Board of Directors Meeting   2/1/2022

Okay then, good morning everybody.

I am going to, for those of you on the phone, we have a number of people here in the room, but I know we've got a number of people on the phone.

We may be waiting for one or two other people that could, it looks like may still be coming up, and I think we, I don't think we have a quorum in the room yet, but we can go ahead and begin with introductions and the roll call, and then we'll hold off on making any, doing any votes until we have

Our full quorum here.

Absolutely.

Ms. Bulova?

Mr. Cardwell?

Mr. Dalton?

Here.

Ms. Doersch?

Here.

Mr. Fisette?

Here.

Mr. Hall?

Mr. Maestri?

Ms. Moses-Nedd?

Here.

Mr. Nichols?

Mr. Sadid?

So it sounds like we're still waiting on a few more people who will be joining us here in the room today and then a few more people as well by phone.

But I think I'd like to go ahead and get started just with a couple of introductory items.

Well, first, I know we have public comment on the agenda.

Haley, is there anybody on the line for public comment?

OK, I'm going to take that as a no.

Anybody on the line who would like to share public comment at this time, please raise your hand in the participant column and we will call on you.

OK, great, well,

I just have a couple announcements that I'd like to share with you all as we're getting started here.

But back in January, I think it was the 13th of January, the CTB did approve a revised FY22 to FY27 six-year plan.

And that included new revenues that were announced that were part of the governor's budget that was released in mid-December.

and because of the increase in those revenues.

Hi, Sharon.

So yeah, so the, I see Vice Chair Bulova just joined us here.

So for those of you on the phone.

So there was an additional 2.6 million in, I'm sorry, 2.6 billion in statewide transportation revenues that were added to our six year plan.

for FY22 to FY7, and that was the result of some revenue increases to the Transportation Trust Fund, so a significant amount of new money.

That also then filtered down into an additional $215 million for VPRA between the years of FY22 to FY27, and also another $2.7 million in freight projects for here at DRPT.

That additional $215 million is very good news for VPRA.

Again, that was over and above what we were forecasting earlier.

And I know Steve had talked about some of that, and we'll talk about the budget some more when we get to the FY23 budget.

And also, after our last VPRA January meeting, where you all authorized the Executive Director to sign the Norfolk 7 agreements,

DJ did execute those and that was announced on, I believe it was January 14th publicly by the governor.

So I'm sorry, January 13th.

So again, that was a very exciting announcement for us as well.

We have a lot on the agenda today with our executive director report, we'll be talking about the FY 23 budget and referring that to CTV.

We'll have updates on our Transforming Rail in Virginia project

A bit about two other projects that you haven't heard before, St. Julian's Garden, the property acquisition, and Arkandale to Paddles Creek, Third Track Project, as well as an update from Jeremy Latimer on safety, and we will be going into a closed session.

Two more announcements real quick.

At our Finance Committee meeting last month, for those of you that weren't able to attend that, we discussed our

potential changes to our investment policy that would take into account some additional climate change factors and environmental ESG, some equity social justice factors as well.

And we did receive a presentation from our financial advisors related to a index that we could adopt

that would be part of our investment policy.

That is something that we'll be bringing back to you at our next meeting.

But I did want to flag that for those of you that weren't able to be at our finance committee in January, we did receive a presentation from the investment advisor on that.

And then last but not least, I regret to announce that Hossein Sadid will be stepping down from the board.

He is actually retiring in full from his professional life or his professional job at VMSA.

And as a result, we'll be stepping down from a number of his boards and commissions that he serves on as well.

And so that will be effective next month.

So we'll be working with the governor's office on a new potential appointee representing the Richmond area jurisdictions.

So with that, that sums up my announcements.

Does anyone have any questions for me before we move on?

No?

Okay.

So since we are still, I'm going to ask DJ to go on to the Executive Director of a report as an informational item because we're still waiting on one or two more people, I think.

Okay, great.

Thank you and good morning, everybody.

It's good to see folks that are here in the room.

Apologies for the space.

We have been blessed with our partners at GDOT allowing us to use their spacious auditorium and it gives us a much better opportunity at social distance.

Unfortunately, they had a conflict today because we had to change the date because of the governor's revenues that was released.

And so we're now doing it in DRPT space, which also very generous to allow us but not quite as spacious.

So as I go through the executive director's report, we have a group of staff in the conference room next door that have been given full rights to chime in and offer commentary as they see fit.

I just want to go briefly through an update of where we are in VICRA, if you could move forward to the Executive Director's report.

Two more slides.

Excellent.

All right, administrative updates.

We, as the Chair reported, finalized the agreement with North and Southern.

That was a great deal of work that any folks have done by the end of the year.

Knock on wood, that was complete.

And we high-fived and had a great celebration that afternoon, and then the next morning the real work started.

We're now under, I don't want to say significant pressure, but I think significant pressure works to get two financial close by the middle of the year.

This is the deal that allows us to run to the Western Rail Initiative areas, to the New River Valley, and

We will get the new Lynchburg-Rono train in place as soon as we get to financial close, so the pressure is pretty high.

We do need to make sure, though, that we're not moving too quickly on this.

There's a lot of environmental due diligence that comes with acquiring a 28-mile rail line.

And as we go through not only the diligence on the line, but looking for the feasibility of the new station sites in Christiansburg, there's a great deal of work to be done to address that.

But it's exciting, and it's really the next phase of what we're looking to do.

That additional frequency to Roanoke and Lynchburg will increase ridership, we project very significantly.

On the downside of this update, Amtrak has informed us, they informed us about two weeks ago that they are temporarily canceling some service, not all service, some service across the country.

And one of our Virginia trains is impacted by that.

We have the Newport News train, which will be canceled until the end of March.

It's unfortunate because we've already received calls from folks in the public like, hey, I've been looking for this train and I can't take it.

What's going on?

Amtrak has been struggling with staffing challenges because of COVID.

Another reason is because it's very difficult as anybody touching the labor market knows.

We're working with them to get the train reinstated as soon as possible.

Right now it's canceled through the end of March.

If you go to the next slide, please, it's just an update on what we're doing to attract folks to the train, a couple of sales that are coming on.

Sales are ongoing starting next week, I believe February 9th, so starting late next week, and travel through the end of summer, no blackout.

So we think that's going to help us improve ridership.

Next slide talks a little bit about staffing.

We are currently at 16 full-time employees and we have five additional offers that have been accepted with the 13 job openings that will get us to our end-of-year projection of 34.

We'll talk a little bit later about a couple of the key openings that we've struggled with.

You see the list of the folks that have joined in January.

We would introduce them.

In fact, John's in the other room.

and then we have a couple other folks to include administrative assistant, executive assistant, Mary Stell Douglas comes on February 10th, which will be a great relief to everybody who yesterday we were in here at 6.30 in the morning coughing things.

So it's that will help keep us organized for sure.

Three other positions have been accepted to include our communication, which will help us

to continue to grow our social media.

You may have seen we are more active on Twitter and on LinkedIn, and that will continue to grow as that person who reports up to Joan Pennock arrives March 10th, I believe.

If you go to the next slide, we look at the ridership for our Virginia trains.

This is specifically looking month by month.

We saw a dip in December from about 4,000 riders.

This, we believe, is due to the uptick in the virus, also the Thanksgiving.

We really had great ridership over Thanksgiving, which made November higher than we expected.

If you just look October to November to December, November was a big bump over October and December is still higher than October was.

What's interesting to me there is that if you look at the decline from November to December,

We actually were pretty strong on the Norfolk route and the Richmond route, which is a good sign for ridership.

Newport News, with that little dip, that dip's going to get even worse with the cancellation of the one train through March, so it's something that we'll look at closely when the train comes back.

We'll have to do some kind of sale or event to get that ridership back.

But all in all, not a bad story.

We're watching it closely again as we go through the new variants each and every day, it seems.

The next slide shows you the comparison year over year.

Once again, you can see the difference in December 2021.

Even with that dip, though, it's significantly higher than December 2020, about just over one and a half, well, 172 percent.

So somewhere between two and three times the ridership that we had in December 2020.

Good sign for recovery.

And again, we feel confident that as we go into the new calendar year, we're going to see continued growth and ridership.

Next slide shows the federal fiscal year-to-date ridership.

Same story, just gives you a different cut of the numbers.

We again feel comfortable with the progression going forward.

We're at about 80% of the ridership from two years ago, from 2019, which was our record year.

And then fiscal year 2020, this shows numbers through December.

It was February or March of fiscal year 2020 when the numbers really dipped down.

So right now, we're at 72% of where we were fiscal year to date 2020.

That number is going to grow because the 2020 number is going to go down significantly over the next few months.

But continued times, the recovery is going well.

Next slide is not a great new slide.

Next slide is on time performance.

October and November on-time performance has dipped significantly, and I know I'm sitting for a Rich in the spotlight for a moment.

Clearly, I think it's struggled as well.

This is the quarter between BC and Fredericksburg specifically.

It's been really tragic event for October and November.

A couple of weather events and lots of rain that slowed folks down.

We talked to Amtrak about this and we're

That is the administrative portion.

So the three biggest were commuter train interference, which isn't really fair because we are slowed down because the VRE trains in front of us.

That's commuter train interference.

That is some changes.

We call it other train interference because the second highest reason for delay was freight train interference.

So those are the three.

There were some other anomalies going on at that time, too.

We had some unusual police activity and stuff at some stations that, unfortunately, are right in the peak of the peak.

particularly on the southbound PM trains, but you're going to see December and January's reliability numbers have gone back up, even with the, you know, various weather events and stuff like that.

Strongly agree, and I don't want to jinx this, but when I look at that,

Those are things that are out of our control.

