Board of Directors Meeting   8/27/2024

Mr.

Chair, the Secretary of the Treasury, members of the board, good morning.

Good morning.

Good evening.

We are located at 919 Spain Street and in Piedmont Room on the fourth floor.

The primary 911 probably is Mary Stell Dennis, secondary, Arthur Westerman,

Our Primary CPR, myself, Mark Bates, Secondary, Joan Robinitz.

Beating the first responders, Primarily, Eisenden Michael, Secondary, Steve Pittis.

You need to locate the AAD in contact with the security desk person.

First AAD is located on the back walls where the cockpit is located beneath that.

Stairways, partner lines, both located near the restrooms.

Fire Secretary from the Department's restroom, and there's a tie board room from the opposite side of the building.

Evacuation, if we were not using two vanishes today, only one exit, the way that we came then is the way we were going to evacuate.

If we were assembled at 9th, North, 9th, and Academy Square, we have to do so.

We will use the stairwells if we do evacuate due to a fire alarm.

Please ensure, look to your left, please look to your right, make sure the person is there and will be there if you have to evacuate.

If you see something, please say something.

We are behind a shooter.

We are either fleeing, hiding, or fighting.

That's the last of the door.

If you're participating remotely, be aware of phishing emails and scams.

And please know your medical emergencies and evacuation strategies.

Once again, the restaurants are located out the door.

Two left-hand turns on your left.

The man's, the woman's restroom, the man's restroom is two right-hand, left-hand terms.

It's located on your right, if you have any questions.

Thank you, Lamar.

Thank you, Lamar.

Well, before I perform the welcome, Mary Estelle was going to perform a roll call.

Ms. Bulova?

Here.

Ms. Bushue?

Here.

Mr. Cardwell?

Here.

Mr. Delandro?

Here.

Ms. Doersch?

Here.

Ms. Drake?

Here.

Ms. Moses-Nedd?

Here.

Mr. Payne?

Ms. Rhinehart?

Mr. Watkins?

He's out and all.

All right, so if any other members come in, we'll note that accordingly.

But with that, I'd like to officially welcome everybody.

I'm certainly a new face on this board.

So I've been able to connect with all of you and most of you in one way or the other.

But I appreciate all the efforts all you have put in to get here as well, coming from all over the state.

So thank you for coming today to help us.

My name is DJ Jordan.

I live in Prince William County and I'm from Hampton Roads, born and raised.

also called 757.

Born and raised in Chesapeake and Virginia Beach, Kempsville and Greenbrier, for those who know the area very well.

I went to college at Liberty University and played football there.

I went to Washington DC and did my graduate school at the Johns Hopkins University, and then worked in broadcast journalism on Capitol Hill for several years during my time there.

Lots of children.

I think I'll speak for everyone.

Thank you for agreeing to serve and we look forward to it.

So we had no public comment, save for the one I think you saw pass around as a public comment.

Correct.

Going through that.

Okay.

All right.

Motion by Ms. Bulova.

Do we have a second?

Second by Ms. Drake.

Ms. Bulova?

Aye.

Ms. Bushue?

Aye.

Ms. Doersch?

Aye.

Ms. Drake?

Aye.

Mr. Jordan?

Aye.

Ms. Rhinehart?

Aye.

So agenda item number six is the annual election of officers and then committee assignments for the year as well.

So first I'll touch on the officers.

We did a bit of informal polling to try to determine who's

I'm willing and able to serve.

And so I'd like to read a slate of proposed officers, and then we can entertain a motion for approval if we're in agreement.

So we would propose as Vice Chair Thelma Drake, as Secretary Patty Doersch, and as Treasurer Steve Pittard.

So I would entertain a motion to approve if that's agreeable.

Ms. Doersch.

Aye.

Ms. Drake.

Aye.

Mr. Jordan.

Ms. Rhinehart.

Aye.

Mr. Watkins.

All right.

Thank you everyone for agreeing to serve and look forward to the year of working together.

On the committee assignments, we also did some outreach just to try to figure out who was able to serve.

So I'll also like to just read a proposed slate of committee assignments here and then entertain a motion for approval.

So this was a little bit longer.

So for the finance and audit committee,

We proposed Patty Doersch as a member, also serving as the chair of that committee.

John Watkins, Mr. Delandro, John Delandro, Cynthia Moses-Nedd, DJ Jordan, and then of course Thelma Drake and myself will serve as ex officios on that as chair and vice chair.

So that is the finance and audit committee.

And we'd also just like to, so the personnel and compensation committee, Beth Rhinehart would serve there as chair.

Victor Cardwell on the committee, Miss Sandy Bushue, Charlie Payne, who's not here at the moment, and then of course Thelma Drake and myself as ex officio as well.

So anybody need me to read those back?

If not, we'd entertain a motion to approve those committee assignments if we're in agreement.

Second.

Oh yes, yeah, absolutely.

I think Ms. Moses-Nedd was the second.

Ms. Bulova.

Aye.

Ms. Bushue.

Aye.

Thank you everybody.

The next item is the Executive Director's Report.

We're going to have a couple of actions from this.

How do we want to do that?

Are we going to do those one at a time?

Just tell us whenever you're ready for us to consider something.

OK. You're very good.

All right.

OK. Good morning, everybody.

Thank you all for coming today.

An exciting day.

We've got a lot of good news.

And over the weekend, I was just thinking back, three years has gone really, really quickly.

And we've really come a long way to be given this suite of projects to move forward in this mission.

with really what's a group of three people and to be able to sit and look back three years later to have grown a staff of just talented committed folks to drive the mission forward and to be making the progress that we're making.

It's really an exciting day and as I think you know we've got a couple of exciting things to talk and have the board vote on today.

So first and foremost administrative updates

to overuse the word excited, and I promise I won't use it again.

We were selected by the Department of Transportation for the 2024 Rosa Parks Diversity Leadership Recognition Award, which is a great honor.

Those that are familiar with WTS, they are very selective in their awards, and this was a great honor for us so early in our professional lives, so to speak.

So that's great news, and we'll be accepting that award in September.

had a program delivery workshop with the FRA, which continues to strengthen our relationship with FRA on grants and other important project related issues.

With regard to the Leland Road Bridge and Siding A, we had an industry day event.

We continue to work with our contractors and work with industry to strengthen our integrity and our relationship with them and continue to make great progress.

And then finally on administrative updates, at least on this slide, we continue to work on the multi-modal part of our mission.

And in fact, we'll talk about this in a couple of minutes with the Newport News opening.

But one of the most important things we do

is move people from place to place.

However, that last place they end up is a station and that's not really where they want to go.

We've got to make sure that we connect with that last mile and that partnership with transit, GRTC in this case, HRT, connector buses, that's a big part of what we do and an important partnership for us.

Yesterday at the Ettrick-Petersburg station, and I will call it the Ettrick-Petersburg because either one I say will offend the other half

Edrick, Petersburg Station, or the Petersburg Station in Edrick.

We celebrated the receipt of a million dollars that was sponsored by U.S. Representative Jennifer Cleland.

Just to spend too much time on this, there are three projects that are underway at the station.

The first one is, and we received money for this as well,

really an ADA upgrade, a cosmetic upgrade.

