Board of Directors Meeting   8/30/2023

All right, I'm going to call the VPRA.

It's August, right?

It is August.

August board meeting to order.

First item on our agenda is our safety briefing.

Yes, morning everyone.

We are at 919 East Main Street on the fourth floor.

AED, First Aid Supplies, AED, I'm beside myself to go get them.

They're upstairs in our office.

There's also, we can also get one downstairs in the first floor.

First Aid Supplies, don't know that you.

Good.

Firearm's extinguisher is actually three extinguishers in this hallway.

This one scouted it, but the firearms are also in both hallways surrounding the elevator bank.

The same with the primaries at the exit routes down the stairs are both hallways as well.

Well, this way or that way.

In Grace, there's the Washington statue and other Virginia Founding Fathers below him on the west side of the cabin.

West side of the cabin.

primary and secondary 9-1-1 callers, Steve Moon, that should be primary, Michael secondary.

Head count responsibilities, Jason, that's okay.

Please be aware of your surroundings.

If we do have to evacuate, make sure chairs are pushed in, don't trip over any bags or things of that nature.

If anyone is wanting to get home, please do the same in case anything happens to you at home.

In the case of workplace active shooter, we hide and fight.

If that comes, then hopefully it won't.

I think that's it.

Unless DJ always will make sure I miss anything.

All right.

Next thing up on our agenda is welcome.

So we have some changes in our board.

We have some new members and we said we're going to say goodbye unofficially to a couple of other members.

So I want to start off and welcome our two new members.

We have Sandy Bushue from Arlington County.

that's been appointed to one of the Northern Virginia slots who's with us in person today, and we have Beth Rhinehart from Bristol.

And she's not able to hear, she said, so Jason was checking on that.

Jason's working on that.

So we'll welcome Beth in a second.

Jay Facet and Wick Morman who served on this board from the creation of the VPRA both rolled off of their appointments.

And we, DJ and I both reached out to them and thanked them for their service to VPRA.

They were both instrumental in getting us up and running.

And John Delandro has been reappointed.

So we've kind of gone through that whole cycle and are back fully in place.

Since we do have new members,

Why don't we go around the room and do some introductions?

Hi, Rich Dalton with Virginia Railway Express.

Good to see you, Rich.

John Watkins, I guess retired.

Thank you.

James Spore with Virginia Beach.

Good morning.

Rod Hall also from Prince William County.

Jennifer DeBruhl, the Board Chair and the Director of the Department of Rail and Public Transportation.

I'm also from Northern Virginia, from Falls Church.

Jason, do you want to, we'll do the whole room if you want to.

Jason Cheeks, Director of IT for the VPRA.

Steve Goodard, Chief Financial Officer.

and Shannon Perry, I'm the Director of Convention, Planning and Analysis.

Welcome, we are very glad to have you, look forward to having you as part of the board and part of our discourse here.

Last thing that I want to say in terms of welcome is I've had a lot of opportunities over the summer,

to ride both Amtrak and VRE.

I feel like I have been on the short trip back and forth to Northern Virginia.

And I've split my time between driving to Spotsylvania and riding VRE and riding Amtrak.

And I just want to share the work we're doing is so important, but I've had wonderful experiences this summer on VRE trains that were close to full.

And I was, I went on Amtrak.

Not last week, but before last.

And I think I texted DJ and said, I want a train that is completely full coming out of Union Station.

And they actually had to come on, tell everybody to shove their bags on their seats, that there was not a single seat on the train available out of Union Station because we were picking up 50 more people in Alexandria.

And I'm sitting there as I'm sitting there holding my things from my overnight trip to DC.

I'm like, oh my gosh, I've got to sit here and hold all this stuff.

Emily, wait a second.

I love this.

This is what we're here for.

It was great to see and I actually had a number of staff that were on trains later in the day that had the same experience and so it just is a nice reminder of how important the work we're doing here is and how important the investments that we're making in Long Bridge and in the corridor that benefit both Amtrak Intercity Passenger Service and BRE are to the Commonwealth and to our economic vitality so

I just wanted to share that by way of welcome.

I believe in what we do.

I'm out there riding and like what I see.

And so that's where I want to start today.

And I'm going to turn it over to you to DJ to start with.

Oh, wait a second.

I'm turning over too quickly.

Next item on our agenda is public comment.

And so we have for public comment, we have one person signed up.

Jay, it's good to see you.

We have three minutes for you, and then we'll conclude public comments after that.

Thank you.

Hey, everyone.

My name is Jake Corvallis.

I'm with JBG Smith.

We're a real estate investment trust with significant holdings in national land.

I'm also the co-chair of the National Landing Business Improvement District, Transportation Committee, and a member of the Board of Virginians for High Speed Rail.

I'm here on behalf of all those organizations to highlight the importance of VPRA's work to national landing and the rest of the Commonwealth.

Before I do, I want to extend a welcome to the new board member, Sandy Bushue, who is an Arlingtonian who understands the importance of passenger rail investments to the county and to national landing and look forward to working there.

For those unfamiliar, national landing is Virginia's largest walkable downtown with more than 12 million square feet of office space and over 22,000 residents.

located in Arlington County.

It's the home of Amazon's HQ2, whose first phase Metropolitan Park opened in June, and Virginia Tech's new Innovation Campus, which is expected to open in 2024.

National Landing's success is rooted in a robust multimodal transportation network, which is set to grow thanks to the Transforming Rail Project Program.

Specifically, the Long Bridge Project and the Alexandria Fourth Track Project will enable significantly expanded VRE service

the establishment of Amtrak intercity service and, per a recent MOU with Maryland's Department of Transportation, the extension of marked commuter trains across the river into national landing.

Together, these improvements will allow employers like Amazon and Virginia Tech to recruit top talent from across the region with direct transit access.

In today's economy, that ability to attract knowledge workers is a major competitive advantage.

We appreciate VPRA's role in making all this possible.

Look forward to more details about when this new service will begin in national landing.

More broadly, we'd like to congratulate VPRA on the increased ridership that was just alluded to on VA's Virginia state-sponsored Amtrak Regionals, which is ensuring that Virginia is on pace to exceed all-time ridership records across all of our Amtrak chains.

The consistent growth in ridership since the introduction of state-sponsored service

is a testament to the value that Virginians place on passenger rail and the importance of VPRAs effort and Madam Chair's vision to expand and improve it.

Finally, we're concerned about the ongoing federal budget negotiations and the potential impact to Amtrak service, especially the proposed 92% cut in Northeast corridor service included in the House budget.

Virginians for high-speed rail is already issued an action alert to oppose those cuts to our members.

encouraging them to contact their representatives.

As ridership numbers show, Virginia is in the midst of a passenger rail renaissance, and we stand ready to work with the DRPT to guard against those accounts that would threaten that progress.

Our next item on our agenda is the approval of the meeting minutes from May 23rd.

Motion by Ms. Bulova, second by Mr. Hall.

Any comments?

Hearing none, Mary Estelle, can you call the roll?

Ms. Bulova?

Aye.

Ms. Bushue?

Sustained.

Mr. Cardwell?

Oh, sorry.

Ms. Doersch?

Aye.

Ms. Drake?

Aye.

Mr. Hall?

Aye.

Ms. Moses-Nedd?

Aye.

Ms. Rhinehart?

Aye.

Mr. Spore?

Aye.

Mr. Watkins?

Aye.

I saw Mr. Green take his mic off, but I don't hear him.

He should be here.

All right, the motion carries.

Thank you.

Good morning, everybody.

Welcome.

It's good to see everybody here today.

We have a lot of information overall today and a lot in the Executive Director's report.

So I'm going to go relatively quickly.

That should not stop you from asking questions or stopping me if you want more details.

So please feel free to stop.

Administrative updates.

I would be remiss if I led with anything other than tremendous ridership and revenues that we saw in fiscal year 23.

Jacob Wallace talked about it, the chair talked about it, we have just seen people flock to the trains and that's going to continue to happen as we add more service and continue to work with Amtrak and VRE to run the trains on time.

FY23 was the record, you see the numbers there.

I would add to that that July of 2023 was the first month of the fiscal year and also the largest ridership month we have ever seen in Virginia with over 125,000 passengers.

I agree with that.

I fully support the extension of the express lanes to Fredericksburg.

I also do.

Those tolls.

So that's great news and we expect that to continue with the caveat that at some some month we're going to come here and say we had a real good ridership month but it wasn't record and we're ready for that.

A lot of what we are seeing now is the addition of the new services.

Last year we had three new trains

It's going to level out.

We're going to continue to put service where people want it and make sure with Amtrak that we're giving them a safe, reliable quality experience.

The next two bullets are really just testament to the fact that we continue to work on moving the projects.

We're 28 months into this and we're getting projects to 60% design and moving things with partners like, as you see in the last bullet, VDOT,

It's coming to fruition and we're going to see shovels in the ground really soon and it's very exciting.

Those two bullets just talk about the continued progress that we're having in those projects.

Organizational updates, we're at 43 full-time employees one part-time.

I believe that's the same that we were at the last meeting.

We had no new employees come out in August.

Here's the snapshot of where we are by gender, race, and age.

We feel good about where we are.

It's something with every selection that we make, we are cognizant of specifically, not specifically, really all three of them are things we focus on, but ensuring that we've got a good balance in everything we do has been important to us from a cultural point of view.

Here's a snapshot of the FY23 annual incentive plan goals that we put in place last year.

I said this in the personal compensation committee meeting and I'll repeat it.

We're thrilled to have met every single one of these goals.

When we put them in place, we were really nervous as an executive team because they were stretch goals at that point.

We didn't know how ridership was going to come back.

We weren't sure about cost recovery.

All of the last three, the Long Bridge, Franconia Bypass, that really relied on industry working with us, that relied on us getting procurement teams in a place where we could get these RFPs and RFQs out and again I'm happy to say that we have met or exceeded every

and every single one of these goals.

Happy to go through them one by one, but in each case we set an aggressive deadline and we hit it.

It's a big part of the team we're building, making sure that folks have that sense of urgency and understand that we've got to work together aggressively and professionally to get these projects done by 2030.

Any questions on the 2023 goals?

Let's see, we talk about these every meeting.

that projected out.

So the funding for the bridge, the bridge, the last dollar I guess will be spent in fiscal year 31.

Right now we've got the shortfall for the entire phase two projects.

We have, and we'll talk about this a little bit later, but we've got pending grant applications for a CRSI grant and for a Fed State partnership grant.

We should hear about CRSI.

The CRSI grant is specifically for the bypass in Franconia Springfield.

That we should hear sometime before September or by the end of September.

The Fed State Partnership, the calendar says that we should hear by the end of this calendar year, so December.

We have asked in the Fed State Partnership to be fully funded for phase two.

As you know, most of the money that we have now on this portfolio comes from Virginia.

I would say no, not yet.

It's something that we're watching closely.

The good news is that we're funded through Virginia through the Commonwealth Rail Fund.