I mean, the police activity is incredibly unfortunate.

You can't control it.

The good news is that when you look at those top reasons for delay, none of them were mechanical.

And those are the things that we really get on top of Amtrak for, because those are preventable.

Just a quick follow-up, because when you're in Europe, it seems like the train is always

I mean, I look at ours, granted this was an anomaly this month, but even when we're back to our normal, we're not at 100 or 98, we're in the high 80s or low 90s.

Are there some systemic, I mean, aside from having your own track, right?

Are there systemic solutions in terms of the freight trains that

So you really have the easy answer.

The easy answer is that if you go to European trains, they don't have that mixed use right of way and they don't have the freight problems.

Another issue with our delays is when there are trespassers, for example.

We often, as a country, take a long time releasing the train and that's something that we in Amtrak and localities have worked on.

If it's a crime scene, obviously, and I'm not a law enforcement official, so I'm not going to pass any judgment, but there are times when they spend a lot more time than others.

And freight railroads historically are not really moved by that.

They say, hey, take as much time as you leave.

Our coal's going to wait.

But unfortunately, our passengers deserve better than that.

And so we do work with the local law enforcement agencies to move those things along when they happen.

Certainly, my apologies.

Any other questions?

OK, capital projects, next slide.

I'm going to go through this relatively quickly because the next agenda item is actually Mike giving TRB initiative updates, Transforming Rail in Virginia.

He's going to give much more detail about these capital projects.

I'll just touch on the good news issues and then leave the rest to Mike.

Long Bridge, another room.

Long Bridge, we received 15% design and we are reviewing that.

That is obviously the big project for our capacity and we're happy to report that that stays on schedule.

We've got a good partnership with FTA and with the DC government folks and that's really moving smartly.

Franconia, especially on that stage, we are so close to signing a contract for preliminary engineering on that.

We had weeks of negotiations with central vendors and we feel now that we are in a good place.

So we hope to sometime over the next few weeks get that through the approval processes and get that signed so we can begin moving on that.

That's, again, one of the key projects we'll work on.

Next slide is pretty straightforward.

Not a whole lot of those.

We're working with the project authorization and CSX.

And then if you look at the next slide, that's when there's the New River Valley Station.

We started a public outreach, public survey that ended, actually I guess it ended yesterday.

So we're gathering that data.

We're going to have a public meeting with folks in New River Valley, one in February and March to go through the different station options there and get a sense for the feasibility and cost of each.

And by feasibility, that's not only what's best for the community as far as a moving people point of view, but what the environmental issues are, what construction costs would be.

There are a couple of types of significant grading issues

Yeah, in fact, a couple months ago, I went down and presented to the New River Valley Authority, mostly with them.

Ray Smoot, who's a member of the CTV, has been integral in just making sure we make the right connections down there.

What we want is when we come up with the final station sites, we don't want anybody to be surprised.

We want them to say, oh, we understand why you made that decision.

It may not be the decision we hoped for.

No one's going to be.

We're never going to have a station site where 100% of people are happy.

We don't want those people.

So we're very open.

Next slide is pretty straightforward.

A lot of these are the projects that are continuing to go, and Mike will talk about those.

Next slide, slide 15.

The only contracting update is the PAN, the Project Authorization Notice, which we talked about at the last two meetings, actually, has been finally signed, which is great.

We can move these contracts forward, these projects forward, which is just fantastic news.

Moving forward to financial updates, as we talked about at the January 10th meeting, we updated the budget.

This slide gives you the amended budget and the prorated budget and then what we've spent actual year to date.

A consistent theme as we go through here, and I'll leave with this, is we just amended a budget three weeks ago and our spending in many places behind what we thought the budget would be.

As we went through these numbers over the last couple weeks, we found that many of our vendors have been slow in billing on us.

We've been slow on beating vendors up to say, hey, Bella.

A good example is the crash wall that you'll see a picture of later for our Alexandria fourth track project is complete.

The wall is there.

High five, it's done.

We've not paid a nickel for that yet.

We just don't have the invoice yet, which is great.

We can make that last repeat of this, but it's just not, that's a joke.

That's not great.

We need to get billed for that.

So when we go through and say we're doing a ton of work, yet our expenditures are much lower than we expected.

We just need to, and that's what we're focused on in the month of February, getting with our vendors and saying, hey, you need to send us these bills.

There are a couple good reasons why bills haven't come in.

For example, one of our major project management contracts

We used to get lump sum bills and we would pay them.

We've gone back to them and said, hey, we need you to break your level of effort up so we know what's Long Bridge, what's Fourth Track, what is all these other initiatives.

So we can tell project by project spending.

To their credit, they've committed to doing that.

To all of our discredit, we've not received those bills and paid them.

So that is our effort for the month of February, getting with our folks and saying, hey, get these bills in.

What you will see

is at the end of the year, we'll accrue all of these things just like we did last year.

And that's just sloppy.

Hey, Jay, one question.

So is your push done?

Because in my world, the end of the fiscal year is the end of calendar year.

And you push like hell to get every bill paid.

Is that what you do end of June?

It would be end of June, yes.

Yes, end of June.

I'll just leave it at that.

and then I'll make a new statement.

Our vendors, however, have different pushes.

So for example, when their fiscal years end, all of a sudden we'll see them.

And I imagine in March, we'll get a lot of, oh, here's seven bills for November through today that we'd like you to pay in the next couple of weeks.

But our pushes, and really our push should be every month.

Going to the next page, the operations budget.

I hope you all are pleased with it.

It really breaks down the train operations

in a lot of detail and actually the next page we're even happier with because it shows it route by route.

But the key factor here is if you look under the FY22, FY22 actual, our overall cost recovery for the state's border trains is 83%, 75% without federal credit.

So that's really a good number.

That's a number that we're going to continue to track moving forward.

Your hard press to fund a public transportation entity that recovers anywhere near 100%.

We have a couple routes that have in the past hit 100%, but that is a number that we're going to continue to track.

As the ridership goes up, that number should get higher because the expenses in many cases to run it as a car train are fixed.

And if you have it half full compared to having it full, the revenue offsets that.

So those are numbers that were really are going to be drawn closely.

To the next slide, you see those same figures

Although we don't have the cost recovery broken out train by train, and we will in the future, this breaks it out by the different route, Newport News, Norfolk, etc., and gives a good breakdown of what we expected and what we're seeing.

Overall, from an operations point of view, we feel good about where this budget is.

And as ridership comes back, we'll continue to see better results here.

Next slide shows our administrative budget.

This is what we use to run VPRA.

This is compared to the amended budget that was approved on the 10th.

As you can see, we're well behind.

But a lot of that is just as staffing comes in over the next few months, we'll catch up.

And then the 23 budget that we'll talk about afterwards is right on path, because we will have 34 people on board by the end of June.

So next year's budget will be

not as, will not show as much of a catch up as this year's has shown.

Next page, capital projects expenditures.

These are the spendings that have come out or the work that's been done on each of the capital projects that we are running.

I'll once again point out Alexandria's fourth draft.

We have a budget year to date.

We expected to spend $2.2 million.

We've currently spent about $100,000.

Yet that crash wall I've talked about, which is $1.7 million, is done.

So that's a great picture of why we need to get billing in line, and we will do that.

Our expected spending to date is $230 million.

We've only spent $203 million.

Again, most of that is due to the timing of invoices that will be fixed.

Next page tells a similar story.

Unfortunately, these are the capital and operating grant expenditures.

A lot of these are VRE projects where the work is not yet ongoing, but we are working with VRE to finalize agreements.

I know VRE is anxious to put shovels in the ground and get the work done.

So getting those agreements in place will move this work forward.

And there are a couple more, if you look towards the bottom, Western Rail Initiative grant, run off yard improvements.

That's money that's in the budget but is not expected to spend until later.

And next slide 23.

For the bylaws, we are supposed to require to come to the board and identify any budget adjustments.

There are not any budget adjustments to report.

We don't expect any.

We're going to stay within the budget.

We talk about that almost daily, sometimes twice a day.

Jennifer's in the room three times a day.

Last couple slides are the ones that you've seen before, just tracks the monthly revenues, nothing really unexpected here.

Next one's cash and investment balance.

In November, we made the payments to CSX for the second of three payments for the Transforming Rail in Virginia.

And so that's why you see the dip in our cash and investment balance.

And then the final slide I have is just cash investment earnings, same slide you've seen before.

As the interest rates have gone down and our cash balance has gone down, those earnings have come down.

We talked a couple of meetings ago about the investment policy.

The Chair referenced it earlier today and moved back at, I believe, the next meeting to talk about that.

So that concludes the Executive Director's report.

I'm happy to answer any questions.

And actually, I'm happy to answer any questions.

But before, I also have some feedback you have on the report that, hey, there's really something I would have loved to have seen, but I didn't.

Feel free to call me afterwards or email me because we want this to be useful to the board.

We will continue, even though we're meeting quarterly, we'll continue to send this out every month.

And we want it to give you all the information that you need to understand what's going on.

All right.

Well, thank you, DJ.

Welcome, Mr. Nichols.

We now have a quorum in the room, so we can take action on a couple of things.

I do want to, though, I neglected to finish in my report.

I did want to give you all an update on the legislative session that's underway right now, and in particular, two bills that are directly relevant to VPRA.

First, there was House Bill 456, which was being patroned by Elizabeth Bennet Parker.

who was a former chair of VRE.

This was related to the VPRA board membership and as you may know under the enabling legislation, the NVTC and PRTC are able to recommend board members to the governor and the governor must consider them in making appointments to those seats and it's a total of six seats.