The canopy there is just decrepit, might be too strong of a word, but it's not that far off.

The lighting is not great.

The platform is not ADA compliant.

The tactile along the track itself is jagged at best.

So this is about an $11 million project that is about 90% design now.

We are going to complete design this year and then next year start doing those cosmetic but very important upgrades to include signage, wayfinding, etc.

The second project is really a planning study, and that's what this million dollars is going to go to.

That's going to look at this station, which was built in 1955, and the surrounding land, which we own thanks to the CSX deal, and look at a way to revitalize the station.

That may be a brand new station.

That may be an addition to the station.

It may be a rehab for the station.

We don't know.

That's what the planning is for.

That is going to be underway very soon.

and then the third project for CS line that we've all heard about the S line is for the most part the abandoned rail that we purchased from CSX that provides a more direct route from Richmond down to Raleigh and further south.

That is the project that we are just entering into 30% design on and we expect to complete 30% design and then eventually if the cost benefit analysis works

It will be a very expensive project, but eventually begin construction so we can get a faster, more direct right down there.

That construction likely won't start until after 2030, but I just want to be clear, those are the three different projects that are going on at the edge of Petersburg Station.

DJ, excuse me, is that inclusive of the fridge over the Appomattox?

Just a question on the station in Patrick, and you're right, it desperately needs something.

Will the City of Petersburg be a partner in that?

I know with Norfolk, Norfolk had to build the station.

We opened the project without a station because they didn't believe us that it would come so quickly.

No, it's a partnership.

It's exactly right.

Because, you know, Roanoke is an example where we built a platform and a station is coming.

We just don't know when.

The city's got to be involved and it's right across the street from Virginia State University.

They've got to be part of it as well.

We want to make sure that it works for everybody.

Thank you.

Organizational updates.

This is the same chart you see every month.

We are really starting to level out.

As of August 20th, we had 58 folks.

We had three folks that actually started yesterday, the Jennifer Renarda and Adil.

You see two contract administration specialists.

Those are folks that are going to help us to ensure that the contracts we sign with our vendors and our consultants, our construction companies, that they're adhering to the requirements and that we are making sure they're in compliance.

And then Adil is a project manager working on the North Virginia projects.

We've leveled out.

We've got two of those things now.

We've got a couple more folks that start in September, but as I alluded to earlier, to grow the staff and really get a group of really talented folks has been one of the biggest accomplishments we've had.

You've heard me talk about it before.

I'm not going to go into detail, but as we select folks, we're really concerned about culture.

We're really concerned about how people work together, really focused on integrity and collaboration and everybody being able to throw the awards in the right way to use a different transportation for sure.

Here's a just look at the same thing you see every month in our diversity.

We continue to feel good about where we are from a diversity point of view.

We work with colleges and we work with various

to ensure that we're getting folks from all different backgrounds, all different ages, different experiences, so we have the right talent around the table.

Twenty-four annual incentive plan goals.

We are not yet done with our annual incentive plan goals, but we are really, really, really close.

And the reason we're not done, there's one piece that's missing, and that's on that first goal.

So the first goal was increasing ridership by 3%.

That was knocked out of the park, and we'll talk about that more in a minute.

The second part was the cost recovery goal.

I think as folks know, the cost recovery goal is basically our train operations costs and our administrative costs.

We had a goal of 67%.

The calculation as we sit today is right between 70 and 71%, except we're waiting for final numbers from DRS, from the retirement services.

They are part of what our

All right.

I'm not going to sit here and say that we're going to achieve the 67% because Mr. Pitt will ring my neck, but I feel pretty good right now without having the numbers that we're going to get there.

We've talked about the rest of these.

I don't want to go over them again unless you have questions, but for the one, the outstanding fourth track, which we chose not to meet, we were on track to hit 92% of these.

So our 25 AIP goals, you see the big yellow.

We're still waiting for the cost recovery goal to come in for this year so we can set it for next year.

Here are our proposed goals for next year.

The big question here is ridership in my mind that you should be asking is last year we increased ridership by 10%.

How come we're only looking at 3% this year?

Well, we're in a situation now where the last couple of years we've not added new service.

The last new trains were added in FY22.

We've leveled out our service levels.

Our number of trains are not going to increase for the next couple of years.

And as anybody who's been in the railroad business knows, we go up and we go down.

In fact, spoiler alert in a couple of slides I'm going to show you, our July ridership was the first month in a long time that we didn't set a record.

We actually went down.

Why did we go down in July?

Well, because gas prices are down 10% from last year.

And when people are deciding whether to take the train or whether to drive, regardless of traffic, and traffic plays a big part, if gas is less expensive, they're more likely to drive.

And so if you look back over the last decade and a half, increases in train ridership and decreases in train ridership go very, very much in line with the gas prices.

So

We continue to work with Amtrak to improve the service, to make sure that it's clean, that it's on time, of course that it's safe, and we'll continue to do that.

But we're comfortable that 3% is still a stretch goal year over year.

Cost recovery, we're going to wait until we get the DRS numbers in before we set that.

And then the other goals here, we've got a section on Long Bridge, just continuing the Long Bridge project to head for that target of 2030.

Key milestones and other projects.

We've got the fourth track in there.

We've got the bypass in there.

We've got the new river rally construction that we'll talk about later.

That's the big deal that we're hoping the board will approve today.

We want to ensure that we start construction there no later than March.

And then we've got a handful of organizational goals.

Our project management information system, we want to get that migration complete later than February.

The last piece is a quality program plan that we're just putting in place now.

Cosmin Andrea, I'm putting him on the spot, is our quality manager.

He's been here six weeks, maybe a little longer than that.

Seven weeks, that was close.

And he's in charge of putting this quality manual together.

We already have our quality policy and he's going to work collaboratively with all of the program managers and other key stakeholders within VPRA and externally to put this quality program plan in place.

You all have heard me say it many, many times, the biggest challenge we have, one of the big challenges we have is consistency.

We've got program managers that come from different lives.

We've got VDOT folks, we've got private sector folks,

and ensuring that as we manage projects, we do it consistently and have a process that's repeatable.

It's very important for us.

I don't want to say that's all on Cosman's shoulders, but it's in a minute.

So there you go.

So these are our AIP goals.

JJ, do we also track the national ridership numbers and compare them to Virginia?

Because I think train service has been everywhere, what I've seen.

We do very much so.

We're actually leading the pack on the states and by leading the pack not necessarily first month after month after month, but when you compare us to most states, we're at the top tier for sure.

We look at that very closely.

We're members of a group, the Safer Sea Group, the State Amtrak Intercity Passenger Rail Committee, and they talk about that all the time about, okay, what are we doing?

What's Virginia doing as compared to New York, as compared to California?

I'm not a big bragger.

So to that point, Virginia consistently and the

The extension to New River Valley is another example of really Virginia being ahead of the curve on time, thinking innovatively to get things done to enhance passenger rail and Uncle Ben with great power comes great responsibility.

We feel that pressure like, okay, what's Virginia going to do next?

So we talk a lot about supplier diversity one time a year.

Thank you, Zach, for the lead-in.

