MORGANTOWN – Last June, Gov. Patrick Morrisey stood at the West Virginia Division of Highways District 4 headquarters in Bridgeport and announced a “massive culture change” in how the state conducts the business of building and maintaining its road system.
Transparency was among the key talking points.
No longer, Morrisey said, would the decisions about transportation projects be the result of closed-door political wrangling. Instead the state would implement a transparent, data-driven approach.
During a recent report to the Morgantown Monongalia Metropolitan Planning Organization Policy Board, DOH representative Brian Carr said efforts toward that shift in philosophy appear to be underway.
“Everybody’s been asking since I’ve been working with the MPO, ‘How do we get a project in the pipeline?’ It’s not easy. I don’t think whatever methodology we put out there will be easy. However, we’ve got a consultant on board that’s working on trying to develop a prioritization tool,” Carr said. “We’re trying to, to some level, compare apples to apples in trying to develop this.”
The efforts are part of the 2027-2032 update to the Statewide Transportation Improvement Program, or STIP — a federally required document that provides the Federal Highway Administration and the Federal Transit Administration a listing of all projects that are candidates for federal-aid or regionally significant projects that are not using federal aid.
While Carr cautioned any system implemented to determine statewide project prioritization will be a complex matrix of factors subject to external forces, the goal would be the ability to give cities, counties and MPOs a realistic expectation of where a project stands using actual data.
“For example … say we’ve got 1,000 projects in the hopper and somebody says, ‘Hey, what about this one?’ We put in the key data, key information, and it comes out. You’re number 912. Well, call us back in five years. Or, it comes out and says you’re number 17. This is something we’ve got to get to,” he said, explaining this is probably the third or fourth attempt at developing a prioritization tool in the last 30 years.
Even so, MPO Executive Director Bill Austin said he’s encouraged by what he’s heard so far.
And none too soon.
Austin spent the better part of 20 years trying to figure out how to get, and keep, projects on the state’s front burner. He’s retiring at the end of June.
“When I interviewed for this position, I asked the state representative, ‘How do you get a project in the STIP and he could not respond,” Austin said recently during his final meeting as MPO Director. “Seventeen years later, I just heard the state representative say, ‘I can’t tell you how to get a project in the STIP.’”
Over the years, the uncertainty over how some projects were selected over others, or why projects would appear to be moving forward, then be suddenly delayed or pulled altogether, has, at times, resulted in something approaching paranoia.
It was on display in August 2019, when an MPO Policy Board discussion of Green Bag Road devolved into a shouting match over unexpected delays to the project.
At the time, Austin summed up the problem, explaining, “As long as it’s subject to the whims of whoever is able to get the ear of the proper person in Charleston, and it’s not a transparent process, then we will have all these issues, because someone will always have the ear of the governor, and the MPOs and other jurisdictions within the MPOs around the state will always be undermined.”
On Tuesday, Austin told The Dominion Post that moving the state to a data driven, transparent project selection process has always been at the top of his priority list, as well as that of the WV Association of MPOs, for which he is a past chairman.
While past efforts have fallen by the wayside, Austin said he remains hopeful that an updated STIP process that distributes funds equitably based on data and adopted goals will make the system work better for all West Virginians.
“The firm the state has hired to create the operating procedures, Cambridge Systematics, is very experienced in this type of work. I believe that they will identify a fair and transparent process,” he said. “Of course, the implementation of the process they identify will be where the rubber hits the road.”