They were proposing to

have a requirement that the governor accept or nominate people, appoint people only from six people on the list, from NVTC and PRTC.

That was a bill that the administration opposed.

It was laid on the table in a subcommittee of the Transportation Committee, so that will not be moving forward.

There is still a bill from the Senate side, and this is

The chief patron of this is Senator Todd Pillian from Bristol.

It's Senate Bill 725.

And in it, it is amending the enabling legislation to add a new board member on the VPRA board from planning districts three or four.

And those planning districts essentially extend from about the Christiansburg area south to Bristol.

At this point, the administration does not have an official position on that bill right now.

We may in the future.

It has not yet come up.

We expect it to come up in Senate transportation, I believe this week.

So I'll keep you all updated on that too, but I did want to make you aware of those two pieces of legislation because they do directly affect VPRA.

In addition to that, the budget is still moving forward.

There are some bills that are potentially recommending revenue reductions that would impact the state's Transportation Trust Fund, specifically a deferral of the increase in the state gas tax for one year, and then also a reduction of taxes on groceries, which then does filter into the Transportation Trust Fund.

I can't report to you today what those impacts would be for VPRA right now or exactly how those are going to move forward.

But those are really the other pieces of budget language that could affect VPRA's revenues and overall transportation revenues going forward.

But we'll keep you all updated with that and with written reports, too.

OK, and with that, I'd like to move back to approval of the meeting minutes.

There are a couple

changes that were identified that I'd like to just call out to you all.

For those of you that have the minutes in front of you, on page three, under the motion for closed session, it reports that the Board suspended the open session at 1.40 p.m., and that should state on January 10th, 2022, to move into closed session.

Down below as well, when it says reconvene in an open session, the date was corrected there to say January 10th, 2022.

And then finally, on the last page, where there's a motion to authorize execution of Norfolk Southern Comprehensive Rail Agreement, we noted that Mr. Moorman had abstained, but the previous version of the minutes did not also note that Ms. Painter also abstained from the motion, from voting on that motion as well.

So we've made sure to correct the minutes to reflect that.

I'm happy to make a motion to approve the minutes as amended.

OK, thank you.

Second.

All right, the second, Paul.

Any other comments or questions?

OK, all in favor?

Aye.

Aye.

And those of you on the phone?

Aye.

Aye.

Thank you.

Anyone opposed?

OK, that passes.

And then the next item on the agenda is the approval of the slate of officers for next year.

And I would like to, first of all, thank those people that have offered to step forward.

Sharon Bulova has offered to serve for another year as vice chair of the board.

Since Mr. Sadid will be stepping down from the board, Deborah Painter has also volunteered to fill in as the Finance Committee Chair for the next year.

She has been serving on the Finance Committee as well, but she's offered to serve as Treasurer for next year.

And then Jim Spore has offered to continue as Secretary for next year as well.

So I'd like to take a motion first to

approve that slate of officers.

And then also, I think the proper motion would then be to see if there's any proposed changes or anybody else that would like to volunteer for that.

But is there a motion to approve the slate of officers?

I'll make a motion.

Thank you.

Any other comments or questions?

All right.

So all in favor, please vote aye.

Aye.

Okay.

Okay.

And anyone opposed to that?

Okay, great.

Thank you to everybody who has volunteered to serve in this position for the next year.

So, okay.

So with that, we're back on track for the original agenda.

We have now the discussion of the FY23 budget.

We presented this to you all in draft form last month.

And now we would be referring, the action before you would be to refer this to the Commonwealth Transportation Board for their consideration.

Thank you, Madam Chair, members of the board.

Just want to start today by saying thanks to Mr. Sadid.

He's been very, very helpful to me over the past year in his role of Finance Committee and also in working on the budget for this year.

as well as the other members of the Finance Committee.

And I also want to extend that thanks to everyone here at the Passenger Rail Authority.

There's a lot of work that we put in the last couple of months, and hopefully we've come up with a better product as a result.

So that being said, at our January 10th meeting, you'll recall you did approve an amended budget for fiscal year 22.

We also presented what we call a recommended budget

for fiscal year 23.

And we're here today to report back as far as feedback we received and any changes to the document from the January 10th document that we went through and you all have reviewed.

The only changes made were minor grammatical fixes that found in the last review of the document.

There were no, not any changes to any budgeted amounts made.

That being said, I just do want to run through once again just verbally the process.

So each year we have to recommend a budget forward to the Commonwealth Transportation Board.

They obviously provide a lot of funding to the Rail Authority.

And then the Commonwealth Transportation Board has until May 30th and essentially their approval

in the code section relates to the capital expenditures of the rail authority.

That being said, for as a matter of practical matter, we basically ask them just to approve the full recommended budget, which includes our capital grants in addition to those capital project expenditures.

This is Jim Spore.

I had a question.

The chair

mentioned that on the 13th of January, the CTB found a $2.6 billion ad, which trickles down to if I got the numbers right to us in terms of the six-year CIP of about $215 million.

So that's a great question, Mr. Spore.

So when

We knew about those revenue adjustments back early December.

And so we did our work incorporating that revenue.

And I guess if you recall, we had a little bit of back and forth with the scheduling of our dates.

But those numbers are confidential until presented in the middle of December.

And so

Okay, thank you.

Any other questions from anyone on the phone?

Okay.

So with that, we have a resolution that was included in your packet for authorization to submit the recommended FY23 VPRA budget to the Commonwealth Transportation Board.

And a second.

Okay, thanks, Mariia.

So with that, all in favor, please vote aye.

Aye.

Anyone opposed?

No, great.

Thank you, and I want to thank Steve and his team for all the work, Shannon Perry as well, on putting the budget together.

I know there was a lot that went into it and a lot of moving pieces, especially with

some of these late-breaking revenue adjustments as well.

And we also thank the Board for their patience as we move these gates around because it really has been difficult.

Yeah, and I should just note that this will probably be a recurring issue every two years when a new budget is released.

because of the timing of the governor's budget, which does usually come out in mid-December.

And with our current legislation requiring us to forward a budget to the CTB by February 1st, that does put us in a bit of a time crunch, unless there's going to be a legislative change in the future to change that date.

But thank you for your patience as we had to move it around.

In future years, we may not have that issue, but the good news is that

It was because of an increase in revenue.

So that's always a good reason to have to move that around this year.

Okay, so with that, we now have a few informational items before going into a closed session.

And Mike McLaughlin is going to walk us through an update of our Transforming Rail in Virginia milestones.

Hi, hello here from the Washington Room.

A few of us are just a few feet away from where the board's taking place.

I'm with Steve, Michael Westman, and others.

One of the reasons I'm mentioning the names, while I'm presenting here on the milestones, many people have performed a lot of work to actually make these milestones happen.

We've had quite a few major milestones in the past few months that I'll get into, but while I have the honor of presenting today,

Folks in this room, other folks, engineering, planning folks, others, have been working tirelessly to move a lot of these projects forward.

Hey, Mike, one moment.

Well, another question.

I felt, you know, when we had to vote last time on Norfolk Southern, had to move quickly because of me.

It's an enormous accomplishment to get that deal.

Jennifer, you have just transformed New City Rail in Virginia.

You know, your team, DJ, everyone's just amazing.

I just take a moment to recognize Howard Junior is an absolute leader because of the work that you do and others.

And just consistent with Mike's comment that the Norfolk Southern deal is huge and it follows after the huge deal you just already had.

Well, thank you very much.

And it's funny because we have been so busy that we almost really haven't taken a moment to reflect upon, you know, that deal alone.

And the time that went in went into it because we were kind of just jumping onto

the next big thing.

But it does reflect a lot of work.

I really also want to commend both Michael Westerman, who's in the other room right now, but our general counsel has just spent, along with our outside counsel, just spent countless hours working through that agreement throughout the holidays, Christmas, Christmas Eve, New Year's, New Year's Eve.

Yeah, no, it's really not.

And a tremendous amount of work.

And so thank you, though.

But that's yeah, that was exciting.

Exciting.

So thanks.

Sure.

So with that next slide.

And thanks, Patty, for those comments.

This is from the budget document, but I just want to point out that

along with the numbers for the budget for each year.

We also have an estimated level, as you can see on the left, what those numbers mean is how certain we are of the numbers.

A lot of our projects, as you know, are still in design phase and not until you get to 30% design or final design do you know final numbers.

So we do believe we carry sufficient contingency and we also do budget for year of expenditure.

but just do want to point out that different projects have different levels of estimate.

Next slide.

So, as Board Member Doersch mentioned, we have the CSX agreement that we finalized back in at the end of March with a public ceremony and you're not, I know this page is, there's a lot on this page, this shows the high number of projects that we have from Washington D.C.

down to Richmond.

And just to remind people, they're slated for various phases, and this is actually part of the comprehensive rail agreement, the various projects, various qualifying projects, and the phases they'll be done.

Phase one estimated to be done in 2026, and phase two estimated to be done in 2030.

And I'm gonna delve into some of the major, not all the projects, but the major projects and some milestones we've hit.

Beyond just signing the agreement, there's some milestones we've hit with individual projects.

Next slide, please.

So the first one, got to start with Long Bridge.

I'm going to have two slides of Long Bridge because it's such a big project.

I think we're all familiar with this, but it's good to have a quick overview on this page.

It is the two-track bottleneck that is a bottleneck for allowing more service to be delivered for both VRE and Amtrak and to connect the Northeast Corridor.

And on both sides of the Potomac, there's three tracks on both sides.

And the $2 billion project, which is $1.8

Miles, it's not just the bridge over the Potomac, there's other bridges as well.