One time a year, we come to the board and get our annual goal for supplier diversity approved.

As you've heard me say before, John Kosnuk is one of the most passionate people we've ever met, I've ever met, with regard to supplier diversity.

And I can honestly say that every purchase that leaves

VPRA, we have the question asked, can we have a diverse supplier here?

Is there a way to use SWAM or DBE?

So it's something that we pay close attention to.

Here's a little background on DBE.

You've seen this before.

I'm not going to read it, but it just outlines what DBE is.

And then this talks about the Department of Small Business, the DSBSD certifications, the different certifications.

We have a whole matrix because there are plenty of businesses that fall into two or more of these categories and we've got a cascading matrix that says you can only get credit for one and here's what you get credit for.

John and his team manage that and they do a great job.

Here are our results from FY24.

In FY24, the goal that you all approved was 10%.

And in our discretionary spend, and that's an important caveat, our discretionary spend, which is what we tracked this against, we achieved 14, just over 14% in SWAM DVE spending.

Discretionary spend is important because when we spend money to CSX, Norfolk Southern, you see them there, Amtrak, we really don't have an option.

We can't say, you know what, CSX, we want to go out and find a diverse supplier, CSX is CSX.

So we've got to give them the client.

So we only track things that we have control over.

And in FY24, the things that we have control over, we were at 14%, which we're very proud of.

We thought 10 was a stretch goal and we exceeded it.

So, you know, good.

They're the list of the top five, but there are many, many more folks who contribute to supplier diversity performance.

For FY 25, we would like the board to approve a goal of 11.5.

Similar to the ridership, you're going to say, well, wait a second.

Why are we going to high five if you achieve a number less than you achieved last year?

Well, here's why.

What the team does is they look at our plan, span, spend for FY 25 exactly where all the projects are, the work that's going to get done and how we can push our vendors and ourselves to use DBE spend and SWAM spending.

A lot of the work we did last year was survey work, real estate survey work, and that is a great opportunity for diverse companies to come in and do that work.

What we're moving into in FY25 is more really of the final stages of design, which you don't have as many companies out there that do that kind of work.

That expertise doesn't exist.

When we go further out, starting at 26 and on, as we get into construction, there are a lot more opportunities and we feel like we'll continue to grow this upward.

But we were comfortable as we went through the spend that 11.5 is higher than our goal last year.

And it's going to be a stretch for this year, given the work that we had in front of us.

That I actually beat John up, that never happens.

And I said, hey, are we sure 11.5 is high enough?

Are we really pushing ourselves?

And John assures me that that's going to be a stretch and it's going to be a lift for us to meet that.

So that is our proposed goal.

And that is something that the board needs to approve.

So if it's going to be a stretch, why would you increase it?

Because we need to continue to do more.

And if it's if we don't meet it, we don't meet it.

But we'd rather try to do more and then just say, well, you know, 10% is a flame dunk.

Let's just do that again.

I know the team doesn't like me for that.

Some of the team.

We just think it's the right thing to do, to continue to push, keep the pressure.

I mean, it's so easy, and I'm sorry, no disrespect to Amazon.

It's so easy to go to Amazon and say, I'm gonna buy this.

And that same product is available from a local, which isn't what we measure, we don't measure local, but from a local SWAM or DBE.

Do you want to approve this at this moment?

Yeah, if someone wants to make a motion then.

Yeah, if we... We're taking a motion to approve a DBE goal for fiscal year 25, 11 and a half percent, is that correct?

Is there any discussion, other discussion?

I personally would prefer a little bit more information about the procurement process and how this would impact

Before I vote on this, that's just me.

You can do that.

That's okay.

So, for the avoidance of doubt, we'll continue to push towards 11.5.

And in the meantime, we can either provide a briefing next time with a lot more detail, or we can talk to you separately either way, and then bring it back for a vote.

And if you all decide that it's too high, then we will be aiming.

It's just my comment.

Friendly amendment to table it?

It is already... Is that a substitute?

All the above.

Those are the right questions.

I think I would make the motion to withdraw it and make sure that DJ has the information that he's comfortable with.

I don't think you have to have it voted on today.

And was there any impact for the staff member that does this work?

You called him John.

It did not, no.

Okay.

And if we don't

Pass this until the next board meeting.

So we have a, all right, withdraw that until the, to withdraw that or table it, make sure exact motion.

Question, so we'll,

The suggestion is to withdraw the motion or table it.

For what purpose then for more information to be able to come back?

I think we're being respectful to a new board member who has to have more information to better understand it.

So I think Thelma, we're

I appreciate that.

You are more than welcome to move forward to vote.

I would probably vote present or not to vote on it simply because I just want to have more information and I at first glance share the concern that Sandy brought up that if this is a stretch goal, what is this actually going to do to our staff?

I would hate to set a goal that we don't meet or especially when we're doing so well

A stretch goal, while may not be met, is sort of that attitude of shoot to the moon and you land on the stars.

If the information you need about how they're going to do that, I certainly appreciate that, DJ, I really do.

And while I'm certainly comfortable tabling it, however, as long as we continue to work towards that goal, I think it's really important for this organization because it really has become, I mean, that award mentioned earlier, the Rosa Parks Award, is outstanding evidence of why these goals matter.

and so I was standing up and says to why it is that our organization should continue to strive to not just shop at a main place that I shop at too much, but actually go down to the local place.

So we appreciate that.

DJ and Mr. Jordan, you know, I am John Cosmic from procurement.

Well, and it was a stretch goal.

We do always want to look to maximize SWAM and DVU.

and I am as well a fan of a stretch goal.

DJ had mentioned that I talked about every procurement, every opportunity or there's slams out there.

So I like to stay aggressive as we look to maximize our procurements and to have a stretch goal, it's a stretch, but it's also obtainable.

And if we talk about this with every contract and every contractor that we bring on board, whether they're a swam or just a prime non-swam, and we make them have small

and diverse subcontracting plans.

We're going to have the monthly meetings and the engagements and as we're always looking to maximize this, yes, it's a stretch, but it keeps us hungry to maximize using small and diverse businesses.

Well, but they're looking at us when we do award, you know, for compliance with the other, you know, civil rights laws and regulations.

That's why I only say that.

I don't know that there's any reason we have to do this today.

Respectfully it's not going to change what we do going forward.

And DJ, also what I heard you say was that this goal was set in light of and in perspective of the question of why are we not setting a higher goal given we achieved it before.

So in the meantime, if I may, we'll prepare a briefing and we'll send it out to the whole board just talking about the procurement process and how we look at every single procurement.

And then if more information is desired, we can certainly meet board members one on one or even do it at the next board meeting.

I think it would be useful

DJ, I think there's confusion on the board.

What's DBE?

I think it'd be useful.

And I do think, John, correct me.

What is federal law?

The DBE with contract goals and DBE at the federal level, it's only used if a project is receiving federal financial assistance

from a DOT component that's subject 49 Part 26.

And now that's limited to FHWA, FTA, and FAA.

None of our delivery projects, though, meet that requirement.

The state level as it relates to contract goals for SWAM, the disparity study talks about how the Commonwealth, we have to stay race and gender neutral.