If we don't get funding from the feds that we're counting on, hoping for, and we feel like we're really competitive for, we've got to go back and look at the Commonwealth Rail Fund and say, okay, well, maybe 2030 we can't do, we've got to use a couple more years of our money.

So that would delay the projects for sure.

At this point, they haven't gotten far enough in their deliberations, I think, for us to really come up.

Thank you.

Anything else on 2023?

I just wanted to note that when we compared the state fiscal year 2019, that was the highest ridership record year ever.

We weren't cherry picking a lower year.

2019 was a great year right before the pandemic, so it might look that shows you how great fiscal year 23 is.

2019 was setting records, hence why we went out with

C. Saxon Road for Southern to complete some deals to get more trains.

So that was a great year.

And if you told us back then we're going to exceed that, 23, you'd have been on them wrong.

OK. And one other point, I'm glad you brought that up, Mike.

Our fiscal year is from July 1st to June 30th.

We track performance, though.

We do performance from October 1st to September.

So some of these dates actually go after the fiscal year.

And you'll see that.

So for FY24, here are our current AIP goals.

This is still in draft.

We're waiting for final Amtrak numbers for 23.

And we just want to make sure that all of these timelines are good.

But we have, once again, following the theme from last year, set what we think are aggressive goals.

The thing that jumps out at you is increase ridership by 3%.

Whoa, wait a second.

Last year, we increased it by 40-plus percent.

You really think 3% is aggressive?

We do, because we're this year comparing the same amount of service

to the service we had last year, it's year over year, 24 over 23.

We're also comparing a post-pandemic ridership in 23 to what's going to happen in 24 and we really don't know what's going to happen if there's another strain of COVID, God forbid.

So we think that 3% is aggressive because if you look before 2019 going back to 2009 when State Support Service started,

Some years were flat, some years went down, some years went up a little.

So 3% is a little bit above the average that you would see over that time frame.

So we think that's aggressive.

The cost recovery goal is higher than what we experienced this year as we continue to move forward working with Amtrak to balance revenues and ridership.

And then the next two are continued milestones for Long Bridge, which of course is the biggest project in our portfolio.

We want to get the RFP for South package out by March, and that'll be to this shortlisted group of vendors, and then a phase one notice to proceed on the North package by the end of month January.

So just quickly, and Mike will talk about this more, and he's probably gonna roll his eyes because I'm taking his words, but

We are currently in a procurement phase with the shortlist of vendors on the north package.

They have to get their proposals back to us by September.

We will have identified the vendor of choice by probably early November, and we plan to come to this board in December with a contract for approval for the north package.

And then if you all approve the contract, we would then move forward with them on the north.

And then you see the other milestones on other key projects.

The last bullet, similar to last year, is just making sure organizationally we continue to get set up, second phase of the ERP, and then also getting a standardized project management process in place.

Before you move on, I just want to add one more thing.

These guys have set dates for all of these procurement efforts and they've hit every one of them.

And it's built incredible credibility with the transportation consulting and contracting industry that's helping us move these projects forward.

Every time I go talk to anybody in the private sector side of transportation, they are so impressed and so grateful for how hard this team is working to set a date, set an aggressive date and live by it.

and that's really helping us deliver this program of projects.

I would just add, there are a few things more rewarding than having someone who I've worked with for 20 years say to me six months ago, you guys will never hit that date.

And then six months later, I believe you hit that date.

And you know who you are.

Anyway, so these are our goals for 2024.

Any questions on these?

All right, that's a great segue into culture.

So 28 months into it, Mike, Steve and I were the first three employees and we knew that we would have to build

An organization that could deliver this aggressive portfolio of projects.

And this is a word, I don't even know the official name, word jumble.

These are the words that came out.

What is it?

Word cloud?

Word cloud.

Thank you very much.

I'm so old.

This is a word cloud that talks about different

Brates, a VPRA that came when we interviewed every single employee.

We did confidential interviews with every employee and these are the things that came out fast-paced, scrappy, I love scrappy, friendly.

I mean these are the things that we are looking to build from a culture point of view.

Every selection we make for employees, we want to make sure that they can handle the controlled chaos that is a startup organization and we are a startup.

We're 28 months in so we're starting to settle but there is a lot of

growing pains that we need folks that are strong enough to endure.

We're also looking for folks that have a sense of urgency.

We can't settle for, well, we're going to miss this deadline by a month because then our credibility is out the door.

And so we've worked very hard as a team, as the team has grown, we've all worked on this together to deliver on that culture.

These are some of the quotes we got from the employee interviews, all very positive.

Overwhelmingly, the feedback was positive.

So we feel like we're in a good place, but we've got to continue focusing on this.

Common themes are on the left, I'm not going to read them.

Cautions though, this is what we're mindful of every day.

We need to keep doing the good things that we can.

We need to make sure that we're not getting folks in silos.

We're using resources.

One of the questions that I ask for every hire is, what does their 40 hours a week look like?

What are they going to be contributing?

How are they going to become part of the team?

What value are they adding to our goals of sustaining and enhancing passenger rail here in Virginia?

And if we can't answer those questions, we shouldn't be hiring that person.

We also have been very quick when people, and it's only happened a couple times, thankfully, where people aren't a good fit for the culture, we're quick to say, okay, you know what, maybe this isn't a good fit for you, it's not a good fit for us, because it's just a bad thing to have folks that are not part of delivering the mission, and so far so good, we've delivered on that.

Something we watch every single day.

Contracting updates.

Very quickly, you see this every month in what I send out.

These are the ones that happened in July.

A quick note, in July of 2022, we brought to you a list of VRE grant agreements.

These were agreements that previously DRPT had agreements with VRE to deliver projects.

VRE delivers the projects.

DRPT was handling the money and the oversight.

We assigned those agreements from DRPT to VPRA.

In the coming days or weeks, we will be signing the first of our agreements directly with the VRE for the Crossroads Project for the next phase of the Crossroads Project.

It's about $8 million.

And let's not even say it's $8.4 million.

It's smart scale funding.

So it's the funding is going to come and we're going to help Rich and his team manage that because it's more than $5 million.

I'm just letting you know we're going to sign that agreement sometime in the next couple weeks.

and it's just in line with the way we manage the projects that are there now.

The other contract that I want to bring to your awareness is the operations contract for Amtrak First Corps.

So that we signed, it was just over $5 million we talked about at the last board meeting.

This is the contract we have with Amtrak for them to continue running our service.

We thought that we'd be in a position October 1st to sign a whole year contract.

Long story short, the 209, the PREA-209 policy is changing the way Amtrak charges states for service and that's continuing to be finalized so Amtrak is not in a position to give us final numbers yet.

We're going to in turn sign another three-month amendment

that will cover service for October through December.

That dollar amount will be in total about $22 million, and we've got a lot of room in there.

However, $22 million offset by the revenue that we'll collect, so it'll be under $10 million, we think.

When we sign that contract, we will send out a note saying, hey, we signed this, but because it's more than $5 million, I just wanted to let you all know ahead of time, we will be entering into that agreement.

No, well, no it's not.

It's actually more than that, but we'll actually, we'll go through that later.

Okay.

So from your expertise with Amtrak, so 5 million this quarter, you said 22 million probably for the year, how does that compare?

Do you have any idea with the other states?

Are we paying more or less or about the same?

The rates are the same.

The rates are the same as the other states paid, but cost recovery is higher, I won't say than all states, but it's darn near the top because our ridership and our revenue is so high.

Okay, thank you.

Okay, so the formula,

But the other states is the same.

Okay.

I didn't realize that.

It is.

And based on like the shared stations, there are some stations that are a hundred percent for state.

So we pay all of that.

Some stations that share with long distance.

So we pay a mix.

But the formula that's used to establish our cost is the same as the formula for the other state.

And in fact, that's what's complicated it over the last couple of years because

It was passed in 2009.

Probably 2012, 2013, the first cost allocation agreement was put into place.

That's worked well, but a lot of states wanted changes.

We've learned a lot since then, so now we're in the process of putting a new formula in place to charge states and getting that formula finalized, getting the forecast finalized has been a challenge.

For all states, that's not a Virginia case.

Any other questions on the contracting updates?

All right, speaking of last July's board meeting in July of 2022, we came to you with a SWAM goal.

We were looking to be very aggressive in having our business go to small women and minority-owned businesses, disadvantaged businesses.

This is a look at our total spend.

So this is all of the spend money that came out the door in FY23.

We had a SWAM percentage of 3.3%.

We're not thrilled with that, but a lot of that is out of our control.

So, for example, this is discretionary and non-discretionary.

Non-discretionary spending is like we have a deal with CSX, we've got to pay them for the $125 million for our transaction, for maintaining and those kinds of things.

We don't have an option, they're our only vendor.

The good news is that our discretionary spend, we wanted to have a goal of 10% and we hit that out of the park, knocked that out of the park.

We had an actual spending of 24% of our discretionary spend, so on the procurements that we could choose who got the work, 24% of it went to SWIM and DPE.

It's really good results in my opinion.

It is, and I'm glad to say that.

So this includes not only our spending, but when we contract with a big production company that's not a SWAM, we say to them, you've got to have a SWAM goal as well.

And so when they filter the money down to SWAM as well, but yeah, we're happy with 24%.

So DJ, I just understand what you're comparing here.

It's the same, so in total, about $243 million went out the door.

Of that, $8 million went to swans.

That's on the first slide.

So the second slide, of that 242 that went out, only 33 of it did we really have a say on where it went.

Thank you.

Can we go back to that?

Just one more thing.

Thank you and the staff for

accommodating discussion I had between VPRA and Northern Virginia Black Chamber.

So candidly, that's something we've done well.

And we should do that.

We should really leverage this group more than we did.

DJ, one other question.

So is there like a number of vendors?

A number of vendors.

Yeah, we have a catalog of vendors and that catalog grows all the time.

And we can get you more information on that.

But yes, we have folks that sign up and say, hey, I qualify here.

And then my last item is just the monthly update.

If there are any budget adjustments, I'm happy to say that in the first month of the fiscal year, we didn't see any reason for a budget adjustment.

So we're thrilled with that.

Any questions for me before I turn it over to Mike to talk about, oh no, just kidding, this is still me, sorry.

So a little bit of fear in Mike's face was in.

Passenger service update, ridership, I talked about it earlier, we have more than 125,000 riders in July.

Great news, you can see we continue to have a gap from the previous year.

I'll just go through these quickly because you see these every month and they're pretty consistent.

Here it is route by route.

The two routes that are the closest are the Roanoke route and I think that's just the adjustment of having the second service.

We're going to watch that as we go on month for month and then the Richmond ridership in the bottom right hand corner

That is closer to last year than the others, but a big part of that is because we added the new Norfolk train, and a lot of folks that used to ride to Richmond on a Richmond train now ride to Richmond on a Norfolk train.

So the times work better for people, it just gives them more flexibility for going back and forth.

Overall, the number, the big number 125 is the one we're looking at, and knock on wood, we continue to have good news there.