We'll have associated projects with the L'Enfant project that Rich Dalton and others of VRE, we're working with them on, and also the four-track project that I'll get into here in a few minutes as well, that'll create an eight-mile, two-track passenger corridor, eight-mile, four-track corridor, but two tracks dedicated to passenger trains, and there was some conversation earlier about how to best

to improve on-time performance and this is where we're starting up in Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C. with a two-track corridor from Alexandria to Union Station that will be complete by 2030.

I was going to say hopefully DJ usually corrects me when I say hopefully because it's my job to make sure they will be complete by 2030.

Long Bridge is a VPRA-led project.

We have delineated the project responsibilities in the Conference of Rail Agreement and it is

The major project and one of the two projects that is responsibility of VPRA.

We did enter into engineering, preliminary engineering back in March.

That is expected to last through 2020-24, final design and construction through 2030.

And if people have questions, don't hesitate to stop me.

I like the interaction back and forth.

Next slide.

So this picture is a little deeper dive on the bridges.

We've mentioned before, it's not just the bridge over the stomach.

There's also the bridge over GW Parkway.

There's also a bridge over Omada Tunnel in 395, Ohio Drive, Main Avenue, and Maryland Avenue.

As part of the 30% design, one of the milestones we're recently hitting as a project team is currently doing 15% design, and that will be going out to stakeholders next week.

When I say stakeholders, Amtrak, VRE,

VDOT, a whole bunch of other stakeholders, FRA.

There's a whole list of folks that'll be going out to as a formal 15% design package.

The FRA did issue the environmental decision back in 2020, but FTA will need to adopt as part of the CIG process.

When I say CIG process, I have presented in the past on the FTA's Capital Investment Grant process, the 5309 process.

We did enter that in November of 2021,

We applied a few months earlier.

It's normal to have a few months of back and forth to clarify items with FTA, and kudos to my planning staff and others who worked with us on that.

But we were formally accepted in November 2021, so that's when the two-year clock started ticking to get out of project development.

We need to finish having environmental done, which will be adopted well in advance of that, hopefully the next few months to a year, and also complete 30% design to get out of project development.

Also, and we've already given a few kudos to Michael Westerman,

The CSX VPRA project authorization notice is being drafted and expected to be complete in the next month.

And thanks to Michael and others who have been working on that.

So unless there's any other questions on Long Bridge, I'm happy to move on to the next project.

Next slide.

So moving downstream, going north to south, is the Alexandria-Fortress project, which I mentioned.

As you can see from the map, this does tie in.

to the Long Bridge project.

That is $210 million.

It'll construct six miles of four track.

There are three tracks in the area.

As a CSX-led project, should also note that the track that is being constructed is on the side of the corridor that CSX will retain, and they will convey to us the track, the one of their tracks when the four track is done.

It is currently at a 30% design, and we did issue a notice to proceed to CSX for final design in November.

Construction estimated to be complete in 2026.

Another milestone we just hit was the completion of a crash wall.

I want to give kudos to engineering staff, Todd Hopkins, and others who've been working on a crash wall.

It is the early works package for the FORTRAC project, and we were able to meet the USDOT grant obligation deadline.

VDOT, and this is a sign of things to come.

We'll be continuing to work with VDOT throughout the quarter.

A lot of

impacts we'll have on their structures and other facilities up down the corridor.

They helped us with the contracting and the crash wall is actually a crash wall underneath the road that leads to Washington National Airport.

Many of you have probably been on the elevated structure in Crystal City that goes over the railroad tracks.

Next slide.

Unless there's any questions on Fortrack,

This is one as there are additional federal funds coming available by IJA and other grant opportunities

We would look to do more as part of this project.

It would not slow down the project, but specifically around the Alexandria Station, there's a lot of congestion and there are a couple bridges that need to be upgraded.

There are good opportunities for state and good repair and other improvement projects in this area that we are going to be paying close attention to.

Because once the crews are out there, once you're putting commuters by a bridge,

through slow orders and construction, we should get as much done as we can.

So the crash wall, that's a bridge, all right?

And that wall is there.

So if for some reason a train goes off the tracks, it protects the bridge's integrity, basically.

Michael, correct me if I have this wrong, but the track for the train is just to the left of that, I believe.

It could be to the right, but I'm pretty sure it's to the left because we walked it a few weeks ago.

Thanks.

Sure.

The King's Crossing?

Yeah.

There's two roads that kind of V off.

I'm sure many of us have been on those roads, the King and Commonwealth roads in that area.

So, and yes, DJ, you were correct on the crash wall that where the crash wall is, is furthest from the street closer to the airport.

So again, people have probably been on the Crystal City Drive.

That crash wall is furthest from that drive closer to the airport, if that makes sense.

So moving further downstream,

Next major project is the Franconia-Lorton Third Track Project.

It's a $208 million project constructing seven miles of track.

CSX is also leading this project.

You should also note there are two bridge replacement projects in the area.

I briefed the board on this in the back in September.

The Newington Road and Route 1.

You can see the picture from Newington Road.

Yes, that is one lane.

Not in each direction.

One lane total going underneath the railroad tracks.

Those costs are included in the budget as well.

We are getting project partners at Newington, VDOT, and at Route 1, VDOT and Fairfax County putting in money in that project.

The same with the VDOT on Newington.

Not only are we constructing another two-track bridge, there'll be two-track bridge there now.

Another two-track bridge, we're going to be widening the berth so cars can safely, cars, buses, and other vehicles, bicycles, pedestrians, can safely traverse underneath the railroad track.

So that is in addition to, so that would be within the footprint of the Franko Alert and Third Track.

But those have different funding streams and project partners, so those are slightly different in our budget.

The project authorization notice with CSX.

Hey Mike.

Mike?

Yes.

One moment, we have a question here.

It's not a question, I'm looking at the picture and it's kind of amazing that this condition still exists

And there is also, I believe, a either WMATA or Fairfax County bus garage on the other side of this.

And so it yeah, this is a very substandard condition.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Director Bulova, it's a great comment.

It's a good example of what we're doing here isn't just transforming rail.

We're taking opportunities when it's presented to us to improve the local conditions as well.

And at Route 1, not only are we widening that as well for various reasons.

One reason is bus rapid transit and also to allow pedestrian and bicycle, better pedestrian and bicycle access under Route 1 as well.

That is wider than Newington, but not as wide as it should be for such a major thoroughfare.

So I had a meeting last week with VDOT and my lead engineer, and we've talked about the coordination we're going to need, not only these structures, but other structures throughout the Commonwealth.

So thank you for pausing and talking about the improvements we're making up and down the corridor.

So unless there's any other questions or comments, next slide.

So in the same area, the Franconia-Springfield bypass, a $241 million project.

I think we've talked about this in the past, but what this will do is it'll carry, especially the VRE trains, whose stations, if you think about in Stafford County, for instance, are on the east side of the corridor, where we own tracks and are adding a third and four tracks down there, over to the west side, if you think about the Alexandria and Crystal City station we talked about earlier, that are on the west, the main part of the station are on the west side of the corridor.

So this would decongest, especially VRE trains with freight trains.

It'll help with some of that on-time performance that DJ talked about earlier with all the CSX, Amtrak, and VRE trains.

So again, the bypass will carry the passenger trains over the freight corridor.

This is a VPRA-led project.

I should note that 23 million is coming from the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority.

DJ and I met virtually with their executive director yesterday,

Director Mitchell did a great job getting us money a couple years ago in the NVTA call for projects.

So we are looking forward to using your money wisely.

Project authorization notice for this is being negotiated with CSX and will take design to 30%.

This project is a little further behind design-wise from the other projects because this is something that first came up during negotiations with CSX versus

Most of the other projects we're talking about were identified in DCRVA, a planning document.

Next slide, please.

I'm further behind.

The schedule that we agreed to starts later and ends later.

Yes, thank you.

I know, DJ.

You've corrected me before in that I just meant behind design-wise.

It started later in the process.

It's not

Yes, we are moving forward, as you can see, with project authorization notice, and as DJ mentioned, we are, I was hoping to give good news today, but we are, my procurement officer would kill me, because we have to give some notices out on the procurement for the design for the bypass.

So moving on to, and again, didn't cover all the projects on the DC to Richmond corridor.

If anyone has questions on the other ones, I just want to hit the major milestones on the major projects in that DC to Richmond corridor.

I'll move on to Norfolk Southern projects.

We did brief you on this recently, so most of this you should recall from past months.

There's multiple projects, but three major projects, Nova Scotia, Calvert, and Roanoke Yard, and Salem and New River Valley track, and past new rail station improvements.

Next slide.

And also going north to south, Nokesville to Calverton double track.

$50 million in the comprehensive rail agreement that we mentioned earlier was signed earlier this, sorry, earlier in January.

It's February 1st now, so I can't say earlier this month.

Lay seven miles of double track for allow for 22 miles of double track south of Manassas.

That gets us double track from Manassas to just 10 miles north of Culpeper.

So it's a great improvement.

It'll help with fluidity of the passenger and freight trains.

Norfolk Southern is leading this project.

So this is a grant to Norfolk Southern.

We did issue a letter of no prejudice back in June of 2021 for them to move forward with the design so they can get started on the design.

What that means is that they were, the letter of no prejudice means that they were beginning their design efforts at their own risk.

And then once we signed the definitive agreements to get a financial close,

their efforts will be eligible for reimbursement.

So I think many people are familiar, no prejudice, but just wanted to be clear, that's what it was.

Construction of this is estimated to be complete by 2026, but actually we've talked with Norfolk Southern about expediting that and getting that done much sooner.

Next slide.

