State and federal budgets for transportation projects in Virginia will fall more than $2 billion short during the next six years, officials said.
State economists and transportation officials delivered the bad news on Friday, Oct. 31, to the Commonwealth Transportation Board.
Virginia Department of Transportation Commissioner David Ekern outlined how the state will deal with the shortfall.
"In the future, VDOT will be a smaller agency," he told the board.
"We cannot afford to administer and deliver our services, programs and projects the same way we have in the past. Safety, emergency response and maintenance of existing roadways will be our top priorities, but we will have to make some difficult decisions to live within our means."
The tally as presented to the board by the state's chief economist, John Layman, is that Virginia will see a shortfall of between $2.1 billion and $2.6 billion in state and federal transportation funds during the coming six years.
The state DOT will amend its long-term transportation in January 2009 to reflect the shortfall, officials announced.
Shortfalls are being blamed on fewer tax dollars going into the federal Highway Trust Fund that pays for federal and state transportation programs.
In September, U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters announced that the Highway Trust Fund was broke much earlier than expected, in part because fuel prices were causing Americans to drive fewer miles and spend less on fuel.
Congress passed a short-term bailout of the Highway Trust Fund a week later by restoring $8 billion that had been diverted from the fund in the 1990s.
The Federal Highway Administration reported that states received $35.3 billion from the Highway Trust Fund in 2008. Without the bailout that Congress eventually approved, states would have received only $24.4 billion from the Highway Trust Fund in 2009, a difference of nearly $11 billion.
The FHWA report indicates that Virginia received $907.6 million from the federal Highway Trust Fund in 2008. Virginia is poised to receive substantially less in 2009.
The latest numbers by the FHWA indicate that prior to the $8 billion federal bailout of the Highway Trust Fund, Virginia stood to lose $271.6 million of its federal funding. |
