Charlottesville transportation planners seeking to rebuild public trust 

First of a two part story

Since 2006, staff in Charlottesville’s government have managed projects that otherwise would have been administered by the Virginia Department of Transportation. At the time, Gary O’Connell was the city manager. 

In 2024, Sam Sanders runs the city’s bureaucracy after a series of other people served in the role. On May 6, 2024 he and other officials gave the City Council an update on efforts to actually build transportation projects.

“We have discovered a number of things that none of are satisfied with but recognizing that there is a number of things that have contributed to it, and the goal at this moment is not to spend a great amount of time talking about that as much as it is laying out how we get away from that, how do we get past that,” Sanders said. 

Over the years, Charlottesville applied for funding through VDOT and was awarded millions through the Smart Scale process. Not a single one has gone to construction and two have already been canceled after Sanders took over as deputy city manager in the summer of 2021.

As of May 6, the city was responsible for managing 29 projects with a total cost estimate of $157 million. Steven Hicks is the city’s public works director. 

“Some are getting ready to go to construction and some haven’t even gotten started,” Hicks said. 

Hicks said there’s a new project management team that is partially in place that includes three project managers and a person to handle the negotiations to acquire property. Brennan Duncan remains the city’s traffic engineer. They all report to a senior transportation project manager position that’s currently vacant. All report to Hicks through a deputy public works director. 

Hicks said getting transportation projects from concept to construction to completion takes collaboration and coordination across multiple partners. That has not been in place and VDOT had already put Charlottesville on notice by Sean Nelson, the district engineer for the agency’s Culpeper District.

“It was elevated at the Central Office level that we’re deficient and that we were not delivering projects on time, period,” Hicks said. “And not only that, some of the projects were going back to 2011, 2016, 2017 and even the ones in the 2016 and 2017 phase are still not delivered.”

Sanders has been meeting quarterly with Nelson to try to figure out how to correct the city’s deficiencies. Hicks said a major reason is that the city did not have a team approach to getting the infrastructure built. 

“We didn’t have the relationship with the Virginia Department of Transportation and if you don’t have a good relationship with the agency that is very resourceful and the one funding the project, you can eventually get to the point where we started pointing fingers and that is not healthy for delivering projects and at the end of the day, the citizens were the ones who ultimately were hurt.” 

Hicks said the city did not have a vision for how projects should move forward. He said VDOT lost credibility in the city’s ability to do any of the work and have since created something called a Projects Development Improvement Plan.

“In other words, that’s a fancy word for correction plan,” Hicks said. “They wanted some ink on paper that demonstrated that we’re serious in what we’re going to do and what’s the plan and how we’re going to do it and how it’s going to be sustainable.” 

This plan was finalized in January and puts in performance measures that will demonstrate to VDOT that projects are moving forward and milestones are being met for preliminary engineering, right of way acquisition, and advertising projects for construction bids. 

Charlottesville is the first locality in the Commonwealth that has been put on such a plan and four months later, Hicks said the city is making progress but some projects are simply not going to be delivered on time. 

“We’re hoping through results,” Hicks said, “It’s no hope. We will be restoring public trust. It’s so critical that we have credibility with the public.”

The city will soon launch a dashboard with up to date information on all of the various projects. 

The City of Charlottesville has not applied for Smart Scale projects in either the 2022 cycle or the current one due to the lingering issues. 

“We’re admitting that we have a lot of work to do and it requires some systems changes,” Sanders said. “That’s really what this is about.” 

In part two, a look at the current state of projects. 

Before you go: The time to write and research of this article is covered by paid subscribers to Charlottesville Community Engagement. In fact, this particular installment is from the May 13, 2024 edition of the newsletter. To ensure this research can be sustained, please consider becoming a paid subscriber or contributing monthly through Patreon.