So we don't use any race and gender conscious measures that promote SWAM utilization, which would be your contract goals and a procurement.

And now for us, for our procurement rules, we're always making and requiring proposals to submit their SWAM and DBEs utilization plan.

And once approved, these become part of any binding contracts.

within their overall swam plan.

That gets a little bit more complicated.

It does.

Just to add to the complication is we set scoring criteria for our major contracts.

We have to weigh, what are we going to put in there to score DPE?

Because if you score it really, really high, you'll get a big number, but you may increase the cost a lot.

So that's a calculus that we do.

He's withdrawn, so he's not pushing the table.

I think it was Thelma's, and that was the motion to defer.

And I'll second that.

Until we can get, I think DJ would be really good if we can clarify that just a little more, John.

But I also think it would be helpful for everybody in the room, not even DJ, what's the difference between DBE

and what's the difference between SWAM because everybody gets very confused and there is a very easy, distinct way to define the two.

But it gets very, very confusing.

Some people think there's SWAM and then they come and say, no, no, no, they're DBE.

Exactly.

So I think Thelma's motion was to defer to table this till the next meeting.

Correct?

And so I think Mr. Payne had actually seconded that one.

OK, great.

Thank you, Mr. Payne.

OK.

Yes, I had you seconded the original motion.

Did you second the motion, Ms. Drake's?

OK, Ms. Bushue did.

So your action item is then to withdraw the motion, correct?

Now there's another motion to defer it to the next meeting.

So we do need to do.

Ms. Bulova?

Aye.

Aye.

Mr. Cardwell?

Aye.

Ms. Doersch?

Aye.

Thank you everybody.

Great discussion.

I guess we can see Patty if she has questions or anything.

I can see her on the little screen here.

Super.

So, as we do every month, these are the contracting updates.

This is notifying you, the board, of any contract action we take that's above $250,000, but less than $5 million, which for those that don't recall, anything $5 million, we need to notify you five days in advance.

contracts that took place this month.

One was with Ernst & Young.

You see them there for the PNIS implementation support.

And then we did tree clearing in Alexandria.

No budget adjustments in July.

First month of the year, that makes sense.

Okay, passenger service updates.

So first and foremost, and I think you all know about this, we last week saw the first train go into the Newport News Transportation Center.

It's not

Officially open because some of the officials were unable to make a ribbon cutting, so we'll be cutting ribbon in September, but the train goes there every day.

It's a beautiful facility.

There was a project that was run by the city and funding from a bunch of different sources, but it's speaking of multimodal, it's a great place for folks.

There are shuttles to the airport, their HRT comes there, or will come there, I guess, later this year.

As you see in the bottom right, big bus turnaround.

It's just a real nice facility.

Talk to the employees.

The employees are thrilled.

It's clean.

It's neat.

It's modern.

That level platform, as you see in the upper right.

So it's just a good event last weekend.

There was some VPRA funding for this, right?

No, there was.

There was about $21 million.

$21 million came from the state for the DRPT and VPRA.

$1.2 million was from Chrissy.

There was a CMAQ federal grant of $30 million that came through VDOT and the city paid a million and a half dollars.

Thank you.

Alright, so that

Again, good progress and we'll have a big event next month.

Here's the operations budget, FY24 budget actual.

Pretty straightforward.

We're happy with these numbers.

The big change that you see here is on the administrative budget.

We were much lower than the budget had.

because we implemented our cost allocation where we put the actual project spend to the projects so now when when folks like Mike or me or Michael Westerman or even project managers are working on individual projects their time gets charged the project is we've talked about before this is important because we want to ensure that when we finish a project we know exactly how much it costs and we include the administrative part.

Other than that, though, it's pretty straightforward.

We're pretty much in line with our budget.

Here it is where you can see the administrative budget backed out.

We were a little bit higher than expected on payroll and benefits because we hired some folks a little faster.

But in turn, our professional services was lower.

Finding that balance, we've done a good job, knock on wood, of finding that balance between VPRA staff and consultant staff.

We use consultants when it's not going to be an ongoing need, but when it pumps up and comes down so that you can see the difference in those two things.

Again, we feel good about the 24 budget.

Annual cost recovery.

We talked about this a little bit earlier.

You see the trend going forward before we get the DRS numbers.

We're at 71 percent.

We'll update that when we get those numbers.

But the trend continues in the right direction.

So we're happy with that.

Here's our ridership.

I mentioned earlier that July was the first month in a while that we were lower than the previous year.

December of 2023, we're also lower.

But for these two months, we had about 18 straight months where we were higher every month.

You'll see on the next page the ridership route by route.

Across the board, we were down with the exception of the Richmond.

A lot of that just has to do with schedule.

We don't have any reason to think that the other Norfolk, Roanoke, or Newport News are at any more risk.

It's just the timing.

So a lot of folks on those other three routes, well, specifically Newport News and Norfolk, are only going a portion of the route to somewhere north of Richmond.

Richmond.

So a lot of that is just timing.

It's something we're watching very close.

2024 was a record.

It was our highest year ever.

And we're proud of that.

But we're going into 2025, watching this very closely.

The weekend has become, post-COVID, our higher ridership time.

It used to be during the week we were higher.

But now that people, the traditional work week is no longer, our weekends are higher.

And as you see, even though we had fewer weekends in July,

This year, the average weekend is lower.

So it's something we're watching very closely.

And here it is route by route.

Not going to go into big detail because we send these out every month.

Continue to have problems with freight train and passenger train interference.

It's something we're working with Amtrak and CSX on when

We get the additional capacity and we will have dedicated passenger tracks and that will clear a lot of this up.

I would be remiss if I didn't bring up safety here.

So, and I guess I shouldn't bring it up on an auto train.

I should bring it up on one of the other ones, but we had an incident on Saturday.

It didn't involve a Virginia train, but there was just north of Ashland.

There was a car, an automobile that was stuck on the track.

And so that car called for assistance.

A tow truck came.

The police were there.

Unfortunately, nobody thought to call the railroad and say, hey, every single grade crossing has a blue sign, two blue signs usually, one on either side that says, if you were stuck, call this number.

And no one called.

And they were in the process of the tow truck getting the car out of the way.

And here comes one of the Amtrak long distance trains southbound, ran right into it.

The engineers, nothing an engineer could do.

You just can't stop training that quickly.

But the point is that safety is a huge part of what we do every day.

September is School Safety Month, Rail Safety Month.

We're going to continue to work with local law enforcement and first responders to make sure they know the first thing you do is you call dispatch and say, hey, we've got a car.

It's an event that didn't need to happen.

Thankfully, there were no injuries.

Thank you, DJ.

Were there any impacts from the CSX derailment in Fredericksburg?

Operationally, no.

No.

In fact, they went out and they talked about what happened there.

I don't want to speak for CSX, but that is actually, they had derails in place.

They had parked a train on a sidetrack and the brakes were not properly applied and it started to roll backwards.

And what you do is you put a derail in place so it doesn't roll onto the main line and then cause more catastrophic.

So the train, the derail, the derail acted exactly like it was supposed to and took the train off of the rail.

Unfortunately, you've been there, the wall right there is so close, the train had nowhere

Here's the Newport News, two daily round trips and pretty consistent passenger train interference, freight interference.

