Audit Finds Improvement, But Still Holes in VDOT Maintenance System

By Paige Winfield Cunningham, of Virginia Statehouse News Monday, August 09, 2010

Until a few years ago, the Virginia Department of Transportation figured out which roads needed work by sending an engineer to drive around the state and take a look.

It was a rather primitive way for the state to prioritize projects and send money where it was needed the most, says Walter Kucharski, the state’s auditor of public accounts.

That’s why his office recommended in 2002, and then again in 2004, that VDOT develop a standardized and automated system that would use a set of criteria to grade roads and thereby develop a reliable priority list of maintenance projects.

Now, it appears that the VDOT has followed the recommendation…almost.

The most recent audit of VDOT, completed last week, found that the agency’s two-year-old program — called the Asset Management System — is working, as far as road analysis goes. VDOT sends out vans equipped with special sensors to assign every one-tenth mile of road a grade of one to 100.

But so far, the projects completed in each of Virginia’s nine transportation districts aren’t always in line with what AMS recommends, Kucharski says.

He says communication between the central office and the district offices needs to improve, with localities reporting back at the end of each year what they’ve done with their funding.

“Right now, that final loop is not being done,” Kucharski said. “They’re not getting the information back.”

Still, Kucharski said VDOT is “light years” away from where they were six or seven years ago. The AMS gives VDOT reliable data on how much repair roads need, allowing staff to better estimate how much projects will cost, he said.

“You’ve gone from something on a very ad hoc basis — an engineer driving around trying to figure out where things should be done,” Kucharski said. “Now you’ve got engineering data saying this is where the roads need to be fixed.”

VDOT oversees one of the largest transportation systems in the country, maintaining more than 57,000 miles of interstate, primary and secondary roads.

While Kucharski’s criticisms are “probably a fair assessment,” according to Robert Hanson, director of VDOT’s planning operations division, Hanson questions whether a lack of hard-and-fast dictates from the central office is really a bad thing.

For instance, VDOT could tell a locality to pave a road, not knowing that a development is planned to come through the next year that would tear it up. Localities know what’s going on, so they should retain final say, Hanson says.

“There’s an opportunity for the central office to be more stringent in its follow-up, but there needs to be a pretty high level of flexibility for those local offices to manage those programs,” Hanson said.