Here they are one by one, and I'm not going to go through them.

Jeremy Latimer is going to be here this afternoon to talk about some of the on-time performance challenges we've had.

You will see, though, pretty consistently on each of these routes, weekend service is where we have the highest numbers, which is very different than what we had seen in the past.

In the past, we had a lot of commuter service.

Now, folks aren't working the 9 to 5 schedule.

Rich and Viri can talk about this as well.

Folks want to get out, though.

They want to get out on the weekends.

Fridays and Mondays are high as well.

So we're looking to how we can market a train to get folks on the train where they want to go.

Last item, and this is truly my last item I think, passenger service issues.

Last board meeting was a couple days after the first derailment.

There was a derailment in the tunnel at Washington Union Station.

You see on the screen the impacts of that derailment.

We had 17 trains delayed, VRE had 14 trades canceled.

We had a second derailment in a different place, different track, different location in that same tunnel.

It was train 86 on July 11th.

That impact was much more significant over the course of a couple days.

Rich had 48 trains canceled over three days.

I will say this, and this is why I bring this up,

Number one, we always have to focus on safety and these things happen.

There were no injuries in either of these incidents.

Amtrak was quick to react.

VRE, CSX, everybody really pulled together to make this as non-impactful as possible.

We actually had a former board member on the first train and she emailed and said, hey, I'm on this train.

Everything has been as good as we could expect.

The communication has been fantastic.

We have been well taken care of.

These things happen.

We actually, after the second one, we called in one of Amtrak's vice presidents, Jared Alston, and he gave us a full rundown of what happened, talked about what they're doing to ensure that all of this is being well maintained, talked about the major projects that are coming short term and long term to ensure that we are running trains in a safe environment.

And it's something that we talk about with them all the time.

They've been great, very responsive.

Did Amtrak provide a reason for these two developments?

We talked to them about it.

I think there's pending legislation, so I'm not sure that's my place to talk about that.

We're not Virginia related.

I just had one quick question that came across my clips this morning.

Norfolk Southern

Fitch and All Date Technology Outage had significant disruptions for Amtrak.

That hit a couple of our trains, but that impact is over.

So what they had, so positive train control is the system that's been put in place in some places longer than others.

But it's a great, great safety improvement that keeps trains apart from each other, which is what you want.

they had I have to count my days they had an issue on Monday where the system went down and it stopped traffic and we had a couple trains canceled yesterday was the last of those cancellations they could not run the southbound train because the day before the northbound trains had made it up there so they didn't have the equipment but as of yesterday it's been resolved for us and it should not impact our passenger service anymore and if somebody knows something different let me know.

I'm pretty sure that's right.

They are, though, concerned because they had a lot of trains that didn't make it through, and so their cargo is pretty... Yeah, it's pretty slick.

Okay, now I will turn it over to Mr. McLaughlin at Capra Projects.

Before I usually begin going down through a number of projects, before we do that this month a little differently, Steve and Sharon's team have put together some

budget variances, what we expect in 2023.

So we're going to start with those.

The first slide I want to show you is this.

A lot of us, we talked at the May board meeting about getting some good estimates, and those good estimates come at 30% design.

And for some projects, when we began our 2023 budget cycle, we weren't at 30% design.

A lot of them we were not.

So we did not quite have the budget estimates that we wanted.

DJ mentioned earlier, in this past six months or so, we've hit 30%, some projects 60%, some projects we're getting to 90%, such as the Alexandria 4 track here in short order.

So we were very, we want to be very diligent in this coming year, setting up for FY25, which

From our staff standpoint, the budget cycle begins soon because we're going to be reporting to you in December and January what our preliminary budget is for FY25.

It's not that far away, even though our fiscal year just started just under two months ago.

So again, we're doing things a little differently as we move forward.

We want to make sure that we have a true baseline budget, which we're going to consider a 30% sign.

because not until you actually get boots on the ground and determine the geography, determine what you need for projects, do you have that good estimate.

We refined a lot of our estimates in this May budget cycle.

We just started for July first because a lot of projects are at 130%.

We'll continue to do that for FY25, continue to refine the schedule as well.

As you know, this is intuitive.

Scope, schedule, and budget all play off each other.

determining what the budget is and what the schedule are and what the scope are.

All are going to impact each other because we need, again, we're putting boots on the ground, we're doing that with ourselves or consultants in this cycle.

So I'm going to go through, and Steve and Shannon, feel free to jump in if need be, through some of the variances.

The good news is all the variances we're spending, we spent less money than expected, but we're going to go into some of the reasons why.

So we're not coming to you and asking you for more money or anything of that nature.

So we're going to discuss some of these on some future slides.

Start with Long Bridge.

Long Bridge, we did spend 43% less than expected.

Let me go to the next slide.

I know there's a lot of words in here.

Long story short, we brought Long Bridge Partners, which is an owner's rep.

led by WSP on board.

We expected them to get on board a little sooner than we did, but we got them on board.

They're turning through there.

Trust me, they're battling us just fine now.

And actually at first, the bills were coming as high as expected, and that's actually hit us on a few projects, which is good.

We allocated a certain amount of money for consultant spend, and they weren't spending as much.

But however, as DJ noted earlier with our procurements, and we'll talk a few times today, procurements are still moving forward.

So even though you do see us spending less than expected, the good news is we're still hitting our milestones.

As our chair and DJ mentioned earlier, we're putting out for procurements.

And when you put out procurements, whether it be for Owners Rep, which we did this past year, we're doing for Long Bridge now, that's when the real spend is going to come.

That's when you're really going to spend a lot of money in the design-build process as well.

So again, for Long Bridge, there is some right-of-way acquisitions needed here.

We want to alert people that we're not taking any buildings or anything of that nature.

There's some small slivers in the district that we're working through.

Amtrak's actually helping us because we have some limitations of what we can do in the district, obviously outside of Virginia.

So Amtrak's helping us with that.

They've been a great partner with that so far.

Another good news is

We thought we spent some unallocated contingency for Long Bridge, and we're not.

Again, that's some good news.

Alexandria-Fortrack, that's the project that actually furthest along.

We also had at least some right-of-way for that, and we're working on that.

We feel confident that we're gonna continue with this project forward.

That is the project CSX is leading.

We're leading Long Bridge, CSX is leading the Alexandria-Fortrack project.

And they actually planned, they're procuring it any month now, in the next few months.

We're frequently on the third track.

There was a pause in their design, CSX design.

We at one point talked to the board about possibly laying a fourth track or we're laying third track.

And when the estimates came back from CSX prohibitively high, we determined it's not going to work.

We're continuing to lay the third track.

because at one point we thought there might be enough funding, our funding, and some other funding to try to be a little more aggressive.

It'll lay some foretrack while we're laying third track, but we did make the determination we're going to follow the agreement with CSX to lay a third track.

The goal is to get a third track all the way from Alexandria down to Spotsylvania through phase four and north of Alexandria foretrack.

Franklin and Springfield bypass

a little bit of a lot of the variances because we decided to do a CMGC procurement, which Jeff Pelletier is going to talk to you about later.

What you do there is you want to mix the design with the construction.

So we did pause that design for a couple months on the frame company bypass.

And again, Jeff, one of our new employees, we're proud of, is going to be coming down later and talking about that.

Again, that is so the designer and the contractor can work more closely.

So we did slow

That's not slowed down though because procurement is already out for that.

We're going to talk about that a little bit later today.

So moving that forward as well.

And then the sidings as well.

They're moving forward.

We did have some delays and some agreements with CSX.

What we got through those agreements are pretty much almost all done.

But for the three sidings, we're all the way from Hanover up to Stafford County.

There's some other projects.

You hit the main ones on the first page.

transaction costs, that's the cost of it right away.

One thing we're doing that doesn't get a lot of attention is we have to do the survey work all through up and down the corridor.

And that work is ongoing.

We're pushing AECOM, we're doing most of the survey work from DC to Richmond.

We're meeting deadlines.

I know there's a lot of projects up and down the corridor, including not just projects we listed here, but projects such as Potomac Shores.

I know Mr. Hall is interested in that also dependent on that survey work.

Because again,

We are purchasing half of the corridor from CSX.

We want to make sure we get this right.

We want to make, just like you buy a home, you do some survey work and get your plans.

We want to make sure we have the right information when we are purchasing and constructing.

Hoover Valley, we talked about that a lot at the May board meeting.

The good news is that in July, we did bring on STV to do up to 30% design.

We're going to be coming back to you this winter.

in December and January and letting you know about the progress of the New River Valley work.

And again, we talked about that in May.

We'll talk more about that.

We may have some findings here later this fall in this winter.

The tunnels also fall in line with the things that New River Valley worked.

So I'm probably going to move along here.

Some of these other projects, these projects on the bottom were ones that we brought to a certain level of design.

They're not the core projects that we had a certain agreements that we've done by certain timeframes with CSX, but still we're moving them forward.

We might come back to you to seek some funding for some of them in the future.

I do want to talk about some recent site visits.

So let me actually let me pause there.

I don't want to go over.

If y'all remember back in May we talked about our budget and how we inherited a group of projects that were really at a conceptual level design and we were just focusing on budget at that point and to me where we're at right today is we're finishing out the triangle and saying scope and schedule goes along with that and so when you're looking at the 23 budget to actual it was based on conceptual

Data conceptual level of design, so there wasn't a lot of accuracy.

And Mike said it very well, we're now building a lot of that accuracy.

In the last six to 12 months, we've moved a lot of projects at 30%, several of them are even over 60.

So when we do that by 25 budget, we should have a lot better spin plan based on that level of engineering.

But we do have to work through all those required projects.

We've also implemented new projects, the ones that weren't required.

Some of those include the original layover team, King Commonwealth Bridges.

We've talked about some of these at some past board meetings.

So I talked about boots in the ground.

Site visits, boots on the ground.

These are all taken by our staff.

A few of us have gone through, for instance, on the right-hand side of the River Valley.

Seeing what those site assessments are, seeing the rock, as you can see in the tunnel, it's very important to do these site visits.

Our team was just out recently.

In fact, they're out almost every week now.

with our consultants in site business.

Quantico is a project that actually VRE is leading.

It's the midst of what we call the Arkandale, nine miles of third track for Arkandale, a project that I think should be wrapped up by spring of next year, that is adding some platforms.

You can see a walkway over the City of Sacramento Way.

Siding C, that is a siding in Hanover County, not too far north of here.

Their teams were out with CSX and consultants a couple weeks ago.

Fulton Yard is one of those projects not fully funded.

There is money in our budget for design.

Of course, that's when you want to get out there and determine what the site assessments are.

Fulton Yard, we might not have talked about that much in the past.

We have agreements with CSX.

Right now, all the Richmond trains, they overnight at Staples Mill.

But if you're familiar with Richmond,

Some of you might pass over a 195, something called active yard.

Getting those trains from Staplesville to Main Street in the morning can be time consuming.