The Roanoke Yard Project, I'm not expecting everyone to be able to understand the diagram, but this goes to show that this is a

Graphic from our Conference of Rail Agreement on Norfolk Southern's initial conceptual plans to improve the Roanoke Yard so that when trains come into Roanoke Station and they leave Roanoke Station going west, they will get through in a fluid manner.

It is a $36.5 million project.

We will be working with them as they refine the plans for the Roanoke Yard

Also, they ought to let her know prejudice for this as well and this is construction estimated to be complete in 2026 and we'll always look to expedite that if possible.

For those who haven't been to Roanoke, it is a pretty good size yard that goes, stretches quite a few miles from east to west, west of the Roanoke Station and we want to make sure that this is one of the projects that has to be complete before passenger trains can begin their

And my, this is Victor Cardwell, and I don't want to embarrass myself.

So the... Yeah, they're two yards.

I just want to make sure I know where they're going.

Yeah, so it's improvements to that one that's farther west, but

But this track chart I think does, kind of hard to see from here, but I think it does include the station on the, the improvements he's talking about are further west of that.

Hey, Mike?

Yes.

Mike, it's Wick.

I'm just sitting here trying, I'm looking at this and trying to remember something I should remember.

The Roanoke Station we built was a stub-in station.

Yeah, good.

As you recall, actually, a platform has been built.

An actual station house has not been built yet.

And Jeremy Latimer, if you're sitting to my right, feel free to chime in, Jeremy, if you want.

As part of the plans we have so far to date with Norfolk Southern, there are no plans to change that platform configuration.

It is the first high-level platform.

in Virginia.

We're very proud of that.

In fact, Jeremy was out there just a couple of days before the event back in 2017, making sure everything was going smoothly.

No.

Initially, and you might be recalling some conversations that were had in the last couple of years, they'll be able to head in and then continue going straight west.

At one point, we might've briefed you on this, maybe a year or so ago, we might've been going back in and then going south.

We are coming into the station and continuing that move westward.

So we'll be able to come into the station and continue west.

And that's why this project is so important.

Initially, and hopefully I'm not getting in trouble with Norfolk Southern, there was some hesitancy to get through their yard.

And we also had hesitancy too, because we don't want trains getting stuck in the yard.

We did put a switch in on the other end.

Thank you.

Next slide.

And as DJ talked about this before, there's a decent amount of work happening from Salem, where that's beginning of the 28 miles of the purchase of Virginia Line, to the New River Valley.

And I'm just focusing here on the majority of the work that's going to be done in the New River Valley for a station location.

As DJ mentioned earlier, we have a survey out.

We've been over 2,500 responses so far to date.

We're very happy with the response.

We'll be having public meetings in late February and a second meeting early in the first of March for the public so we can receive feedback individually.

What this project will do is it will construct track, signals, platform, and a station in the New River Valley.

Again, the station location is really four we're looking at here on the east side, the Ellit area in Blacksburg, along the Virginia line at the end of our purchase

and then two locations near the New River Valley Mall.

If anyone's been out to, I'm sure Mr. Cardwell's familiar, but for anyone else who's been out to New River Valley Mall, there is some north-south track that Norfolk Southern has that comes off their main line and it's possible to connect the Virginia line to that north-south track and have the station be near the mall, which has received the most votes

of support without a doubt to get to one of the two mall locations as far as the survey's gone so far.

So this is a VPRA-led project.

So this is in the grant to Norfolk Southern since we're constructing.

This is something we'll be constructing.

We are working with the New River Valley Passenger Rail Station Authority.

They want to, as we build a station house in the local, there's some responsibilities regard to our rail plan

and with regard to the state locals' responsibility, they actually want to put their headquarters in a station and we're supportive of that kind of use and other public use of any station that might be constructed.

Also, it's very important for us to have pedestrian connections and there's a great trail that DJ and I and many others have walked that goes along this, near the mall, that many people ride their bikes, it goes from Blacksburg to Christiansburg,

And let me just add, Mike, if I may, that that area, there's so much residential growth there within walking distance.

It is you can tell why it's an ideal choice from the public.

We just need to be careful before we get too excited because we don't have a sense for the true environmental needs.

There's a lot of water there.

We've got to wait till all the facts come in before we make any decisions.

But

It would also require some private property acquisition as well, in addition to acquiring some additional right away from Norfolk Southern that is not part of our existing agreement.

So again, while that is our, you know, clearly the publicly preferred alternative and has a lot of land use benefits from our perspective as well, there's still some challenges that we need to work through to make sure that that is a

feasible and cost effective alternative too.

It will be an Amtrak train that it would be our Roanoke service that will eventually be extended to the new River Valley.

So are the two trains that we'll have serving Roanoke after this year.

will then, once these improvements are completed, would be extended to New River Valley.

And a third train as well, potentially between, we have a slot for a third train between Roanoke and the New River Valley.

And that is whether or not that would be an Amtrak train or some other services to be determined.

Yeah, I really appreciate all the

You know, at a discussion of the land use implication, you know, this is not just revitalizing or upgrading something or expanding, it's creating it, right?

So for those of us in local government in the past, this is an anchor.

This is a really important destination that will change the opportunity for the local government, for the business owners, for the retail, everything there.

It is the town of Christiansburg, although the New River Valley Station Authority includes all of the surrounding counties in that area.

So including the town of Blacksburg, Washington County, I believe, and Montgomery in that area.

The land is in Christiansburg.

That's town council or city council is going to be actively involved in.

and I'm just hoping that when we're doing the scoping and siting and planning that they're actively brought in because this may be their opportunity to change some buildings or provide some incentives.

There are also public-private partnerships with maybe the landowners that have an investment there already.

Sure.

Absolutely, and that will be a big part of the final decision.

As you can understand, we're still in the NEPA process, and so we want to make sure that all of the alternatives are given the appropriate consideration.

So is this the legislation that we talked about earlier?

So it's this planning district?

It's that planning district plus the planning district south of that.

to Bristol.

Okay, that would like to have a seat on the VPRA board.

Yeah.

Getting to engaging.

Maria.

So this is maybe a good time.

I know last year, I think it was Jay had suggested maybe when COVID was a little more under control, we could actually have a board meeting that would be outside of Richmond, somewhere along the system.

So just hearing how these capital projects sounds like, whether it's

Roanoke or Christianburg or Northern Virginia.

There's a lot going on and it would be great for us to have a chance to walk the track and see what's going on and all that.

And then I am wondering, since I see this as your last slide, Mike, with the projects, especially the ones in Northern Virginia, I'm curious if there will be any impact to travel

Frequency, reliability, will there be any impact to current riders in the future with these projects as they get underway, or will the new track and such be happening in parallel and so it won't impact someone who's on the train?

Totally slows you down if you're on the road, so I'm wondering.

Yeah, I think it's fair to expect that there will be some impacts.

Well obviously we'll be working with Norfolk Southern and CSX to minimize that as much as possible and we're also looking at how to phase the construction in ways that will, along with VRE service and their projects too, that will minimize those operational impacts.

When I was thinking and I was wondering if in thinking about the budgets and bringing out a new government relations person, if it would be wise to have a healthy budget for communication and really having a campaign.

So it's a positive spin why you may be delayed.

I know we do that with

Some other transportation construction projects and you can bring in the arts and you can you know there's ways where people can be

Yeah, exactly.

That's a great point.

We've talked about working with the communities to make sure that the word is out there before the shovels are out there.

But we haven't set aside money in the budget for that.

I do want to note that in addition to the public meetings, I should have mentioned that we are having one-on-one meetings with private property owners in the New River Valley.

Our director of planning, Kate Young-Luth, has set those up, and we're meeting with them starting in the next few days.

So the town of Christiansburg, Montgomery County,

private property owners, others in that area.

So, Director Fisette, you're right on that we are having conversations.

We've already had some preliminary conversations.

We're having some conversations for the record as well in the next couple of weeks.

Also do want to mention that I forgot to mention that some of the screening criteria are transit impacts and when we build out the budgets that we're assuming that all these locations, transit, bicycle, pedestrian will be brought to those locations as well.

And one other point to the comment, Director Zimmerman just mentioned, we do have a service planning committee with CSX and Amtrak and VRE.

In fact, DJ and Director Dalton, myself, and Jeremy Latimer, who's running our rail planning services, we're at an initial meeting and the first of monthly meetings is beginning in coming days here soon.

So to cover those issues, such as when construction happens, how do we best alleviate the pain to

to riders.

So we'll be dealing with those issues, and we meet on a monthly basis with the Services Planning Committee.

I have one.

Mike, thanks for going over that.

My question sort of centers around the BIF funding.

BFIHA depends on who you talk to.

What I haven't seen, and I'm sorry if I missed this, but to the extent, so in the mode that I focus in with respect to FAA, you know, take off landings, it helps in the formulaic portion other than there's discretionary piece as well.

So we kind of have an idea of how the airports are going to get impacted.

I guess what I haven't seen, and forgive me if I miss it, I'd love to be directed there.

And if not, hopefully we can give some thought to it.

At some point, I can foresee a question coming in from some of my local political personalities, particularly as it's spring.

of the rail funding is discretionary.

And so unlike transit and highways, where much of the funds are distributed through formulas, this is all money that we'll have to apply and compete for.

We are working internally right now and also with our secretary's office to put together a sort of strategy for going after grants.

Fair to say we're going to put something together that's much more holistic and looking at our

entire program of projects and how we can best bring in a state share, I'm sorry, a federal share into the project and how we can target different grant programs to make up that state share and then kind of build up what a set of applications would look like.

I know that's something that both FRA and FTA are interested in hearing from us as well.

They'd like us to come in and

bring them more of a comprehensive overview of a federal funding strategy as opposed to just a scattershot approach to coming up with a new grant application every time there's a new notice of funding.