Thankfully, we, knock on wood, are going to be out of the heat, slow orders portion of the summer and that will give us a little more reliability.

No, but I'm back to the incident with the car and the tow truck.

So, you know, there's Tow Truck Association, there's Police Chief Associations.

Are we reaching out to these groups?

Or is there a state agency that would reach out to these groups?

Because I just can't even imagine that was something that could have been completely prevented.

No one has heard.

We work closely with Operation Lifesaver, which is the group that reaches out.

That would help if those got new.

Oh, absolutely.

Well, that's exactly what happened here.

But we work with Operations Lifesaver.

There's a couple of different ones.

I would love that.

Thank you.

Go ahead.

Thank you, Matt.

We do have outreach to all of the

We should find out.

We're putting Bruno on the spot.

Did you hear anything about that, Bruno?

Is it Amtrak?

Did you?

No.

Yeah.

So we will find out.

Across the Commonwealth?

Across the country.

So the private crossings, I mean they're especially

On the western side of the state, there are a lot of private crossings where someone owns a farm, someone owns a house, and it just goes right across.

You won't find the signs there, unfortunately, but any public crossing, the signs are there.

We've talked a little bit about how we work with Amtrak on Price Point, and there was a request just for a little more detail, so I just wanted to spend a couple minutes going over what's happened since March of 2022.

That was, you may recall it, March 2022.

We suddenly saw, why is our revenue going way down?

And we went to Amtrak and they said, oh, we've actually changed the way we do revenue.

We used to have five price points.

Now we have nine.

Sorry, we should have told you.

And so we sadly, I wish that wasn't a separation, but we worked with them between March and September and really shout out to them.

They have done a great job.

They have worked with us very closely.

The next couple of slides and Steve Pittard is a big part of this.

also Ashwini and Jeremy who you've met, Shannon Perry, all a big part on our side.

On the Amtrak side, you've got Denise Johnson, Jacob Clark, J.D.

O'Bri, Eric Olson, all of the folks that are in the revenue band.

have really been more collaborative than we have seen folks at Amtrak for a long, long time.

And it's been a good success story.

So we found the problem in March of 2022.

September, we started working with them, meeting with them every other week on pricing and revenue management and trying to understand how they, Amtrak, set these prices and what impact or influence we can have on how that works.

So we worked, and these graphs are really hard to read, but we'll leave them out on the internet.

We'll send them to you.

So what they started to look at is all of the different factors, ridership, load factors, your yield, average fare, the fare bucket.

We, VPRA, looked for anomalies.

We looked at and they're listed there.

Fare trends, missing trains.

So for example, we have trains that we know run and yet for some reason not in the revenue system.

Sometimes there are system problems.

We are working with Amtrak to track those things down.

Ticket splitting.

Sometimes it's cheaper.

If you want to buy a ticket from here to New York, Richmond to New York, it'll cost you $150.

But you can buy a ticket from Richmond to DC and it'll cost you $30 and then from DC to New York and it'll cost you $30.

So you're only costing $60 if you split the trip.

That really isn't great.

I mean, we want to make sure that there's consistency there.

So we're working with Amtrak on that.

The lines there, you can see that's the change year over year in revenue.

You've got the ridership there.

You've got the yield there.

You want them to be as close as possible.

We continue to look for a sweet spot.

I don't want to say we want to maximize revenue.

where we want to maximize ridership.

We want to find that sweet spot where revenue and ridership are working together.

So you want those lines to be as close together as possible.

The point of this is not to analyze, hey, here's what happened in October, here's what happened in November, but to point out that this is the kind of data we get from Amtrak every other week and they work together with our team to make sure that the tickets and the fares are appropriate.

We've now started just over the last 12 months setting goals on revenue, setting goals on ridership.

Looking at how the seasonality of ridership impacts fares or how the fares impact the ridership when different holidays are, you know, they're different.

Sometimes Easter, for example, crosses months, spring break crosses months.

So they've really done a great job of working with us to make sure that our fare tables, and it included some increases, especially on those lower buckets of fares,

on our side.

Make sure that the fares are driving the ridership and the yield that we're looking for.

It's really a big success story, a great partnership between Amtrak and VPRA and continue to praise it.

Looking forward, this is just a quick chart.

If you see, you've got load factor to the right.

You want a higher load factor, and then you've got yield going up.

You want a higher yield.

We've got a bunch of trains in that bottom right.

It's easy to say, oh, let's move everything to the top right.

So it's high load factor, high yield.

You want to find that sweet spot because the load factor and the yield work together.

But having everything on that right side of the chart is a huge accomplishment.

And we continue to work to find that sweet spot.

So any questions on ticketing?

I know I did that quickly.

And it's very complex, the successes that we're working well together and we're

You know, good partners on this.

Yes, DJ, that was great.

I just wanted to add that, you know, it is truly, you mentioned a balance of revenue and ridership.

You could say, well, ridership, let's go all on a ridership in our financial plan.

There is a certain level of revenue that we'll be able to make that financial plan through the end of our capital project.

So that's why when you're thinking about that balancing part, there is a big piece there.

ridership, and the revenues for our financial plans.

Perfect.

Thank you, Steve.

And then this chart, just the final chart shows the ridership growth as we've talked about ad nauseam.

We continue to grow in ridership.

The 1.385 was a record year for us in 2024.

We're looking to continue to achieve that 2025, even given headwinds going forward, no new service, et cetera.

All right, the last thing for me before I turn it over to Mike and capital project updates, the Amtrak operating agreement.

So as we've talked about before, we have an agreement with Amtrak to run the trains.

They run the trains on our behalf, and all of those rates are designated by the 209 policy.

Our current contract expires at the end of September.

We

will be entering a new agreement with them in order to continue service that will go from October 1st to September 30th.

This is actually for those of you that have been on the board for a while, this is great news because we have been, we the states together have been negotiating back and forth with Amtrak on the different rates that are set by this policy.

And this will be the first year

I want to say 2022, I think, where we had an actual agreement that's going for 12 months because we have extended agreements, extended agreements.

Finally, late last calendar year, the state Amtrak Intercity Passenger Rail Committee agreed on the rates.

We've been working on getting those rates to flow through the Amtrak system.

And so now we are close to a situation where we have final rates for FY25.

So what we're going to do now is ask the board to approve our FY25 operating agreement or at least give the executive director the authority to sign the operating agreement so we can continue to run service.

Again, the cost of the cost, the committee with Amtrak and the FRA determine the rates and they're all in the agreement.

It's pretty straightforward.

It's just math.

I would move approval of an authorization of the fiscal year 25 Amtrak state sponsored or supported agreement.

Moved and seconded.

All right, we have a motion and a second.

So we're voting to approve the Amtrak operating agreement.

July to June.

This is on their fiscal year.

Any other discussion?

Aye.

Ms. Bushue?

Aye.

Ms. Drake?

Aye.

Ms. Moses-Nedd?

Aye.

Mr. Payne?

Mr. Spore?

Aye.

Mr. Watkins?

Thank you to the staff for overseeing this agreement and the great outcomes we're getting on this.

Thank you everybody for supporting that.

