By Paige Cunningham
To Virginia’s audit agencies, VDOT is like a high-maintenance girlfriend and the general assembly an overbearing father.
Millions of dollars and thousands of hours have been invested in studying the Virginia Department of Transportation. Audits have looked at everything from which regions get the most funding to why projects exceed cost and time goals to whether a new accounts payable system is working like it’s supposed to.
In the last five years, Public Auditor Walter Kucharski has overseen 12 different audits of VDOT. Add those audits up, and his office has spent 17,177 man hours and $1.06 million to compile suggestions for improving the financially-plagued agency.
In total, 32 studies have been done on VDOT in the last 10 years–including a study commissioned by the General Assembly in 2007 and four audits that are currently underway.
Kucharski says VDOT has usually been prompt to put into place audit recommendations—at least the ones over which the agency has control. But VDOT’s control over its own funding is too limited by long-standing and rigid formulas that fail to send money where it’s needed the most, he says.
In a 2002 audit, Kucharski’s office recommended that the General Assembly amend the code of Virginia so that funding would be determined by need rather than just locality. So far, political wrangling has gotten in the way, he said.
“[VDOT] could say Interstate 81 is the most dangerous road and all of a sudden, the people in Northern Virginia are going to say ‘that’s nice, but what are you going to do for me,’” Kucharski said. “Unless those laws are changed, VDOT is stuck with the basic formula.”
Lawmakers failed in the last session to find more funding for VDOT, whose budget for highway work has been chopped since last year. And continuing revenue shortfalls led the Commonwealth Transportation Board last November to cut about $850 million from the state’s 2010-15 VDOT spending plan, meaning there will be less money into the future to maintain roads and construct new ones.
Partially to blame for the shortfalls are dipping revenues from car and gas taxes, which fund about two-thirds of VDOT’s budget. The gas tax has not been increased since 1986.
The latest audits were prompted by Gov. Bob McDonnell, who said in April that lawmakers need more recommendations to improve the operations, maintenance, finance and construction practices of VDOT before funding solutions can be found. At the time, the governor said the audits would likely cost less than $500,000.
But work orders totaling $620,944 have been authorized for two of the audits, contracted to private firms. A third audit isn’t funded by VDOT, while the fourth is being done in-house by the Joint Legislative and Audit Review Commission.
Right now, JLARC is looking at how VDOT plans and schedules projects and plans to release the audit by the end of the year, said Director Philip Leone. The agency has done 29 audits of VDOT in total. Leone says VDOT has implemented about 65 percent of his office’s suggestions.
“Some were very useful, some weren’t paid attention to,” Leone said.
Like the public auditor, JLARC has also suggested that the General Assembly revise the funding formula and start sending money to the highest-priority projects around Virginia. The current funding formula was out-of-date, the 2001 study found.
Nine years later, legislators have yet to cooperate.
“They didn’t do that,” Leone said. “The pot of money is shrinking and when you start fooling around with the funding formula, the only way you can get away with it is increasing the size of the pot.”
According to Del. Bob Brink, D-Arlington, Virginia’s funding formula is out-of-date and has historically short-changed Northern Virginia—where his district happens to be located. Northerners put a lot into the pot and get little back, he says.
“I think this is a legacy from when we had a farm-to-market-based system,” Brink said. “The formula hasn’t kept up with the 20th century population and the transportation patterns we have now.”
Brink predicts a change coming down the road due to the U.S. Census. The Census will confirm the shift of the population from the rural areas to the metro corridor stretching from Loudoun County down to Virginia Beach, he said.
“There will be the political heft to address the transportation needs of those areas which are more cohesive than the problems of rural areas.”
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