So that is something that we're working on right now.

It's been very successful to the Commonwealth in the past.

Our Atlantic Gateway project is actually a good example of that where we came up with a huge multimodal

Program of projects that included both rail, transit, and highway components to fix the I-95 corridor.

And we actually then applied for a single grant that could then, we could have some of that going to rail, some of that going to highways, some of it going to transit, and as a much bigger comprehensive package that had much bigger benefits.

And so I think we'd like to approach this

in much the same way, which we look at sort of a bigger transforming rail in Virginia approach to the federal funding strategy.

But that will probably mean applying for multiple grant programs that may have different application cycles.

But I know in my conversations with some folks at FRA and FTA, they're very interested in hearing, they're actually asking us to bring that to them because they want to have a way to sort of think through

Sure.

All right.

Any other questions?

All right.

Thank you very much, Mike.

Thank you.

Our next two.

Sure.

The next couple of presentations are going to be by Jeremy Latimer.

The first will be talking about St. Julian's Yard, which is a smaller property acquisition that's actually been in the works for a while.

through DRPT, and actually a somewhat older project called Arcadils to Powell Creek, which dates all the way back to our ARRA funding.

Just on a time check here, what I'd like to do is, depending on how long we go through the next two presentations, is potentially then break for lunch quickly, come back in for a closed session and complete our closed session items, and then if we need to come back for the safety,

Presentation after that, we can do that.

But that's sort of how I'm looking at the schedule right now for the next 40 minutes or so.

OK.

All right, thank you.

Good morning.

So St. Julian's Yard, we're going to talk about what that is and the purchase that is currently underway and go to the next slide.

St. Julian's Yard is the current facility where the two round trip Norfolk trains are serviced.

down in Norfolk.

So this is important to the state in partnering with Norfolk Southern and an entity known as Kanoni Atlantic that owned the property and had licensed with Norfolk Southern to make this a service facility and they in turn worked with Amtrak who currently operates that facility where the trains overnight.

So you can see there it's located near downtown and the Amtrak station down in Norfolk.

Go to the next slide.

It's a very narrow strip here, but you'll see the dotted line in yellow is where there was existing track, and that is owned by Kanoni Atlantic.

And a little bit about Kanoni Atlantic, because I'm going to be mentioning that name a lot.

They are a private entity that owns the railroad assets.

They have St. Julian's Yard here on the Norfolk side of the bay.

They also have an area in Norfolk called Little Creek, which is operated by the Buckingham Branch Railroad.

And then they have some 50 miles of rail in Akamak in North Hampton County.

on the Eastern Shore.

And they have been going through a lot of changes.

They were operated by a railroad that no longer exists and so they are divesting from some of their assets on the Norfolk side as well as in Northampton County.

And so the yellow line you see there is the track that they owned on this facility.

There are other improvements you'll see in some other pictures that Norfolk Southern built through a grant with the Department of Rail and Public Transportation to bring service

Amtrak service to Norfolk in 2012, which has also expanded to two round trips, which was started in March 2019.

Go to the next slide.

So, Kenone Atlantic is the owner of the property.

That includes the right-of-way and some of the tracks, and then there are other facilities there, including additional tracks, water boxes, crew facilities, things like that to service the train that actually are owned by Norfolk Southern through the grant.

that the state gave them back in 2010 to 2012.

This facility currently in use is the Amtrak service facility, so it's very important for us to ensure that this stays available for that service because it does have the capacity for the growth in service that we have planned under the Transforming Rail in Virginia initiative.

And so DRPT negotiated a purchase price on this property that was before the Virginia Passenger Rail Authority existed to secure its use as the Amtrak service facility.

The offer was formalized in a letter November 4, 2019.

And if you go to the next slide, I'll discuss that also there were some other programs through DRPT that had invested in this property and that adjusted the purchase price.

But here we see this is the Norfolk Southern Tracts, the ones that are not in red there to the left.

And the red is the turnout that comes towards the service facility.

So that's one of the parcels we'll be acquiring.

You can go to the next slide.

And as you continue east, I don't know if there's a delay, but I haven't gone to the next slide on my screen.

So that's the bulk of the facility there that's in operation today.

The next slide, third parcel.

And so this is the back of the facility where we have additional capacity for an additional train to overnight there.

and some of the tracks as you get off towards the east actually don't exist and there's a lot of trees there.

So, three parcels will be acquired.

Next slide.

So, as I mentioned, DRPT negotiated the purchase price in 2019.

The $1,761,000 amount that will be purchased

is the result of a $2 million purchase amount agreed upon, but due to past grants made by DRPT under the Rail Preservation Fund to help maintain a state of good repair on what was the short line railroad known as Bay Coast Railroad, because we have contingent interest in those assets, we're reducing the $2 million that would technically be owed back to the state, so $238,401, so that results in the final amount paid to

Canone for the St. Julian's Yard property at 1.76 million.

Next slide.

So, still a number of things in flux here to complete this purchase.

We do have a real estate purchase agreement executed by DRPT and Canone Atlantic on January 5th.

We have environmental work underway and being updated for the closing, survey title inspection, title insurance in procurement phase,

We have attorneys preparing the deeds and settlement papers and the transfer agreement because this will be ultimately transferred with board approval from DRPT to VPRA.

And then Kanoni is sending a letter to consummate the abandonment to the Surface Transportation Board.

They may ask for an extension on that.

There's a lot of moving pieces here.

And so we are targeting a close in the second quarter of 2022.

Next slide.

All right.

Okay, since this is a piece of property acquisition that will eventually be acquired by DRPT but transferred over to VPRA, we just wanted to make sure you all were aware of this.

And this actually goes back a couple of years.

It's somewhat of an opportunistic acquisition because of the abandonment of the property.

But it's also an opportunity for us to have a

I just want to say, I think it's so forward looking when you're growing a system like this.

Thank you.

All right.

So the Arkandale, Third Track, and Quantico Station improvements.

This is a legacy project.

It actually predates a lot of things that DRPT and VPRA have grown.

So as we go through this, I just wanted to put that out there.

This is a legacy project.

A lot of lessons learned.

I'm going to go through all of it.

You can see the limits of the project.

It goes through Quantico Station or the Quantico Marine Base in the Northern Virginia area, so Arkandale to Powell's Creek being the limits of the design.

This is a third track project, which also includes the passenger station improvements at Quantico to improve the ability for Amtrak, VRE, and CSX trains to meet, pass, or overtake each other at a location midway along the heavily trafficked

RFMP corridors.

So, 9.2 miles of actual third track and 84% of that track construction is complete.

The CSX is constructing the track and the signals, and VRE is a partner with the ERPT.

They're going to be, VPRA, they're going to be constructing the Quantico station improvements.

The construction started in 2014, although the grant was awarded in 2010 under the ERA program, and completion is scheduled in 2023.

I'm going to go through that schedule a bit and some of the complexities of this project.

Go to the next slide.

So the Arkandale project is a $125.3 million, nine-mile track construction project with the Quantico Station Improvement.

The Arkandale third track portion of this, the CSX constructed part, was funded with the federal ARRA Fund.

$74.8 million was awarded to Virginia in 2010.

We supplemented that, the CSX part of the project with $26.5 million, so the total budget for the CSX track construction is $101 million.

The Quantico Station improvements, which is a partnership with Virginia Railway Express, we have $3.6 million in Commonwealth rail funds allocated and obligated, and then we have an additional $10.4 million in SmartScale funds, so $23.9 million for the total Quantico Station.

So state and federal partnership.

One thing I wanted to do, and I heard some questions about the crash wall and stuff, and I want to make sure that everybody understands what, when we say a third track project, the station's like, this is a very complex project.

And so the elements of construction do include tracks.

And this picture, I think, demonstrates something important here.

You'll see that we're actually using concrete ties

compared to the other main lines there to the left where they have timber ties.

As we were going through this project in the design phase, for durability and longevity, they improved the distance between those track ties and resulted in more track ties needed and those are concrete ties.

When we look at the costs of what a modern rail project looks like, this is the difference between some of the timber ties we see there.

So the third track is a significant part of it.

Signals are also part of it.

That signals are not an inexpensive piece of any rail project.

They're very complex, very intelligent people designing these signal systems, very important for safety.

Of course, we also have positive train control now in the picture, and so everything needs to be up to standard code for safety regulation.

I'll show the map of the project again, but one of the things I wanted to point out is we have a lot of water along this route.

There's Quantico Creek, there's the Potomac River, Chesapeake Bay, and a lot of streams and things.

So retaining walls are important.

There's a lot of slopes in this area, so some of the retaining walls are holding back slopes, some of the retaining walls are holding the track bed.

There's a very important piece of the project.

I'll go through some of the challenges on that front.

Quantico Station was part of the scope that evolved very early on in the award of the federal funds.

So what was going to be two side platforms is now going to be an island platform with pedestrian overpasses over the tracks down to the platform on both sides of the tracks.

Grade crossings are distributed throughout the project.

So we have private and public crossings.

One of the significant public crossings is there at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Potomac Avenue,

We also have multiple bridges.

We have to build causeways, and we have significant slopes that have to be dealt with.

Access roads had to be reserved or rebuilt, and we had to work within the limits of the right-of-way that we had, which gets very tight, especially as you go through Marine Corps Base Quantico.

And then we also have design for future build-out.

So very complex as we're moving through this nine miles.

Next slide.

Some of the project challenges.

Around the office, we say like, you know, Argandale really was the lessons learned on a lot of fronts.

I mean, it's the project that will, from finding sunken Civil War battleships in Quantico Creek, poor soils, just climate change, changing coastlines.

So some of these challenges that early on were in the project agreement phase.

