va rethug governor blows 250M on road never built. New Democratic governor trying to recover moneys [View all]

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Last edited Mon Jun 1, 2015, 03:25 PM - Edit history (1)

How Virginia paid more than $250 million for a road that never got built

By Michael Laris May 30 at 5:26 PM
Virginia officials are trying to get back tens of millions of dollars from a private company that was supposed to build a 55-mile toll road in southeastern Virginia.

State officials had been sending the company multimillion-dollar installments each month to build the road. But the state lacked federal construction permits, so the road wasn’t built.

And now the commonwealth is out about $256 million.

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"I can’t think of a worse contract that I have seen in my years of public service,” said Virginia House Appropriations Committee Chairman S. Chris Jones (R-Suffolk) (Steve Helber/AP)

The problems help explain why top officials in Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s administration have recently increased scrutiny of public-private partnership deals, a sharp shift in tone in a state that has for 20 years been a national leader in pushing such projects. The changing views could have a major impact on one of the most important transportation initiatives in the state: a vast project to add toll and carpool lanes along 25 miles of Interstate 66 west of the Capital Beltway in Northern Virginia.
Transportation Secretary Aubrey Layne said this month that the I-66 project should not be ceded to private investors for “ideological” reasons, as might have happened in the past. Keeping the construction of toll and carpool lanes under state control could generate hundreds of millions of dollars for additional transportation projects, he said, and avoid a repeat of cases in which the state was left “holding the bag.”
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/how-virginia-paid-more-than-250-million-for-a-road-that-never-got-built/2015/05/30/39a1a222-062d-11e5-a428-c984eb077d4e_story.html?tid=pm_local_pop_b