Anyone in transportation operations know it's always good to have a yard at the end of the line.

Beere's Yards, Spotsylvania, after Spotsylvania, Broad Run right there to Broad Run Station.

It's better to have the yard after you have service.

Fulton Yard just south of Main Street Station because we're trying to get more trains to Main Street than we have.

The first expansion we had with CSX was actually getting a train that ended in Staples Mill down to Main Street.

Of course, the Newport News trains also come through Main Street as well.

We have more Richmond trains coming in 2026 and 2030.

So right now we're just deadheading one train.

We don't want to have to deadhead more trains.

So we're going to be, so the plan is right now we're seeing what the conditions are in Fort backyard.

and if we determine that's something we want to move forward, we'll come to you with a recommendation for a full funding portfolio.

It'll be hard to talk about too much.

For those, if you want a site visit, we can go up to DJ's office and see you from there.

It's literally just an eye shot away from downtown Richmond.

Again, talk about boots on the ground.

There's some people out there, and I'm frankly going to go to the third track area.

Also, as you can see, Newington Road right there,

Newington Road is a one lane road, not one lane each way, one lane road that we are, because of what we're doing, we've talked about it a lot with Vice Chair Bulova as well, we're going to be widening that because we're adding another bridge on that extra below and support tracks over that.

So that's something we've been taking a look at a lot, bridges over at the St. River.

Again, putting boots on the ground when there's

Rock, when there's rivers, when there's roads that need to be impacted, and VDOT impacts.

We have a lot of, really a lot of interaction with VDOT.

These are things that are going to impact, or cost, there's a bunch of scope and schedule.

For anyone who learned third track, we need to talk about this a little bit.

Key is here, we're going to take away, 60% of signs are coming in less than two months, in October.

Steve mentioned 30%, summer 60%, this is one of those key projects, six miles,

and the bypass is being done at the same, similar within the boundaries of this.

So again, six years of design plans coming in October.

Long Bridge, I'm gonna talk a little bit about this a little bit later with Winnie.

We're gonna give you some of the dates.

We thought it deserved some few minutes to talk to you about some dates for the RFP and RFQ.

Sometimes I have to pause myself and make sure I'm getting the dates right.

Cause we have a lot going on obviously with two procurements out for Long Bridge.

Test pilots.

One of the reasons we're out yesterday talking with the media, some test files are coming in the next few weeks.

That's important to know what we're dealing with out there and the conditions out there.

Alexandria Fordtruck, we've talked about this already.

We've had a few good meetings with CSX recently on that.

And if anyone hasn't, I'm gonna geek out a little bit here.

Being in a meeting with

VRE with Dallas from Rich's team, with Amtrak, with CSX.

I've had the opportunity to be in some of these meetings with them with the Alexandria Ford truck project.

And one of the reasons I love the Alexandria Ford truck project is it's so complicated.

So we say we have meetings with them trying to structure staging and chair the rule.

We've talked about this with this Crystal City to DCA bridge.

That's gotta be coordinated with the Alexandria Ford truck project.

VRE's Crystal City Station,

Amtrak's Crystal City Station has to be coordinated with the Alexandria Ford truck project.

The Alexandria station, the VRE Amtrak station has to be coordinated with the Alexandria Ford truck project.

So being in meetings with brilliant minds, I have the luxury of standing up here and reporting this to you, but the minds in that room, all FRA, CSX, VRE, to hear them to coordinate the project staging that needs to take place.

It's complex, it's challenging, it's exciting in many ways.

And it's also important for the congestion on the derails because in places like at Crystal City right now there's only one platform.

The island platform, same with Lufthansa, very similar.

Adding an island platform allows you two edges so trains can go each way

coming into the station.

You don't have to wait on that congestion for that train to get out of the way.

At Alexandria Station, we're adding four-track improving of platforms.

There's actually work going on right now.

You guys are close to 100% designed yourself at VRE.

That's gotta be coordinated.

So that's gonna be improving safety there as well, getting the platform above the top of rail.

Improvements for ADA improvements there as well.

So again, sorry, you allowed me to geek out for a few minutes.

It's exciting work.

Again, the Franconia Bypass, for those who aren't too familiar with this, Jeff's gonna talk about it later.

The bypass is gonna be taking, if you're going from south to north, a lot of the VRE stations, for instance, in Safford County are on the east side.

A lot of the VRE stations, including the aisle platforms, will be on the west side, north of Franconia.

It's taken our passenger trains up and over, so not conflicting with CSX trains that are coming through at a good clip.

But Jeff's gonna talk about that a little bit.

Some other capital projects that we are going to push forward and others are pushing forward.

I'm trying to think what we'll leave you with here.

King and Commonwealth, we'll talk about that I think in coming months.

That's a project also in the Alexandria four-track area.

There's about seven projects, not kidding you, going on in that area.

Those are the bridges right next to King Street Station.

Those 90% design for bulk bridges are coming in October, we're getting 60% in cost estimates for that.

That's why we want to talk to you about that, see if we want to determine that forward at the next board meeting.

VDOT, I mentioned it once, we have a few agreements to move forward with VDOT.

I also want to give a shout out to our chair, Mr. Bruhl, who used to work in VDOT, has a great relationship with Chairman Bridge.

If there's ever an issue, she often helps to dislodge things moving forward.

But good relationship to VDOT, again, a lot of impacts to VDOT up and down the corridor.

We impact them, they impact us.

So it's great to have these interagency agreements that have also gone through the County Board of Transportation Board, the sister board, if you will, that were taken to the board by this past summer.

Capital operating grants, these are generally grants that give out to others.

It talks about Christmas Day in L'Enfant.

Those projects move forward.

In fact, the procurement for L'Enfant is out.

It's been out for a couple of months now.

And we'll be awarding it in September.

And again, I'm not going to go through all these Quantico's and other projects we already talked about.

Falls Creek is also in that Quantico area.

Again, the variances, I do want to point out, the Alexandria Station improvements are going to be moving forward.

So that's, I'm not too worried about that right now.

We talk with your team almost every day, at least every week.

There are some other projects though that because of our agreements with CSX, that some of the work may not move forward.

as robustly as they had before.

So Brooke and Leland, for instance, because we're owning a certain part of the corridor and might add a third track, that is, there are some grants that we have to determine we're doing going forward, but they're smaller dollar grants.

Broad Run Station, we've talked about that a few times.

Manassas Park, NTP, as you saw, went out in June.

So some of these are moving along, but their variance is high,

For next year, these reports, the variance will be much lower.

And again, these are some other smaller projects that we have.

The station program planning.

We haven't talked about this much recently, but we do own some stations now.

We're moving forward with making some improvements, say at the Ettrick station, for instance.

And that is in that station programming and planning.

Amtrak equipment,

and I think Steve will talk about this a little bit later.

And also the Roanoke Yard improvements.

Norfolk Southern, so Norfolk Southern has got two projects to go forward.

One is no sort of california just south of the Manassas area.

Another one is Roanoke Yard.

They have made some improvements to their design for Roanoke Yard.

So that is one that they haven't spent much money, but we've been told they're gonna be spending a lot more money moving forward.

They're gonna be making improvements to Roanoke Yard that will allow our trains to get from Roanoke to New River Valley.

So that is part of the larger agreement with CSX.

The two trains that get to Roanoke right now are going to be moving to New River Valley.

We want to make sure those trains don't get caught in Roanoke Yard.

I was down, Mr. Dalton and I were down at Norfolk Southern and earlier this month on this project and they are moving it forward.

So again, I know there's a lot of variances here that 99, 100%, but we have assurances that they will be building us and happy to do so in the coming months.

We went through most of these already.

Not sure if you have any questions, you can always feel free to stop me because the project's going to be touched on all of these.

And I think with that, let me pause.

I was going to say, let me pause.

I just have a question.

The test tiles for Long Bridge, it's going to happen in a couple of weeks.

Is that going to have an impact on the public?

Yes, we're reaching out to stakeholders and letting them know about the test files.

In fact, I went through it quickly, but National Park Service is another big stakeholder.

That's a great question.

As far as who, there's not, as you know, in that area, there's not as many people or officers right in that area.

but we are letting people know.

And you're right, we're going over their portal right there at the Potomac's Edge.

Like on the Newport News Station, when is that going to be done?

Yeah, Newport News is the lead on that.

And actually there's a slide that shows a picture.

A lot of it is, so that's expected to be done early next year.

There's even, well, possibility is substantially complete, but in service,

Possibly by the end of the year, but I think they're expecting it to be done the first half of next year.

Thank you.

We do have significant funding that the Newport News that 44 is all in is 20.5 million for VPRA.

Newport News is leading that.

VDOT has a role in that as well.

That's a great new station that hopefully we should have invitations for opening rim cutting the first half of next year, if not sooner.

Thank you.

Mike, what's the progress on that trick?

Progress and ETRIC is, we are bringing and looking at WITI as our procurement, we're bringing, we have a designer, they're 90% design, we're looking to finish that up.

So for those who aren't familiar, ETRIC is the Petersburg station.

It's a $10 million project, 6 million from the Federal Crissy Program, that is for canopy improvements, platform improvements,

We actually are looking for funds, federal funds.

We have an application out there.

I just want to be clarified because it's really two projects.

One is to improve the parking lot, the canopy, ADA improvements.

We also have a request to look at a larger station redevelopment because that is one station where VPRA took ownership of a large plot of land.

And Testerfield is really excited as well because that's right across from Virginia State University.

and to be with you, our planners are excited because actually, wow, we actually get some land to plan with.

So there's another applicant, I think it will show later in the federal funding slide.

We have a request in the house, the house earmark actually for over a million dollars for Ettrick station planning.

We need some money to do a larger station plan.

Do we wanna, we have the station or we wanna build a new station.

But again, we got some acreage out there.

and also that will be part of the Richmond to Raleigh project because that Ettrick station, Petersburg station, could be one of the biggest beneficiaries of Richmond to Raleigh.

We're planning to make a third track in there, so we want to do it right.

So there's the shorter, make sure things are safe and dry out there because every time it rains out there and this happens, stations all throughout Virginia, you have puddles and things of that nature that might not, shouldn't be there, so we're going to improve that in the short term.

Longer term, we want to build a modern 21st century station that's going to help the people there, not just now, but also coming for the original online project.

That's probably five to ten years out.

Yes, yes, yes.

But that's one of those we like to expedite because we can still get benefits to the here and now if we build a new station five to ten years out.

Even before the whole of the 75 plus miles, we'd better run away to rebuild because again, there's 14 trains coming through Ettrick every day.

That's not insignificant.

That's a good number of trains.

And we're looking forward to, we've talked about this with folks from Hampton Roads as well.

People there are looking to go south as well.

It's not just all about going north.

So we look for some, whether it be cross-pass from Chancers or just one seat rides to go south as well.

Mike, real quickly, is VPRA a recognized federal grantee?

Okay, so it doesn't go to DRPT, but to VPRA.

It goes directly to VPRA.