The ARRA program, I think, is important to recognize

put $8 billion into the public realm for passenger rail projects.

And as mentioned earlier in this meeting by Director Mitchell, highway and transit get formula funding, rail does not.

One of the significant impacts of not having regular formula funding coming to rail across the country is that there were not a lot of plans ready to go for $8 billion.

And that's one of the things I think we're better prepared, especially in Virginia and North Carolina,

but $66 billion coming out of the IIJA, really it creates a bit of a scramble across the country when you have these boom and bust periods of funding for rail.

So the $8 billion, we learned a lot of lessons.

The FRA was requiring service outcome agreements.

That was something the railroads resisted very early on and set back some of the project agreements, and so it took years to get to agreement.

When I mentioned about the planning challenges, a lot of states, including us on this project, did not have, we had about conceptual design for Arkandale.

And so there were things that you find out as you advance design and you do more investigative work as part of the design process.

So one thing we were finding out after we got under contract was that there were some poor soils in this area, we knew there was a lot of water, drainage was an issue, and these are things that you have to value, engineer, and deal with.

We had a lot of steep slopes.

Not just those steep slopes, but who owns those slopes became a problem.

We had changing coastlines.

We did find at one point as we get close to the Potomac River there, Chesapeake Bay, that there was a lot of scour under the tracks from past hurricanes.

And so when you look at the pressure that a new track puts on that embankment, do you have enough support?

And so we had to go and secure that coastline to make sure that we had a safe railroad put into service.

and that was complicated by the fact that the water and the land that we had to access was owned by NAFAC for the entity that owns property for Marine Corps Base Quantico and takes years to get permits to enter.

And then we also have utilities running along this, Verizon and CenturyLink and some plantation pipeline fuels.

There's a lot of utilities in the area that run along it that are on the CSX right-of-way and then there's also utilities that traverse it from one side of the tracks to the other.

You can go to the next slide.

Quantico Station, as I mentioned, originally was planned when we went for the federal funds as two side platforms.

And that quickly changed as we looked at service in that we wanted, if we're going to build three tracks in this area, we want all three tracks to be accessible by a platform.

So the island platform idea where you put a platform in the middle of two tracks and then have a side platform on the westernmost tracks was the way we decided to go.

That requires safe passage for passengers up and over the tracks.

That means you need to put in inter-track fences, especially in an area that has a lot of pedestrians because you go right through the Marine Corps Base Quantico and the town is on one side of the tracks and the base on the other side of the tracks, so a lot of people crossing constantly.

Those inter-track fences, the tight property lines with the town and the base, it was very tight to fit all this in.

We had to get some permits.

but we are going to be extending the east platform, building pedestrian bridges, installing inner track fences, upgrading the Potomac Avenue grade crossing, and project completion is anticipated in December 2023.

This is one of those projects that VRE has now begun in earnest, so they are digging the holes for the elevators, they are moving all the utilities, there is work if you go through this area, you will see construction now,

And so when Michael McLaughlin mentioned the performance committees, this is going to be one of those areas where we look at performance as we get into construction and if we need to adjust any schedules or find other service solutions to make sure that trains move through efficiently and we don't have significant delays.

Next slide.

So I had mentioned that Argandale was a project where we learned a lot of lessons.

And to that extent, even our funding program was a lot of lessons learned across the country.

Without such significant funding going into the industry, we didn't have a lot of the expertise ready to go.

So a lot of states learned a lot of lessons, including Virginia.

One of the things we've learned is that you want sufficient design before you put out a budget to the public and go after federal funds.

We had conceptual design.

We did have some estimates with more contingency, but the application we went after included an entire corridor between Richmond and DC at the time, and the award to Virginia in 2010 was for the $74.8 million on Arkandale.

As comparison, I think North Carolina got about $500 million.

And the appropriate contingency, we had about 10% contingency in that budget, which is not sufficient.

We designed for service.

We found that island platforms made more sense for network fluidity.

So that introduced a design change very early in the process.

And then the geotechnical issues in that we had only advanced to conceptual level design, so we hadn't done a lot more of the geotechnical work to find out what challenges we had in front of us.

That is something that you have to find places to put forest soils.

They have to stay within certain project limits to not trigger certain environmental

issues and it was just something that was very challenging through the life of the project.

The schedule, I mentioned the legal contractual phase, so at first across the country there was some resistance to the service outcomes that the FRA was trying to include in the grant agreements when they distributed federal funds.

A good example of that is in our area when you have a nine mile project.

and asking for a service outcome on a 123-mile corridor, that was something that CSX was resisting.

And so ultimately, the FRA did let go of that service outcome.

And so our obligation under the FRA agreement is to have these improvements in service for 20 years once completed.

Our award was made in 2010.

CSX, FRA, state negotiations lasted through 2012 to 2014.

and then the stakeholders that have affected the schedule include NAFAC or the Naval Facilities that own all the property for Quantico.

We've had several years of delay on that front.

Utility companies, we did have some legal confrontations with utility companies and ultimately came out with a successful solution for our project.

However, it did set us back about a year and a half and then we also had local permits that were needed and we just had some legwork to do with Prince William County

when they were looking at a rail facility, which they're not used to giving occupancy permits for.

And on the environmental front, the need for work, we did have some amendments that were necessary through the life of the project because of permits and because of extensions.

We also had bald eagle nest season, which limits certain times of year that you can do work.

We also have the northern long-eared bat, which limited times of year when we could do work.

And then I mentioned before that we had erosion issues, including the scour under right-of-way along the Potomac River.

Go to the next slide.

Jeremy, we've got a question here.

We did no harm.

Yeah, we had to avoid certain times of year during, I believe it was their mating season also, we had to check, I think, in trees and things that needed to be felled.

So yeah, this was really fascinating, Jeremy, thank you.

I have ridden this stretch many, many, many times.

It's a beautiful stretch.

I will say I often have thought, oh my god, I hope they're keeping an eye on these rails because you feel like you're about to fall into the river.

And so I actually think this would be a really interesting little story to get in the Amtrak newsletter or the magazine, right?

Like literally, I often am like, it's beautiful.

Oh my god, I hope I don't fall to my death.

If you think about just how much infrastructure we have to deal with climate impacts, and this is very legitimate.

It's not easy when we say we want to make things climate resilient.

It does cost more money.

It is worth it.

I also look at that and I'm like, boy, today you would probably never choose to put a line there in the first place right along the coastline.

Oh my gosh.

And this is the side of the corridor that we've acquired, which is one of the reasons

We have learned a lot of lessons from this project for better or worse.

It goes all the way back to 2009 when the ARRA funds were made available.

A lot of parallels to the infrastructure funds available today, particularly some of the, you know, having a sufficient level of design, sufficient contingency, really understanding the environmental challenges out there.

I feel like with the projects we have underway, we've done that due diligence.

A lot of that work was

cleared environmentally as part of our DC to RBA environmental impact statement, so we have a much better feel in the corridor.

For the benefit of the Vice Chair, I just want to remind her, she's probably sitting over there.

The predecessor to this project was the Cherry Hill third track project that goes back to the early 2000s.

And so VRE had taken that up to a conceptual level.

And then, of course, the state picked that up.

So in terms of timing-wise, where we sometimes say that these projects move at a glacial pace, that's a good example.

And back to the station improvement project.

Yes, very excited to be out there doing a lot of the utility work, as Jeremy mentioned, and some of the other site clearance work.

We currently have work zones out there that we are currently managing through with no passenger interruption to this point.

That's something that

We are all collectively conscious of, and I will say that CSX2 is a good partner in ensuring that the trains don't get delayed now.

But nonetheless, we're very excited about it.

If you want to see the actual progress of this project, you can get on BRE.org under our project page.

Look for Quantico, and we do have construction cameras out there that'll show you almost a daily update of this project and a time lapse version as well.

The time lapse is really cool.

Yes.

Just one more question.

The point that Jeremy made, well, many good points, but one of them was how at the funding at the federal level, all of a sudden, you have $8 billion from ARRA.

Now, all of a sudden, you have $66 billion.

It's really interesting to me that FTA and FRA has asked you to come in with a plan for discretionary grants.

That doesn't happen every day.

They don't ask every agency to do that.

My personal observations is I think that

all having really well-developed project development plans, agreements in place, and in a ton of time, as Jeremy mentioned, went into just the legal work.

And I will say we've learned a lot from that experience that we were able to incorporate into our CSX and Norfolk Southern negotiations that we've nailed down a lot of those roles and responsibilities and engineering issues, construction budgets, things like that.

But I think when you look

If our experience is any indication of what some other states may also be facing as everybody's in a rush to try to go after some new federal money, is to make sure that those plans are very well developed at the outset, that there's resources available to state DOTs or other agencies that may be doing this for them to develop those plans.

There's such a rush to do shovel-ready projects that I think a lot of sponsors then have to rush through getting their project to that point.

But I think it would be important for personally the feds to be able to provide some resources to make that happen or state DOTs to do that too.

So the good news is for us, I think we've learned a lot from this experience.

We've been able to incorporate in our agreements, shorten some of the timelines that we have here.

So is that like say with like an Upper Southern Agreement, there's obviously you're fiscally prudent, here's what we can fund, here's the money that we have.

Where are the nice to have?

How is that built out, right?

Like funding the, you know, the King Street grid with, I mean,

200 years old, however that is in Alexandria.

Well, I'll add my observations and then DJ that, you know, as we've been going and developing the budget and refining things and as you may recall from our January meeting, we did bring back some increases to the capital budget that reflected new information that we had where it was usually the additional scope that had not been identified

as opposed to unit cost inflation.