I'm going to go over the capital project updates.

We do have two sessions later.

We're going to go into more detail.

So I'm going to be brief with your permission, say a couple of highlights, items we're not going to hit later on.

So we have, again, we have two sessions later on and can talk about capital projects.

One project, so Long Bridge, North and South, if you're seeing it from period materials, we're going to talk about that in a later session.

I do want to talk about Alexander and Fortrack.

and you might have seen in the prepared materials, if you've ridden the train, there's work going on out there.

There's been tree clearing, this happened, happened actually more than half a year ago.

And there's also a dump bank work going on.

That's utility relocation.

As anyone, as a lot of people know, as a lot of us that's been tours, tour of the corridor back in, I think that was June.

We showed you when we were up a lot of fun, some of the pipelines.

Those pipelines up and down the corridor is also fiber optics up and down.

And you see the green, that is the fiber optics, and the copper metal, that is a gas pipeline.

It actually feeds nationally important.

So very important pipelines for freight railroads.

Their utilities are very important to them, very important source of revenue to them.

So that work is ongoing out there.

It's the Kinder Morgan pipeline, and again, the fiber optics utilities.

So that's something I want to point out.

So that's some important work, some important milestones we're hitting with regard to

Alexander, and Ford Trapper.

With regard to Franklin and Springfield bypass, I'm not going to read all the words on this, but we're going to go into more details and some upcoming milestones we're going to hit there in a later session.

The shoot-by concept, in case you're wondering what that is, that's a temporary bypass, if you will.

And last month's executive director's report had an image of that.

So that's important.

That's going to be helpful to speed up the project.

I do want to mention, while it does say port drillings for geotech have been completed,

All but four to be satisfactory.

95 were satisfactory.

So I don't want you to leave away thinking that we did a small number and only four, and the majority of them were unsatisfactory.

What does that mean?

That means of the 99, 95 hit the rock that you needed to, four didn't hit.

That's not an unexpected offer.

I do want to point that out, that again, 95 of the 99 were successful.

Another project, another page I want to hit,

As we talk about this page, a lot of these projects are getting some milestones.

I want to focus on something.

One we haven't talked about with the Norfolk Sovereign Agreement, which we're going to talk about soon,

That's a project that was part of the core 2022 agreement that has seven miles of double track to south of the Broad Road facility.

It's actually going to create a 22 miles of double track, which is very important to Norfolk Southern, not just for our Roanoke route, but for the crest that Amtrak runs on from down south.

Also part of the base 2022 agreement was the Roanoke-Westyard.

We have money in that agreement.

Both of these are continued in the agreement that we're going to brief you on later today to make sure that improvements are made to Roanoke Yards so that the Amtrak trains get through there in a swift manner.

We don't want to have the new train go into River Valley and get caught in the yard.

As you know, rail yards are very, very busy.

So we have agreed upon track charts that we're working through with Norfolk Southern to make sure we get through at certain speeds.

They're going to be basically making

Kind of a bypass of the word because they do have discretion to get us through the yard.

The Derona Westyard is an important project for the New River Valley.

And the bottom three are all hidden milestones this summer, already have.

So the Arcaneta-Piles Creek project, that is a legacy project from DRPT days.

It's still ongoing.

It's finishing up.

It's actually tied to the Quantico Station project from looking at Mr. Dalton because VRE is leading the Quantico Station project.

Both of these projects are nearing completion.

The Arcaneta-Piles Creek, nine miles of triple traffic.

Trains recently from Amtrak, if you're stuck behind the freight train that's going slower, is able to use those tracks to get around them.

So I've been on one of those trains, I know a lot of people have.

So that's a big advantage.

And that's what we're looking forward to with a lot of these projects coming down the pike.

Adding the addition of that third track in many locations, or fourth track further north, is going to allow pass-through trains to move more swiftly through the corridor.

And again, the clinical station is really in the middle of the Arkandale project.

We're not familiar with the area in Arkandale last week,

It's the eight or nine miles around Quantico Station.

And both of these are federal money and state money, and Quantico Station that VRE is leading, that is close to completion, and we hope to invite board members to a ribbon cutting sometime this fall.

And that is actually going to building, not just the triple check, the Arkandale project is working, bringing it through.

Also, if you haven't been through it,

also having a pedestrian overpass up and over so you don't have to go at the crossing, so you don't have to walk at the crossing.

So it's a really neat facility, done a great job with the historical look of the Quantico Station, so we're excited about that project.

Newport News, we already talked about earlier, you saw the pictures earlier for Newport News.

So with your permission, I went through it quickly because we do have two sessions later, we're going to cover Long Bridge, Franklinian Bypass, a couple signage projects,

And in closed session, we're going to talk some more about some of these projects.

So happy to answer any questions on all of them.

These are the same slides we present every month.

So in our executive director's report, but I just want to hit the highlights for you today.

I'll just quickly

Revenue and Investment Updates.

This first slide pretty much shows our common rail funds and the collections we had for the past year.

And it's a little bit of a timing that they see in August when revenues come in from the end of the year and the beginning of the fiscal year.

But overall, the point here is pretty much what I would say is we were one estimate at $600,000 less than the estimated revenues for the year, which was, I think, four tenths of a percent.

And then, once again, estimate.

If it's within 3%, I think that's a very good either plus or minus.

So it's a pretty good process of estimating revenues.

And that's our dedicated funding from the Transportation Trust Fund, in case you're wondering.

Now, we also have a large balance of funds that we have collected from our inception and through our first four years of existence and just about over $700 million.

And these next few slides are taking you through what they're doing with those funds as far as investments.

You see, we collected almost $236 million of revenues

various funding partners and various funding agreements that we have during the past year.

And as we go forward, you will see we've actually earned almost $37 million of income from those investments, over 5% return during the year.

And that was a large increase from the prior year, almost 73% of revenue coming in, taking those balances.

We've been very fortunate to talk about that.

We've had a lot of those funds in the LGIP, the state's LGIP.

That's a very advantageous thing because they're 30, much a 30-day window.

That's what they're shooting for.

So it's been very advantageous.

And you all know the past year we did some tweaks to our investment policy to allow a little bit longer maturities.

Not past the five years, but we got rid of the average being at two years.

So we're still at a limit of five years for maturities.

But what that's allowed us to do, we got a new investment manager and we were able to take some of our funds and start giving them to an investment manager and actually putting the funds out maturities over the next five years to take advantage

with the expectation that rates would be coming back down to that 2% Fed target we all hear about, which it sounds like that's going to begin to happen here in the next 30 days, 60 days.

So we're in a really good position that, one, we have large balance funding to execute a large transaction like we're going to talk about later with the book of Southern, but then two,

kind of maximize those earnings through one being short-term investments and now pivoting to a little bit longer with still three goals, which we'll go through, policy objectives of maintaining principle, so we're not investing in anything, we're not out finding individual stocks, we have a very limited set of investments that are all in the border proof policy, that all have very high ratings,

We hold them to maturity, so even if rates fluctuate, a short-term gain or loss, we're holding these investments to maturity so we won't actually have a loss.

And then you see the maturities of all the various types of investment for all within those maturity windows.