I don't remember which board meeting, but there was a resolution a year or so ago.

And to that point, I mean, there are some existing federal grants that still come to DRPT that we're in the process of working through FRA to transfer those to VPRA.

Any other questions?

I know we went through that quick.

There was a lot of material.

If you want to follow up, feel free to reach out to us.

Just seriously, being in the room with all the engineers and to see the coordination, this has to go first and that has to go next.

It's just exciting.

Steve, I think that's where I headed over to you.

I was just going to add, Mark, on the capital grants, a lot of those are pass-through funds, so we're not necessarily the entity controlling the project.

And to me what happened is BRE had a great capital plan and then we came along after that and TRB came to life.

And because of that, they've had to go back and readjust their whole schedule.

Similar to what we're saying about getting conceptual level design for our required projects.

So with that, I'm gonna try to go through this fairly quick.

Feel free to jump in with any questions you might have.

So this is just for overall.

for budget action for the past year.

It is unaudited, all this data is unaudited, very close to doing really well audit this year, very close.

Hopefully we will make the September 30th deadline.

First two items here, capital projects, capital grants, Mike did a great job discussing.

I'm not gonna jump into that, but there is some good news here on the operating side.

One, the expenses came in 4% to the positive, meaning under.

So that was a positive.

And then as Director Stadler mentioned earlier, the revenues were 32% higher than the budget.

So really good news on that front.

This slide actually provides more detail

and Dr. Bushue, you asked earlier about cost recovery.

So we look at cost recovery, we talk about 67%, it's all in.

It's the direct Amtrak passenger costs, the direct revenues, but then it's also all of our administrative costs, our maintenance costs.

It's 67%, it's all in.

But if you actually look, my first bullet here, if you actually look at just a direct, so to speak, I guess I could call it the gross margin, so to speak, on our passenger service, we were at 96% recovery.

So when Amtrak reports a number, that's the number they'll report, because that's their cost versus the revenue.

Another point I wanted to make here was in that middle bullet, we did see, we have passed through, when we get in the NEC corridor, we sort of split revenues with Amtrak and they charge us a fee of 20 bus cents a mile and then they give us those revenues.

They control the fares and a little more control of those fares because it's, so to speak, they're cooler.

Thank you, it was either, or DJ mentioned that travel is a lot longer distance now, so more people are going on past Washington, so more miles on the NEC, so therefore we had more expense.

And the revenues didn't quite match up to that same differential, but the way we had contracted that service is we will always be to the positive when you net the two.

So there was a positive $8.7 million

of the NEC expense versus the revenue for last year.

If the projections are we're going to be negative, the expenses are going to exceed, then we can decline that in the contracting for the annual operation with Amtrak.

So once again, really good news there.

And lastly, I'm going to say, we have spent a lot of time this past year working with Amtrak about the fares and working on the ticket revenues and

I feel like we're in a good place where we can potentially look to adjust the fares.

And when I say that, I say it as sort of a partnership thing that instead of us looking at just intra-Virginia, that's what we're focused on, and Amtrak is looking at just the DDC, I feel like we've gotten to a place where both sides are realizing we kind of work together there to make it really successful as we're going to have to.

Moving along, this is just a graphical depiction of a 32% increase in the revenues from pre-pandemic.

The other point I'll make here is these passenger revenues, they are critical to our overall financial plan.

So we're doing financial plan number 31 to win our capital projects in.

As part of that process to fund a lot of the capital projects, to fund the operations we're currently running, we need these passenger revenues to be in a certain level.

Steve, I think you probably know the question I'm going to ask.

getting our ticket revenues from Amtrak so we can bond against them.

Somewhere, I was gonna mention that.

Okay, I thought this was...

There was a question earlier about how we're gonna fund the gap in the budget, and we talked about the federal grants that we've applied for, but then there is some good news that with Amtrak, they are now, top-level management has now requested their staff to work with us

to figure out the details of how they could start transferring those funds.

In fact, Friday will be the meeting with myself and some of my team along with the Amtrak team to hopefully, you know, the devil's in the details so you never know.

But hopefully it will work and there will be good news there on that front.

So this is a slide that just shows historical cost recovery and you can see pre-pandemic we were in the 70%, 75% range pandemic.

The trains essentially stopped and we went way down and then we have done an incredible job recovering.

And the one thing I'm going to add to this slide is when I say

All in costs, the one thing that's happening right now, our administrative costs, somebody, when people in Mike's group work directly on a project, we're allocating that time to the project.

The rest of us, we're allocating right now 100% to the Amtrak operations.

So the point I'm making is eventually, so if this will go 25, the goal will be to do full cost allocation

One quick question.

So in terms of the last slide, do we have any idea how much the offset has been

caused by no longer working from home, people riding back or tourists to and fro.

You know, I guess what I said, we've worked with Amtrak the past year and part of that was a discussion about getting and what I'd like to get is data of every single ticket purchased.

So we know every rider, how much they paid,

They went from this station to that station and getting that data into a database that we have.

And they have, I think they have been working with the state's passenger rail coalition to provide that data.

And so I'm not going to say we're getting it today, but at least, I think it was May, this was brought up in one of our calls and they were very open about, yes, we're working through that to this portal so we can have that data and then we can do

Mr. Delandro, the analysis you're talking about.

Thank you.

The next slide is just the overall administrative budget.

I think the idea here is we came in just under the total budget, so we were on track for the year.

That I'm going to jump into

Standard Revenue Investment Slides.

On here, if you're reading closely, last year we made $186 million off our dedicated Commonwealth Rail funds.

This year the estimate's 158.

You might be wondering why there was a transition period of the 2020 transportation session

legislation and all the new revenues and the new allocation process.

There was a three-year transition period versus the CTB had certain leeway to make off-the-top allocations.

Rail was getting some of those off-the-top allocations.

So this will be the first year where there are no longer these CTB decisions off the top of Formville.

And so

The $158 million represents in the ballpark, growing slightly over the coming years, the amount of revenue that's dedicated from the transportation trust.

Next slide.

Here's the same story we've seen before.

We had a really strong asset balance, hope to generate over

I'm hoping over $30 million from that asset balance in the coming year.

We are currently in the process of selecting an investment manager.

When we originally started the company, we had to get banking services and we sort of included investment management services in that as sort of a throw in, so to speak, and set at the time, if you go back two, three years, these board meetings, at the time we would be putting this out

for competition for just investment management service.

So we're in the middle of doing that.

Hopefully by the end of September, we will have that completed.

Next slide, status quo within the designated limits with the board and set for liquidity.

And then as far as principal, safety of principal, there are a couple of investments that are

If we were forced to sell them today, there would be a small loss.

However, we have the intention to hold these.

So when we get to full maturity of those underlying securities, there will not be a loss.

The other thing to say there is if interest rates happen to decline, these investments that you see over here that we're talking about losses, they will actually change to actually be in a gain because they will

all of a sudden be at a higher interest rate than you can currently get.

Next slide.

Here, you've seen this before.

We did add the benchmark, which is the yellow line.

It's the Federal Fund Frank, which is a benchmark from our investment policy.

And as you can see, the majority of our funds are in the LGIP, almost over 400 million up to 600 million.

450 million, 600 million are in LGIP and that's been exceeding that benchmark since we started.

Next slide.

Mike mentioned this earlier.

I do want to say we did apply for a multi-modal project discretionary.

Grant, just last beginning of last week, it's the submission date.

And we applied for the same level of funding that shortfall in our budget.

We applied for that, that we did back, I think it was in May, that state partnership, we also applied there.

So we're overturning all the rocks trying to get that funding out as much as possible through federal funding.

Like mentioned, the entry project you see here for $2 million.

We don't have any federal funds.

We've gotten a $45 million grant that we could

Actually, we got allocated on Alexander-Fortrex, so Long Bridge has no federal funds on it.

Unless, you know, that's true, the 20 million.

Is that from DOI or DOT?

It was from the Department of Transportation.

I believe it was RAISE.

Not this time last year.

I think it was Senator Porter, Mayor Bowser, and others.

The Penn bike bridge, which is part of the $2.2 billion all in.

Steve, in I think my first meeting here I was surprised to see that you had a requirement of

the ESG investment companies.

So how does that work?

Is that one of the factors you look at?

Is it the predominant factor?

Most of the funds are in the LGIP, which is the states.

It's their investment pool.

There's $30 million in

and LGIP extended maturity.

So it just has a little longer maturity date to it.

And then there's a hundred million that could be subject to that DSG provision.

And essentially that all related to either corporate bonds, which we have no investment in corporate bonds or commercial paper.

We do have some commercial paper.

And when you get into those two instruments,

The way it works today, it may change if we get a different investment.

We look at their scoring of ESG and we came back in the policy to say that it had to at least make the average, like their scoring went one to five.

And so we said it had to be at least the three or above.

So I would say to you, it has had very little impact today because the current advisor has not had a step into corporate bonds.

Any other questions for Steve or any of us?

Thank you, DJ.

And it's late, my apologies.

Next item on our agenda is Mr. Pittard again with our Management Reserve Policy and this is something that I know we started talking about back in May in the Finance Committee.

Yeah, we had a very good meeting with the Committee.

It was a very good discussion, actually, with y'all back during the budget, and we started talking on this subject and pushed us to go ahead and getting policy developed

at a very good meeting with the Finance Committee on this topic.

Just briefly, this is Shannon's finest work to date.

I love this slide and I just want to tee this up because I think key to understanding this, and you know, John spent a lot of time on this, Sharon spent a lot of time and a lot of folks have in the Finance Committee, but key to understanding this whole

Policy is understanding what the management reserve is, I think, and particularly how it relates to the budget as a whole.

As we all know, great majority of our funding is very, very carefully programmed to support a very ambitious multi-year capital.

Program and the operating costs of our rail service, management reserve.

We don't have an amount yet.

We have a recommended amount from the committee, but when it comes to me, it's a small share of that budget and it's unallocated share.

Most of it is a light blue allocated, small shares, unallocated.

It's important to understand this because to understand this isn't any form of extra funding because we know that current sources are insufficient to cover all of our costs, our multi-year costs.

It's a cash flow issue, but this is money that is therefore represents funds that could go to multiple different purposes and that's where the discretion aspect just comes in.

And so the management reserve policy is to establish, I think,

a formal and transparent process for selecting among the potential uses of this funds, which is in line with the informal yet equally transparent process that DJ has used so far to exercise some discretion over a small section of funds that are unallocated.

And he would come to us with that in his monthly reports.

He would certainly raise it for us at the annual meetings.

This is at the periodic meetings.

This is just to

make it more formal and a written policy adopted by the board.

Just add a little bit.

So previously there was not a policy.

And so now, you know, this would actually provide a policy

for the board to have some say and oversight in what is done.

So I see this, I'm gonna go ahead and finish the presentation, but this essentially brings more discipline into the process.

Yeah, I like the word.

said transparency, I like that.

That's really what this is.

What we were doing, now we're going to, it's going to all be disclosed and updated on a quarterly basis.