I personally think one of the things we're going to have to be very, very mindful of, as the whole industry does, is unit cost inflation.

I think we're just seeing economy-wide increases in inflation that are going to affect our project budgets, and that's where we're going to have to manage very, very closely.

Labor cost is another area that is absolutely going to be increasing.

We're seeing it in bids today.

and I think it's going to get worse as more money is out on the street.

What that means is we've got to have extra discretion on the nice-to-haves that are, and we need to identify these things as nice-to-haves, that if we're starting to see inflation on our must-haves, that we are then going to have to be in a position to be able to pivot on some of these nice-to-haves if we start to see some escalation there.

That's why we'll have some good planning in place, program and project management plans for the use of contingency as well.

Contingency certainly can be used to cover some cost inflation.

That's what it's there for.

But it also is to be available for scope creep or scope issues if that exists.

So I think it's going to be a problem industry-wide personally.

That's really going to affect how we think about these nice-to-haves as well.

I think you're spot on.

I would add to that that we're also looking at phasing projects, for example, on the CSX field.

We had phase one and two, which are, quote unquote, funded and going to be done by 2030.

And then phase three and four are other projects that are not yet designed, but they are prompted versus nice to have.

They're things that, hey, once Long Bridge is done and phase one and two are done, these are the things we're going to look at.

To the extent there's more money coming more rapidly, those are projects that we can pull forward.

So places where we're putting in a third track now, in phase three, there's a two-mile fourth track that is nice to have.

We can make the argument that doing that fourth track in 2026, when crews are out there, when you've got the gang slowing down the railroad, makes more sense economically.

We should take advantage and pull those projects forward.

But it has to be done smartly.

We can't just say, hey, this is on our wish list.

There's money.

Let's do it.

Because then you get in a situation, and everybody's heard me say this, where you're writing 10-C papers instead of 5-A papers.

So you can't afford to bite off more than you can chew.

But I think you're exactly right.

So is that the plan?

Like it's something I'm going to share with FRA and FTA?

Listen, we're going to do this eventually.

You know, it's not just a nice-to-have.

It's you can help us time value of money, et cetera, the cost efficiencies of pulling it up.

It's just as important as everything else.

We don't have the money for it now.

With your help, we can do it now.

I think it'll be both.

I think it'll be looking at, I mean, personally, I don't think there's a lot of project elements in our current plan that we could say, oh, we can pull it forward,

We can get Long Bridge done.

Instead of 2030, it'll be 2027.

Because frankly, I think that's also already an impressive schedule.

But I think when we think about, do we use federal funds to add new projects or add new stuff?

Or do we try to use the federal funds to advance what we have?

That's where we're going to have to go through and have some discussions with our partners about that too, about how much we use to try to, you know,

complete our plans today, maybe move some state funding forward to some other things versus how much we try to add to the scope of what we're doing because we want to be careful about trying to do too much.

Yeah, I think these are really important conversations and connections to be making and thinking about that strategy.

I think DRPT is also a really important player as you think about the transit and the multimodal connections because that shouldn't necessarily be part of the rail authority's budget, but if we're thinking about how do these projects leverage each other and even thinking

The issue you raised, Patty, I've heard here in GRTC even of like they don't really have their transit pipeline because they've been very limited by fiscal constraint and thinking about the regional plan and so how do we think about if you're getting a new station or these station improvements and we're projecting ridership increase and how the transit agency could think of that as ridership increase that could access other FTA funds than necessarily the project scope specific for the rail authority?

because I just think our transit agencies locally could use some help with that and if the rail authority is getting these meetings wouldn't it be great to make sure DRPT and the local transit folks and others who are thinking about bike connections and other things are so we're really being smart and leveraging it at a community level things like the RAISE grants or other things like they can be

And we're actually doing that now as well.

On the DRPT and the transit side is looking at how we can partner with our agencies that are also thinking about pursuing federal funds to try to help them and tie it into leveraging our state funds that already go into that.

On one thing, I just want to clarify back on the issue of unit cost inflation.

It is an issue that I know VDOT is very, very concerned about as well.

They are already doing a lot of scenario planning.

On the highway side, we are also doing some of that with our program management consultants now, too, to look at what the potential impact could be of increases in unit cost and labor cost on our project budgets.

I think it's something that the entire industry has got to be very, very mindful of, particularly with all this new money flowing in, that there's a real potential for cost inflation.

We were very lucky for many years to see

I mean, I can think back 10, 15 years ago when capital costs, unit costs were inflating 4%, 5%, 6% a year.

A lot of it was because of fuel cost inflation.

It kind of leveled out for a while, down to like 3% or below, which so 3% was always kind of a safe assumption about what you thought your cost would escalate at.

And if you can go back and look at the engineering news records, capital cost inflation index, and it's pretty steady for the last

You know, seven to eight years, but I think now we're getting ready to go into another period of potential cost inflation, which will impact our project budget.

So it's just something we're already thinking about it, doing some scenario planning on that.

Yeah, I'll add a few things.

So we talked a little bit about how we have lessons learned.

And so yes, from the state side, the VPRA side, we're looking at robust risk management, like Director Mitchell was just discussing, and looking at year of expenditure and looking at proper contingencies.

But I also wanted to mention, we have a group of states, States for Passenger Rail, that work together with the feds, both the FRA and staffers.

And we talked about some of the lessons learned and so out of the R program, the feds have also learned, you know, like the R program put strict deadlines on when that money expires.

It expired September 2017, which is the date I'll never forget because I remember it almost became less about is the project finished and it became have we spent all the federal money.

And so there was this, not in addition to a scramble across the country to get that federal money, then it became a scramble to spend it and a lot of those projects were not actually done and states had to pick up the rest of it to see it through.

And so they've learned that lesson and they do not have those types of requirements coming down through this $66 billion.

And actually in Milwaukee when we last met in September to discuss these types of challenges with the $66 billion,

A lot of the states came forward and said, you know, our concerns are about the resources to implement.

What does success look like for $66 billion in the rail industry in the United States?

Is it going to be another graph where we have to be spending this much a day to get to the date where we've spent it all?

Or is it going to be about the delivery of projects that have service impacts?

So they have shifted towards the delivery of projects and giving more flexibility on the delivery and recognizing that planning is an issue.

They've actually expanded the definition of some of these

Yeah.

Great.

Well, thank you.

Thank you, Jeremy.

So it is just about 12 o'clock.

What I would propose to do is that we take a 15-minute break.

Allow us to grab some lunch.

Is 15 minutes OK?

What I was going to propose is that we actually break now to go into closed session.

Allow us to grab some lunch while we close the phone line to the public.

And for those of you that are on the phone as well, you can take a break and reconvene.

Is 15 minutes okay for everyone?

Okay.

We'll reconvene in 15 minutes.

We'll be eating our lunch while we are chatting and go into closed session.

And then we will, after that, open back up for closed session.

We will have an action to take potentially.

related to our closed session.

And then we have a safety presentation that I think we discussed a couple months ago.

I think we did include the materials.

We included it in the materials.

Depending on how long our closed session goes, I may suggest we defer the presentation on the safety presentation or let you all just review the hard copy presentation and come back to us with questions.

But let's see how our timeline shakes up.

I move that the board convene in a closed session pursuant to section 2.2-3711A1 of the Code of Virginia for the purpose of discussing prospective candidates and salaries

with respect to specific VPRA employee positions and the performance of specific public VPRA officers, appointees, and employees, and Section 2.2-3711A6 of the Code of Virginia for the purpose of discussing a project involving the investment of public funds where bargaining is involved and where the financial interests of the Commonwealth would be adversely affected

if the discussion was made public at this time.

Additionally, I move that staff and attorneys attend the closed session because their presence is deemed necessary and will aid the Board in its consideration of this matter.

Okay, with that, Joan, would you mind taking the roll call vote?

Absolutely.

Aye.

Ms. Zimmerman.

Hi.

You guys have it?

Great.

Thank you.

So with that, we'll take a quick break.

And for those of you on the phone, we will be back at, let's say, actually 1218.

So give ourselves 15 minutes.

All right.

Thank you.

I think we have everybody back and we have everybody here.

I have a certification that I'm going to read and then we're going to move on to the two motions that we have in front of us.

We are now going to take a roll call vote.

I ask that each member indicate their agreement with the following statement.

To the best of my knowledge, during the closed meeting, the only matters heard, discussed or considered were those matters lawfully exempted from open meeting requirements under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act and only those public business matters as were identified in the motion

by which the closed meeting was convened.

Ms. Bulova.

I agree.

Ms. Doersch.

I. Mr. Fisette.

I agree.

Mr. Hall.

Mr. Sadid?

Aye.

I agree.

The ayes have it.

All right, thank you.

We have two resolutions in front of us.

The first one is, and I'd like to ask a motion for this,

It is authorization for compensation to the Director of Engineering and Construction and the Long Bridge Project Manager.

Is there a motion to approve that?

Okay.

Second?

Second.

All right.

All in favor?

Aye.

Anybody opposed?

Great.

Thank you very much.

We have one more resolution in front of us.

It is authorization for the VPRA Executive Director to serve on the Board of Directors of Litronics Group Incorporated.

And again, this is a conditional approval that would also be dependent upon the receipt of a informal advice from the Virginia Conflict of Interest and Ethics Advisory Council.

All right, second?

Move it.

Anyone opposed?

All right.

Well, thank you very much, everybody.

Appreciate your participation today.

And I know our next meeting is not scheduled until May, I believe, but we will give you some updates as we go along on where we stand with some of the other matters that we've discussed.

And appreciate all of you coming down

here to DRPT today.

So stay safe everyone and have safe travels home.

And this meeting is now adjourned.