And then you see the actual percentage shares of the various investments here in the pie chart, which were within the limits that are all invested in policy.

And finally, this last slide, once again, I talked about the LGIP and we're going to, soon when we move forward, we're talking about a large transaction later today with Norfolk Southern.

We had the balance with the table of the LGIP to consummate that transaction.

And when we move forward, we will take those funds out of the LGIP and

Then we will be shifted to a lot more of our funds, the remaining funding being in those invested balances over that five years.

So you'll see, as rates come down, we will still be earning that four and a half percent, as I think the target, we've mapped it out over five years, we'll be still earning that four and a half percent when rates, if we stayed in LGI, it will start to get closer to four as maybe 3.75%.

Taking advantage, but once again, making sure that we have the liquidity to meet our project needs.

Finally, the last slide just shows the grants that, federal grants that we put in for, we're still waiting to hear back on those.

So we put in for our Route 1, Furnace Road, Railroad Bridges project, and then some state of good repair,

items at some of our stations.

If I can too, real quick, on the Franklin Railroad and the French Railroad, that's the extension of the Franklin

South.

So that's important to get you up on the river bridge.

Steve, hi, it's Patty Doersch.

Can I ask a question?

Sure.

Excellent presentation as always.

Just on your last slide where we put in two million dollars for requests for congressional directed spending for Staples Mills.

I think we've seen a House Thud Bill and the Senate Thud Bill.

Sometimes they don't include the commercially directed spending until the omnibus package.

Did you outline our funding?

So we get our funding, I don't have the slide here, but it's in our,

It's in our budget document, actually a very good chart where all our funding comes from.

So we talked about the dedicated transfer state transportation funding, so about $150 billion a year.

But when it comes to all our capital projects, we have Amtrak has dedicated $944 million for that life of those projects.

We've got now almost a billion dollars of federal awards towards those projects, right around that number.

And if I keep going, I'm going to miss BRE has contributed several hundred million dollars toward the capital projects.

There's a lot of dedicated other state transportation funds that are coming through the formula that have been dedicated from priority transportation funds.

funding from the I-95 corridor, express lanes, some of the concession funds there were dedicated.

So a lot of different sources.

Another big source is the I-66 inside the beltway, toll lanes.

Those funds go through a waterfall and our projects are fairly high in that waterfall and we'll be issuing a large amount of debt

that those tolls will service that debt.

Okay, that's good though.

Would you?

That would be really helpful.

And I do have an update to your question.

I thought we were, I just want to be clear, there's money in the House Appropriations Bill.

It's a requested amount of $850,000 from Representative McClelland.

Excellent.

And I know from prior year's experience, we need only be in either the House or the Senate to eventually end up in the final bill.

That's what I'm reading correctly.

It's also on our public website, but we'll send one.

Any other questions for Steve?

We are running a little bit ahead of time, about 15 minutes.

We want to turn to the Norfolk Southern transaction update, also addressed in the next item.

Yeah, so thank you.

We are going to give a brief update of

where we are on our transaction with Northrop Southern.

We discussed this in the June board meeting and we've made great progress.

I'm going to do a few slides for everyone and then we're going to ask to go into closed session so we can go into more details on the contract of CRA, the rail agreement that we're going to sign.

So in summary, as I think folks will recall,

We made a deal back in 2021.

It was announced 2022.

It was codified.

We entered into the deal that would extend passenger rail from Roanoke out to Christiansburg.

The original plan was we would go over the Virginia line, which we purchased with this transaction.

We learned from that transaction that when projects are at 0% design, your cost estimates are at best not good, at worst they're bad.

So we brought this up and as we learned more and more about the terrain, as we learned about the mile-long Merrimack Tunnel and its current state of repair with regard to 2024 safety standards,

We determined it was going to be very expensive to get through that tunnel, through that big mountain to the mall in Christiansburg.

So we came back to the board in January of 2024.

And based on 30% design, we had three different options.

And those options ranged in cost from $546 million to over a billion dollars, depending on where we're going to go in the New River Valley.

I don't think I have to remind you that the lowest cost was a solution that got us to the east of the Merrimack Tunnel and to go any further south or west you would still have to go through that tunnel which is going to be tremendously expensive.

So when we presented those options to the board we not surprisingly got some pushback that that was a lot of money and the

decided to look for another option.

We reached out to Norfolk Southern and said, hey, is there another way we can do this because we really need to extend the service, but the cost is much higher than any of us imagined.

Thankfully, Norfolk Southern was receptive.

We got great support from the governor.

We got great support from the secretary and the secretary's office.

The former board chair, Janet Rule, played a huge role in

Getting everyone to the table and talking about a better solution as we presented to you all in June, we were in the beginning stages of coming up with that solution.

In June, we made a, we paused the work to go to the Cinnabar location, which was the location to the east of the Merrimack Tunnel to look for a better solution.

I'm here today to say that we have found a better solution and we're in the literal final hours of negotiations with Norfolk Southern to final minutes to

come to an agreement with Norfolk Southern that would really change the route of how we get to Christiansburg.

It'll get us there for a lower price, it'll get us there faster, and it will also give us control of the Manassas Line, which is a huge transportation piece of the transportation network in Northern Virginia headed from Alexandria out to Manassas.

So that's in summary.

I'll just give you background.

So here's the relevant territory you see in the upper right.

You're in Alexandria.

That is all currently owned by Norfolk Southern headed all the way down to Roanoke.

And then the last stretch from Roanoke to New River Valley.

We currently we Virginia currently on the V line and we are proposing to sell the V line back to Norfolk Southern and instead get access from Norfolk Southern to the main line, which is the end line that goes from Roanoke down to the New River Valley.

It's a shorter route.

It's shorter.

It'll get done more quickly.

And we'll talk a little bit about why that happens.

But as part of this transaction, we would also purchase the Manassas line, which is the line from Alexandria out to Manassas that VRE runs every single day, both Monday through Friday currently.

Here's the background of the old plan.

I have to go into detail on this because we've all seen it, but basically we thought the cost to extend to New River Valley all the way to the mall was going to be $257 million.

We thought we'd be able to start service at 2026.

We found out through design process once it got to 30% that it was going to be closer to 2030 to get all the way to the mall and over a billion dollars.

That's why we consider the Cinnabar location, which was still over half a billion dollars.

So we were looking for the cheaper alternative which is the one going to the south on the main line.

Norfolk Southern again was a great partner to us.

The way that we have negotiated the deal will save us over a hundred million dollars.

We will get access to the main line

The Norfolk Southern Railroad will build a platform for us at the Cambria location, which is the site of the historic passenger station that served from 1906 to 1979, I believe.

And we will own that hole that the transaction goes forward.

We will own that piece there.

The trains, when they get there, will let folks off at Cambria and then continue to the southwest to Radford, where Norfolk Southern is going to build us a layover facility where the crews can report and where they can do light maintenance on the trains.

And they'll build all of that and deliver that for us.

In addition, as I said earlier, on the Manassas Line, we will have the ability

After a period of years to control dispatch and control maintenance, and that will help us add both night and weekend bearing service, which we already have access to on the RFMP, which goes down to Fredericksburg, Spotsylvania.