So, you know, and I think I'll just add to what was just said that, you know, our financial planning doesn't just happen.

We create a plan and put it on our internet site and we're done.

Every day it's evolved.

It's changed the sources.

They're not just static.

They're not known and they're not going to never deviate.

There's taxes on their sub-taxes, go up taxes, the revenue collection, the income that they go down.

So constant change to sources.

As Mike alluded to earlier, the projects are going through a lot of evolution.

So the use are also evolved.

So I think, you know, Patty, you said this, the unallocated, this is taking all those sources.

All those uses and then saying it would be prudent to not allocate every single dollar because those sources and uses are changing.

So that up to 5% it might be wise to lead on allocating.

I think that's cool because I think when you observe some people, I know there's a bucket of money set over here.

It's not really that.

It's a constant evolution of financial planning.

So move on, I'm gonna quickly run through these four areas, prioritization, goal, how it's calculated, and then most importantly, the use season.

The prioritization obviously needs to support the Authority's mission to promote, sustain and expand passenger passenger rail in the Commonwealth.

And then prioritization given to

If the project or the use is going to provide additional service, is it in the budget?

And has that effort achieved 30% design?

Will it enhance currently approving period projects?

And finally, I think this is important too.

Will the project actually help us leverage other resources that could help us do for the project?

So the goal, and Rich said this already earlier, the committee, the authority team came up with up to 5%.

I think the key word is it's a goal.

So it's not required that we have 5% unallocated.

It's the board's decision.

So if you go back to, and what we're really looking at here, we talked about capital,

We're excluding the capital grants because those are really pass-through funds.

There's not a lot of discretion and we're getting funds passing them through to other parts.

So we're taking our capital projects planning window and our operations planning window, adding that together and saying, what is 5% of that number?

And so that comes out, if you go back to our May budget, it came out to $290 million.

And I think when I say goal two, the other point I wanted to make here was it's really, y'all are saying to us, when you do your budgeting, your annual budget process, aim for 5%.

We may come with a budget that ends up at 3.2%, but we will explain payroll the uses and walk ultimately then once again, some board decision.

So,

Calculation of the VAC.

So this isn't a lot to explain.

This is an ongoing process.

What we're committing to is to update you quarterly on that with a report.

And as I mentioned, the sources of revenues change.

So when we reasonably know that a source of revenues has changed.

So we mentioned the Amtrak ticket revenue

and we have that in our financing plan for $210 million.

If Amtrak could come back and say, we are not gonna send you those funds, and they were definitive about it, then there would be a 210 removal of a source of funds.

So you have to actually constantly be tracking that.

I'm jumping ahead, that's what the next slide's showing,

taking the financing out.

If we didn't get the good news, you'd have to take it out.

And in the report, we'd be showing that coming out, and then we'd be presenting it to you.

So the board approval part, so at your next board meeting after we provide the report, we'd come for your approval of current reserve balance, because it could be an impact that we might have to unfund some funded projects in the budget.

So if we lost that $210 million,

There would be some hard choices that possibly we have to unfund some projects sitting there because we only have 124 million in the reserve, but we lost 210 million.

The opposite could be there could be an increase, which we still want y'all to have the information.

We still think it's advisable at that next board meeting for y'all to go ahead and as a matter of routine to approve that reserve balance.

So this is a slide that really is just examples as I talk about the source of funds.

I don't want to be here in a complete panic that the sources of our financial plan are uncertain.

We feel very good about them, but there are a lot of changes going on.

This just gives you examples and the timing of when some of those changes occurs.

A lot of them occur at the end of the year, June 30th, where we are now.

Some of them can be ad hoc.

So we were requested to come to you with an update for June 30th in the Finance Committee of what that $124 million that the Management Reserve was set in the budget.

We were asked to come back and update that through June 30th.

This is that update.

And fortunately, it is all good news.

And the I-66 inside of the Beltway pay go.

We went through a lot of deliberation this year.

The traffic patterns have changed.

But as it turned out, we got to the end of the year.

Let us know that actually they had $13 million of I-66 inside the Beltway pay go funds.

And there's a waterfall with how these funds are distributed.

And we're kind of at the bottom of that waterfall.

So they let us know and they sent us this $13 million just before June 30th.

So positive news there, we're not counting on that 13 million on our financial plan.

So that's a positive news.

Commonwealth Rail Funds, I said we were 186 million earlier.

We had put in the plan 183 million.

So once again, another positive.

And also the interest and realized gains.

budgeted, I think, around $15 million of earnings of interest and gains on those investments.

And we ended up just over $20 million.

So I know the policy.

So this is just sort of an example.

And once again, I want to say these are unaudited for an auto audit.

But and then to the opposite side, to the right side of the slide, we're just showing the impact on the reserve, those changes.

So this would be the type of report we would send to y'all quarterly, and then when we have the next actual meeting in person, because our meetings don't always match up a quarterly cutoff, we would ask you to approve the balance that was reported.

So next slide, this is really, I was gonna say, this is probably the most important slide for you outside of the overall concept

having this reserve or unallocated balance is, okay, what's the procedure for use of those funds?

And I think the key here is it requires board approval.

So that's first thing.

So it requires y'all's approval.

Second, we would come to you, the R18 would come to you with recommendations, mostly in the annual budget cycle, but also it could be add up.

So throughout the year, it could happen if there's a good reason

from a timing perspective to come.

We come to you explaining our recommendation.

Do you have the ultimate decision to say yes?

The other part to this is obviously for you to make a decision, you need a lot of information.

And this chart on the right-hand side shows you the information that we would provide to you so you can have an informed decision.

Part of it is if you remember our priorities when we were doing the budget back in May, so that's the first item here.

We've got to fund our operations.

We can't have a deficit there.

And then we have these required projects with CSX and Norfolk Southern.

We have these certain required projects that we committed to and then new projects.

I would also, at CFO, would need to certify that

If we do a project that it doesn't cause any sort of cash flow problem with the existing budget.

So if we add a project, we don't want to add $200 million of expense.

And now we're going to be out borrowing funds because the timing doesn't work with the current capital plan.

Third item we provide is all, you know, the list of pipelines and projects.

So this would be, we've funded 30% design on King and Commonwealth.

We've got Route 1, Newington Bridge, several projects that we kind of pulled the reins back on and only funded 30%.

There's Richmond Layover.

So, and then there may be other projects that come to light, but we provide you a list of the projects that we know of that aren't currently in

the budget funnel.

So you could see what are your other opportunities for use of the funds.

And then obviously we would show, hey, if you take this action, how would it impact the management reserve balance?

So use of the management reserve, this is the other way the management reserve can be used.

So the last May board meeting, it was mentioned, oh, does DJ even have the ability to

make a small purchase beyond the budget.

And he actually didn't have that ability in our bylaws that the board has approved.

And this list here is taken from the bylaws.

And what we've added is we've added the fiscal year 24 budget and the amount that these delegated authorities have given to Mr. Stadler as the director of the agency.

So you can see the dollar impact of those delegated authorities.

The only difference, there's two differences.

The first difference is now you will know where the money's coming from for DJ to add $200,000 to this capital grant.

And whenever that happens, we are diligent to report it to you according to these guidelines.

But now you'll know it's coming out of this unallocated management reserve.

The ultimate difference is in the operations administration line, we are asking you, and this will be coming up later in a different resolution, we are asking to amend the dialogue to allow one and a half percent dealt on the administrative budget.

We started out, we've kind of set this hard, fast road administrative budget we cannot exceed.

no delegated authority.

And what we realized is we're in the middle of building an organization and you're trying to manage to a budget and all of a sudden you get down to May and June and you're making decisions potentially to delay something that you deem actually important for the organization because of, you know, trying to give a little bit of leeway here.

And I think it's, I think in most organizations,

rare to have a steadfast, you cannot exceed the budget.

There is some leeway.

So we will be asking for that in a separate resolution.

Finally, this is just an example of what I talked about two slides ago and just put some numbers to it.

So I'm not gonna go through it, but it's just giving you a little more information of how that process will work.

So with that, there is a resolution

The actual policy that was written up is included within that resolution.

Any questions for Mr. Pittard?

Hearing none, we have an action before the board to adopt the management reserve policy.

Seconded.

All right, moved by Ms. Doersch and seconded by Ms. Bulova.

Hearing none, Mary Estelle, could you call the roll, please?

Ms. Bulova?

Aye.

Ms. Bushue?

Aye.

Mr. Delandro?

Aye.

Ms. Doersch?

Aye.

Ms. Drake?

Aye.

Mr. Hall?

Aye.

Ms. Moses-Nedd?

Aye.

Mr. Payne, I can't hear you.

Ms. Rhinehart?

Aye.

And Ms. Rhinehart, would you mind putting your answer in the chat also, please?

Mr. Spore?

Mr. Watkins?

Aye.

And I will just confirm that both Mr. Payne and Ms. Rhinehart voted aye.

Yes, they did.

All right.

The motion carries.

Thank you, Mr. Pittard and to the Finance Committee for work on that.

Our next item on our agenda is the revision to the bylaws.

All right, so we have some provisions to our bylaws.

Why are we changing bylaws?

As Mr. Pittard mentioned,

There is a proposed change in delegation of authority to the executive director with respect to the administrative budget to give a one and a half percent cushion each year.

So right now the bylaws do not reflect any flexibility in the administrative budget.

And so I'll get into that in just a moment.

As we went into the bylaws, we said, okay, we're changing them for one reason.

Let's go ahead and read through them and see where they're out of date.

The bylaws were actually adopted in September of 2021.

That's almost two years ago with VPR, eight years, that's an eternity, right?

So we gave them a good read and we said, okay, are these bylaws, are they different than we actually do things of practice over the past two, two and a half years?

So we've actually been functioning.

So we developed eight recommended

Changes to the bylaws are under consideration for today.

I will try to take 10 minutes or less to speak to each of those eight.

The first one appears in section 3.1 of the bylaws.

What this section currently says, and it's unmodified form, is that all of the, so that the Code of Virginia gives certain powers to the Junior Passenger Rail Authority.

Some of those are given to the board,

certain ones of those are actually given to the executive director.

What the bylaws say today in their unmodified form is that all the powers under the law are given to the authority VPRA or exercised by the board.

And so that is actually arguably in conflict with the later delegations under the bylaws who were delegated to the executive director to do certain things unilaterally entering the contracts.

So we're simply making a clarifying edit, we're proposing a clarifying edit that says

The board exercises authority given to the VPRA under the law provided, however, the board may delegate authority to the executive director.

The board is authorized to delegate certain authorities that are given to it.

Because in actuality, the board, this group here, does not exercise every single power given to it.

So that's change number one.

Change number two has to do with the function of the Officer Secretary.

So each year the VPRA has to adopt, or sorry, elect its officers.

One officer is the Secretary.

Currently, the bylaws say that the Secretary does two things that the Secretary actually practiced, has not been doing and doesn't do.

One is to be the custodian of all VPRA records.

So we actually have a records officer

We are the custodian of staff, sort of the custodian of all records for freedom of information purposes.

And so that function is really carried out by staff.

Likewise, the laws currently say the Secretary must keep all minutes of meetings that occur.

That function in actuality is done by staff.

Bring all the records back.

All right, so a change in the brief deals with authority delegated by the board to the executive director.

And right now the bylaws say that the executive director can execute documents and legal instruments on behalf of the VPRA and exercise other powers and duties relating to passenger rail within the Commonwealth.

and so we're recommended deleting within the Commonwealth.

If you look at the authority's powers granted to it in the Code of Virginia, we actually have express authority to function extraterritorially.

I think folks in this room all know we own property in North Carolina, we own property in DC, but we have real property interest in DC.

We're undertaking progress beyond the geographical bounds of Virginia.

So we thought that within the Commonwealth, the qualifier is not accurate and so we're recommending deleting that.

In the same section, granted to the executive director, are the budgetary adjustment authorities.

And so as Mr. Fiddert alluded to, right now we're going to talk about the annual administrative budget.

There is no wiggle room.

And so the bylaws are recommending a change that says the executive director may add budgets to board approved line items up to one and a half percent

of the annual administrative budget that they considered kind of bigger than us.

And it was based on 23 or 24, but it was $240,000.

So that gives a quarter of magnitude estimate for that absolute authority.

I want to ask a question on that second item.

I think it was that we did not have to, because the Virginia Public Records Act requires us to be the custodian of our own records.

So there's already a codified law, statutory law, that requires us to maintain our own records.

The Freedom of Information Act requires us to hold public meetings and take meeting minutes.

So those duties are in there.

Those duties are not assigned to a particular staff member.

We thought it was perhaps better to stay flexible on that.

So we have the duties to maintain our records.

We have the duties to keep meeting minutes.

Those duties are there by a statute.

The bylaws do not say who does them.

So it could be Ms. Mary Stell, one meeting, it could be somebody else that has to step in

On our website we do

have that information for our records.

We have a Freedom of Information Officer as well.

Absolutely.

We're required by law to have this view on a website.

It's Jared Goodman, our director of ex-Trump, ex-Trump Affairs, Government Affairs and Media Relations, I think.

I always get her title wrong.

It does.

So the law that created VPRA gives us express authority to have real product of the interest beyond the bounds of the Commonwealth and to use that to do construction projects.

to improve rail beyond methods of the California.

So this does not go beyond the law, it just agrees with the statute.

Yeah, okay, thank you.

Okay.

Section 342 refers to a senior leadership team, in actuality, we call that the executive leadership team.

So it's being changed from a senior to executive to align with the power and the nomenclature internally.

and then the other change to that section is currently as it reads it says that the executive director establishes the executive leadership team and decides the functions of those employees and those functions that are approved by the board and as we thought about this we said okay there's a small leadership team and if the executive director wishes to for example right now on procurement is under the chief administrative officer

if Director Stallone wanted to ship a procurement under the Chief Financial Officer, that's really a day-to-day operation.

That's not something that we should wait for a quarterly meeting or call a special meeting and come to the board and say, hey, how about changing this function?

So we're recommending that simply those day-to-day functions are designated only to the Executive Director and not to the full board.

Section 3.8, which governs

remote meetings and virtual meetings, or remote participation in meetings and virtual meetings.

We changed that section to align with the policy that was adopted by the board last year.

This section needed to change because the law changed.

Freedom of Information Act changed.

In the before times, if you wanted to have remote participation in a public meeting, there needed to be an emergency declared by the governor, and then you could have a remote participation.

Those laws after COVID, people have gotten a lot better at remote participation, right?

The laws are more relaxed, and folks will remember we adopted a policy last year.

Now there are many reasons why you can ask to participate remotely in a meeting, and a state of emergency does not need to be declared.

The change says in section 3.8 is simply that remote participation in official meetings will be governed by the policy last adopted by the board on the topic.

Section 3.10, so this is just not particularly substantial.

It's more drafting, but within Section 3.10, we talk about the committees that can be established by the board chair and approved by the board.

We refer to those as committees, subcommittees, standing committees within the unmodified provision.

Well, they're all the same thing, so we simply clean it up and say, we're just gonna call them one thing, we'll call them committees.

And finally, in Section 3.10,

This is a section that talks about the Finance and Audit Committee.

Today, the unmodified language says that the Finance and Audit Committee will make recommendations on all questions related to the financial matters of Virginia passenger rail authority.

That struck us as not accurate, as too strict because sometimes we might buy pens and pencils or chairs

just do minor things that technically, arguably, have to do with financial matters of the rail authority.

But the finance committee doesn't make recommendations on those things.

They make recommendations on significant matters, significant financial matters of the authority.

So those are the eight changes that are being recommended.

There was in the ward package, the modified bylaws were provided in Red Line.

Any further questions for Mr. Westerman?

I have a motion for approval.

Second.

Motion by Mr. Spore, second by Ms. Bulova.

and Mary Estelle, could you please call the roll?

Ms. Bulova.

Aye.

Bushue.

Ms. Doersch.

Aye.

Mr. Hall.

Aye.

Ms. Moses-Nedd.

And I believe Mr. Payne and Ms. Rhinehart have both voted aye in the chat.

Thank you very much.

Mr. Spore.

The motion carries.

Our next item on the agenda is, ties in with our bylaws and that is our committee assignments and officer election.

This is our first meeting of the fiscal year.

So it is timely for us to look at our committee assignments and to take action to make changes there.

We have a couple of vacancies on our personnel and compensation committee that,

to be filled due to changes in the composition of the authority board.

What you have in your package for today is a recommendation that we take action to have Mr. Cardwell serve as the chair of personnel and compensation.

Mr. Hall serve as the vice chair of personnel and compensation.

Ms. Bulova would remain on personnel and compensation and we'd add Mr. Payne to fill out the personnel and compensation committee.

Happy to answer any questions about that recommendation, but we have an action for us to approve those committee assignments.

The finance committee is intact with no changes to the composition, so there's no recommendation for finance.

No comments, no questions?

So the action is to approve the,

There's a resolution in your package to approve the VPRA committee assignments as recommended by the chair.

Yes.

So the bylaws, I will answer and then you can correct me.

Is that correct?

Well prepared by staff.

All right, so I think we have a motion and a second.

Ms. Lillie.

Aye.

Ms. Bushue.

Aye.

Bush.

Aye.

Ms. Drake.

Aye.

Mr. Hall.

Aye.

Ms. Moses-Nedd?

Aye.

Mr. Payne and Ms. Rhinehart both voted yes.

Thank you.

Mr. Spore?

Aye.

Aye.

Thank you.

The second action on this item is we also need to address our officer elections for the year.

There are two that remain the same.

That is Ms. Bulova as our vice chair and Mr. Spore who no longer has to store boxes in his garage as our secretary.

I am recommending one change and that was as we went back and looked at the bylaws, we remembered that in the original drafting of the bylaws that the treasurer position can be filled by staff.

And so as Mr. Pittard so aptly serves as our chief financial officer and is our expert on all of our financial matters, the recommendation before you today is that we appoint Mr. Pittard to be the treasurer for the authority.

With that, I'm happy to answer any questions or we have an action item in our package that would have here before you for approval of that slate of officers for the year.

Move approval.

Motion by Ms. Doersch, second by Ms. Drake.

Any further discussion?

Ms. Bulova.

Aye.

Ms. Bushue?

Mr. Delandro?

Aye.

Ms. Doersch?

Aye.

Ms. Drake?

Aye.

Mr. Hall?

Aye.

Aye.

That was a yes and a yes, but Mr. Payne and Ms. Rhinehart.

Mr. C.J.

Aye.

And Mr. Watkins?

All right, motion carries.

Our next item on our agenda is a budget adjustment for Newport News.

Sorry.

I thought I'd just take a minute to talk about the Newport News station.

I think there were some questions about that.

You should go all the way to the end.

So for those who aren't familiar, this is a brand new Newport News Stadium.

It's going to be further north and peninsula up by Bland Boulevard.

Also going to be done in conjunction with Panther Rose Transit, HRT.

So it's very multimodal in nature, closer to the airport.

It also going to be the second high level platform in Virginia.

The first one is in Roanoke.

So anytime we're building something new,

FRA is more or less mandating that platform.

So we're excited about that work again, $20.5 million in originally DRPT funds, now VPRA funds going to a $44 million project.

We were approached by Newport News a little over a year ago saying they could use some more funding.

And we were in the midst of applying for some

And we were successful with the FY, the last year's Transportation and Health Appropriations Bill and getting some funding.

And I think that's just the quick overview on where we're given, why we're here.

Again, Newport News is the sponsor of the project.

So it's not a whole lot to add, except we did get that earmark for $1.2 million.

And the FRA is going to administer it.

It's under the Christie program.

FRA is going to administer that.

And we have an existing relationship with FRA.

So City of Newport News asked if, and really the earmark was directed to us.

So it's just adding to the pass-through funds that we have.

We will work directly with the Federal Railroad Administration on this grant.

So the reason we need to ask for y'all's approval is this is a capital grant.

The amendments that were just up here a while ago delegated authority to Mr. Thadler requires anything over $250,000.

We are asking for your approval to increase the budget line item for the Newport News Intermodal.

This $1.2 million of federal railroad funds.

Is that an accurate picture?

I think I'm going to have to go look at it.

That's really what it's going to look like?

You can actually see it from the interstate on the eastbound side.

Yeah, very modern.

Oh, that's right, Norfolk.

So great, the Norfolk station, the light rail's on the other side of the platform.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, okay, yeah.

Newport News, Norfolk.

He also mentioned that Amtrak freeway service.

And there is space for more layover facility.

The one thing, and Mike and I have talked about this, and I think down the road it's not a discussion for today, is do we do yard work in Richmond or do we expand Newport News for the trains to start there and come home?

because that would give you Norfolk Newport News and Richmond.

So I know it's just a matter of cost and how, what's the best thing for the Commonwealth and for passengers.

Any further discussion?

So with that, we have resolution on our package and the action item to approve the capital grant budget adjustment for the Newport News station platform and surface facility project.

Thank you.

Motion by Ms. Drake, second by Mr. Spore.

Any further discussion?

Aye.

Mr. Delandro.

Aye.

Ms. Doersch.

Aye.

Ms. Drake.

Aye.

Aye.

Thank you.

Mr. Watkins.

Aye.

Thank you, Mr. Pitter and Mr. McLaughlin.

So what we're gonna do now is we have a closed session that we need to undertake for an update from the Personnel Compensation Committee.

What I would like to do is I would like for us to recess for lunch, but before we do, we'll go ahead and take our action to go into closed session.

We'll take a brief recess, reconvene in closed session.

Jim, did we approve the VPRA officer elections?

We did, yes.

We did.

Yes, we did.

That was reaffirming most things except the Treasurer's now.

Okay, 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 and considering the performance of a specific public officer of the VPRA and that the VPRA chief administrative officer and general counsel attend the closed session.

We need a second to that motion.

Second.

Oh, Ms. Bulova, sorry.

I'm trying, you're typing, you know, I'm sorry.

Thank you, Ms. Bulova.

Okay, I've got too many things happening.

Ms. Bulova?

Aye.

Thank you.

Ms. Bushue?

Aye.

Mr. Delandro?

Aye.

Ms. Doersch?

Aye.

Ms. Drake?

Aye.

Mr. Hall?

Aye.

and Mr. Spore.

And Mr. Watkins.

And Mr. Payne and Ms. Rhinehart both voted yes.

All right, so in terms of timing, we will reconvene in closed session at, you're not here.

We'll reconvene at one o'clock in closed session and our target to go back into open session would be 125, 130.

Okay, thank you.

Should know that the abandoned corridor from Petersburg to just inside North Carolina, that is one place in Virginia the speeds could go up to 110 or if not more.

CSX has a right to run freight there, but they don't have any plans to.

So with our agreements with CSX, that maximum achievable speed is well above the 90 that we have on the DC to Richmond corridor.

talking about side-shavings an hour to an hour and a half.

It could be significant time savings, especially if the speeds are going faster.

We're in discussions with them.

I think they want to do what makes sense.

We know there needs to be a lot of improvements in that segment one, if you will, to get into Main Street Station.

So she's referring to the fact that some of our trains go around Richmond, near the Paul White Parkway, if you've been down that way, into Staples Mill.

And to get into Main Street Station, you have to come up more or less across the James River, straight from the south.

Richmond and Raleigh plans are Main Street to Main Street, meaning the Main Street station down there.

But we're both pragmatic, us and North Carolina, that if there could be some shorter-term solutions to go around Richmond, if CSX allows, because we don't own the A-line, not the estimate, the A-line around Richmond, we own rights to the S-line,

that goes across the James River.

So we have more rights there to construct.

Mike, the problem that exists from Main Street Station around to Parham Road, it's very slow.

And it's very limited right of way.

And there are a lot of small bridges that will need to be improved in order to carry the traffic.

But you're going to do the 30% design, which would be Main Street to Main Street.

Main Street to Main Street.

Right.

And then the other would be another discussion.

And we don't need as many improvements to go in the A-Line around that's existing track now that service is running.

Whereas South Richmond to Point South,

Right.

So that was actually it.

That's for Hall.

The speed caught my attention, but the potential for speed there, just because everybody just came back from Korea and went around a lot by train.

I was just like, Hey bro, what's that?

Max Speed you were traveling at, and he was like, oh, 190, like it was nothing.

In this area, no.

Okay.

You have northeast corridors doing some, there's some DJ notes too, six on the Michigan area, California, Texas have plans.

West, yeah.

But in this area, no.

So this would be one of the first higher speed

Yeah, we're just thinking how we further distinguish our capability here.

That was one of the parameters on the high-speed rail that we put together.

Congress doesn't classify an onion under as high-speed.

Thank you everyone.

So next up is Franconia Bypass.

We've got Jeff Pelletier and Jeremy, are you the one too?

Welcome.

Thanks everybody.

Good afternoon.

My name is Jeff Pelletier.

I'm a senior director of projects for the engineering construction team.

I'm relatively new to the authority.

I joined in June.

My primary responsibility is to oversee our projects in the Northern Virginia NCC area that are not Long Bridge projects related.

And one of the ones we wanted to update the board on today is the Franklin U. Springfield Bypass and the CMGC or Construction Manager General Contractor Procurement that's been ongoing this year.

But before we

Dig into or dive into the Bypass Project and CMGC.

I do want to zoom out a little bit, bring you to the Franconia corridor.

I know it's been brought up a couple times in the meeting today, but it is important to phase one of the TRB program and it's where the bypass takes.

The corner that you see up to the right here, it starts just south of the VAF interlocking in Alexandria.

continues through the Franconia-Springfield VRE metro station, through the Newington neighborhood and terminates just south of Oregon.

If we're using roadways as our last though, or landmarks, we're just south of the Capital Beltway in the Franconia-Springfield area.

We run parallel to I-95 and just south of Florida Road.

We have three major projects going on in this area with our partners, Marcell's, APRA, VRE, CSX,

and they're all, like I said, they're all keyed into the TRB program.

They're all in design right now and they're all scheduled to start construction in the next 12 to 18 months.

The first one I want to talk about is the Franconia Lord and Third Track.

I know that's come up a few times in the meeting today.

This project design and construction is led by CSX.

It's being funded by us, VPRA.

We're also doing

the Engineering, the Environmental Planning, the Permitting, and the Right-of-Way acquisition.

And the project itself is pretty much self-explanatory.

It's a new third mainline track running the entire six-mile corridor, the Franklinian Corridors.

It includes improving and replacing drainage throughout the corridors and wayside upgrades, as well as expanding and replacing bridges in four locations.

We have Newington Road, Accotink Creek, Povac Creek,

and Lorton Road.

And in the case of Newington Road, which you see here, and I know Mike showed a picture of this earlier in the board meeting, we're replacing the original 1905 structure, which is one vehicle lane, and we're expanding that span to allow VDOT to construct two-way traffic for vehicles and for pedestrians.

So there's multi-modal benefits beyond just the rail capacity.

When we expand these bridges, we're accommodating

and the fourth track, which could come in another iteration or phase of the TRV program.

The next project in the corridor is the Franconia Station's Franklinia Springfield Station improvements project, but at the RA, they're leading design and construction.

Currently, the station operates off of one platform, the east platform, which you see down at the bottom of the diagram there, the plan view of the station.

With the third track and bypass project coming on board, it's going to become a two platform station.

So the project will expand and extend the east and west platforms, which you see in the purple there, to allow both platforms to operate and both platforms to accept ACAR trains.

So when trains come in there, they'll be able to board in a light using all the doors on ACAR trains, which is great for operations, obviously great for passengers.

for their orientations.

The other key part of the station improvements project is with that third track coming, which you see on the top graphic here, that east platform becomes an island.

So what the project is also going to be doing is building a pedestrian tunnel off of that east platform to maintain that connectivity with the neighborhoods of the rail corridor, and to also connect to a cul-de-sac and very road that's used currently as a drop-off point for DRA and Metro stations.

This project is scheduled to start in late summer or fall of next year.

The new VPRA, Franconia Springville Bike Race, is the project that we as VPRA are designing and constructing.

Again, I think it's been brought up a few times today, but it's important to understand how the passenger order is here.

North of Franconia, these passenger stations are on the west side of the corridor.

They operate on west platforms.

and as we go from Franconia south to Richmond, those passenger platforms are on the east side.

And when passenger trains, either going northbound or southbound, have to make that move, they are basically doing a crossing movement within the current two-track corridor, which stops trains in any direction, whether they're freight or passenger, and causes a bottleneck.

What the five-pass project is going to do, it's going to do that crossing maneuver by

cracks, and making that movement without needing that conflict or without having those stoppages, which is really critical to, like I said, the phase one of TRV to opening up that capacity and that service flexibility that phase one is going to bring.

To get a little bit closer and look at the bypass by the numbers, it really is a significant project.

The footprint of the bypass covers 1.8 miles of the corridor.

The bridge itself is just under a mile long.

We're gonna be installing 8,000 feet of third track along the bypass, and like the other bridges in the third track corridor, we're gonna be designing and constructing it to accept or to accommodate the future fourth track.

And aside from all these numbers, with this rendering, this overhead view of this rendering,

shows is one of the challenges that we're working through right now in the project, which was, even though we're just outside of DC and just outside of Alexandria, the real estate and the footprint of this project is in a pretty secluded and highly wooded area that doesn't have a lot of easily accessible and readily available construction access points.

So that kind of surprises me.

All that wooded area, what is that?

On the southern part of the bypass, this is Loyesdale Park, which is a park within the Fairfax County Parks Authority.

Off to the west, it's some privately owned property as well as some conservation park property that the Parks Authority plans.

It is, but we are

We're trying to stay within the footprint of the existing CSX corridor as much as possible to minimize our right-of-way acquisition and the environmental impact of the project.

This is another view of rendering what the bypass would look like in its final configuration.

This does a good job of showing the operational intent of the bypasses, which is to have those passenger trains fly over the CSX traffic, which is in the two ground-level tracks.

In this case, you know, it would be a VRE commuter rail train.

This is a movement that can't happen today.

This movement causes trains to stop in all directions.

Can I put out one other thing in the picture?

You'll notice there's only one track in the bypass because there's three tracks on either side.

But we're building this, also places like Newington Rail, to allow for actually an extra track to be added in the future.

The long-term goal of our Transport Rail in Virginia

because they have four tracks at least down to Spotsylvania, which is the end of the VRE territory because that's where 70 plus trains are.

So we'll take opportunities here in Newington Road to build a new bridge wider.

We only need one track now, but it's so much easier to go in later and add that fourth track.

So we'll have that ability to think about the future.

So if we can get a four track order from Spotsylvania all the way up to Washington DC,

There's currently two tracks, right?

This is the one where CSX, what was the one where we said CSX was building the track?

I was going to say four tracks.

CSX is, yeah.

So, VPRA is leading, that's why I just presented, to bypass.

Correct, Jim?

Yes, the projects overlap.

CSX is doing the entire corridor.

We are doing the bypass bridge project.

So, that's where we're doing the sixth corridor.

That's what CSX is doing.

during negotiations CSX said they don't plan on using this.

The bypass.

Just like the new Long Bridge, other than maintenance or emergency, they don't really plan on using.

Similar here.

That's some of the reason as to why VPRA is leading some projects and CSX is leading some others.

They plan to just continue through here.

Yes, I know.

Okay.

2.0, exactly.

Two tracks, 2.0.

This will be a VPRA asset, Long Bridge will be a VPRA asset

The rest of the corridor, we will purchase half of the corridor, the east half south of Franconia, the west half north of Franconia.

And it aligns with the stations that jet play out as well.

We own some of the stations, so there's a rhyme or reason as to why we own half, why we own half south of Franconia, because that's where trains are primarily gonna run, the east half south of Franconia and the west half north of Franconia.

And this is where we switch it from that west to the east side.

That's what this is all about.

Yes.

Just to get technical for a moment too, this rendering also gives a good idea of what the structure is going to look like.

We have parts where the flyover track is clear of the ground level tracks, and that's where we have a pretty conventional bridge structure with transverse concrete piers, longitudinal errors, bridge deck.

Where it gets interesting is where that third, future, fourth track do crisscross with the tracks that are on the ground level.

And that's where we actually flipped the orientation.

We're going to build the piers longitudinally and parallel to the track.

And we're going to set the girders across perpendicular to the track so that we can build a deck that allows the track to go across.

This is called a tunnel-like structure.

I know the tunnel person would tell me absolutely not.

That's not what it is for safety purposes and whatnot.

That's a good question.