This will give us the ability to add night weekend service on both lines, which is critical.

Here is a closer look at the map.

You see the difference between the beeline and the Christiansburg line.

I think I covered everything.

Oh, the other thing that this new agreement will add is one of the current Roanoke trains we can have stopping at Bedford, which is a huge win for the Bedford community.

As soon as they build a platform there, Bedford will do that.

And then it opens the opportunity in the future.

It doesn't guarantee, but it opens perhaps extension of service to Radford, a third daily Roanoke train.

And as we talked about in the January meeting and again in June,

At the old location, the Cinnabar location, any extension further south and west would have to go through that tunnel, which would be hundreds of millions of dollars.

This takes that Merrimack Tunnel out of the equation.

And if there is desire and funding to go further south and west, this allows that on a much easier basis.

The Manassas Line that we would be looking to acquire is 24 miles, as you see.

As I said earlier, it allows us to select the dispatcher, gives us control when a freight train and a passenger train are at the same place.

The dispatcher has to make that decision.

If we control the dispatcher, there's a better chance that the passenger train goes first, which it should.

It also, the deal has us acquiring seminary passage, which is

to the east of the Manassas Line itself.

There's a yard there that VRE or we could use for storage.

It's the key piece of infrastructure where the RFP, which is the line again that comes up from the south, and the Manassas Line come together.

There's a horn track there and they merge, as we've talked about with the Alexander Fourth track, that's where you've got basically five tracks going down to three currently.

We'll have control of that area as well.

A big part of what this does for us is right now VRE, when they provide service on Manassas Line, they have to negotiate with the freight railroad and determine what their access fees are going to be.

is not really competition there.

They have to negotiate with Norfolk Southern and Norfolk Southern says it's got to be this amount or nothing.

Rich's choice, unfortunately, is to either not provide service or to pay the amount that they say.

So it's kind of a one-sided negotiation.

This will give VRE slash Virginia much more certainty, much more predictability on what costs from service going forward are.

Oh, the dispatcher is the person that the control center that says, all right, train one.

Exactly.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Okay.

So there's a period of time where Norfolk Southern and

It is intended at this point to just be a layer of facility.

That being said, we understand and Norfolk Southern understands that when there's a layer of facility there, there will likely be demand for a service extension and we'd be naive to not think that was part of the next discussion.

We've got to get to Christian first.

And then just a summary, and I won't read these, but this is why the deal is better for us and it's significantly better for us, all of those things you see.

The one thing I am going to point out here, it is less risk for us because

Norfolk Southern has the responsibility to deliver platform at Cambria, the parking lot of Cambria, which is separate from the deal, but still parking lot, the layer facility, they are doing all of that procurement, they're doing all that construction.

That's all their responsibility to turn over to us, as opposed to us having to deal with construction companies, etc.

This is stuff that they do every single day.

So they're going to take on all the risk of that.

It's a huge win for us.

It will allow it to get done faster.

They have folks that can do this work in their sleep.

So that's a big win.

The pictures, if you look on the far right, that's the building as it was in the past.

It's the same building now.

The upper left is the 30 percent design rendering of what it will look like when it is complete.

As I said earlier, the current plan that would take us to Cinnabar, get service late 2028, early 2029, the deal that we are asking the board to approve today will get this work complete no later than 2027.

And I say no later than 2027 because when we started this whole process, we probably over-promised and didn't have the ability to deliver.

They will still use the end line, which goes from Roanoke to Christiansburg, freight and passenger, and part of this deal would give them $25 million to put a couple crossovers in, so there would be more fluidity, so there'd be more ability to go back and forth, so they're not in the way.

Exactly, right, right.

Oh, okay.

The B-line was single tracked.

I don't want to trigger PTSD, but they're also on the main line.

There are no tunnels.

There's one tunnel, but it's literally the train sticks out of both ends.

So there's not a mile-long tunnel on this one.

So it's double tracked.

So, we're not buying that whole right of way, are we?

The end line we're not buying.

Okay, so we're just paying for access, this is just a freight line railroad agreement, we're paying for access.

Yes, correct.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay.

Okay.

Then next step.

So we are asking the board to approve the deal today after we go into closed session and give you more details on the confidential terms.

Thank you for that.

And then we would close September 5th on the Manassas Line, September, October,

Rich and the VRE folks would consider approval.

Rich has already talked to the board, the chairs of each board, and he's got authorization to negotiate with us.

And then by the end of 2024, the exchange of the V-line for that last piece of seminary passage.

and then later steps you see the construction can take place.

So we're going to go into closed session five first.

My last slide.

Here is an overhead view of the Cambria location.

Right in the middle is the depot building, which is the historic passenger station.

Rail has a long and

Colorful history.

If you look to the left, just a little further west, right where the road crosses the track there, you see another depot.

That was the original passenger station.

And that became a freight depot where the freight crews showed up.

And now it's a bookstore.

But we would own the CPO in the middle, and then the New River Valley Passenger Rail Station Authority, they would be responsible for that building, any upkeep they want to do that building to make it a station.

We, slash Norfolk Southern, are responsible for just the platform and the parking.

The platform is fully ADA compliant, as you can see there it will have a 670 foot canopy, high level platform.

And the open session portion, we're going to give you more details on the terms, thank you very much, on the transaction.

All right, well said.

So with that, we're going to, I think Ms. Bulova is prepared to take us into closed session.

Ms. Bulova, I would mention that we'd also like to invite Deputy Secretary John Lawson in with us.

Chairman, I move that the board convene in a closed session pursuant to Virginia Code Section 2.2-3711A and 29 for the discussion of the execution of two VPRA contracts under negotiation.

One, a comprehensive rail agreement with Norfolk Southern for the acquisition of the Manassas Line and the construction of a passenger rail station

and Christiansburg, and two, a funding agreement with DRE to contribute funds for VPRA's acquisition of certain territory in Northern Virginia.

In each case, such contracts involving the expenditure of public funds and discussion of the terms

or scope of such contract where discussion in an open session would adversely affect the bargaining position or negotiating strategy of VPRA.

And three, a board member must second the motion and a roll call then will be held and we'll make sure that everyone who needs to be present, Mr. Lawson, should remain and other staffs who are

integral to the discussion.

Thank you, Mr. Second.

Second by Mr. Watkins.

Discussion?

Ms. Bulova.

Aye.

Ms. Bushue.

Aye.

Ms. Drake.

Aye.

Ms. Moses-Nedd.

Aye.

Mr. Payne.

Aye.

Ms. Rhinehart.

Aye.

Mr. Spore?

Aye.

Aye.

Motion carries, so it's your closed session.

... requirements under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act and only those public business matters as were identified in the motion by which the closed meeting was convened.

Ms. Bulova?

Aye.

Agree.

Ms. Bushue?

Agree.

Ms. Doersch?

Aye.

Ms. Drake?

Agree.

Mr. Jordan.

Aye.

Ms. Moses-Nedd.

Agree.

Ms. Rhinehart.

Agree.

Agree.

All right, thank you, everyone.

So we are back in open session, we say, so.

So in closed session, we put the board on a comprehensive rail

So we'll do them in both as distinct motions, though, for these two, okay.

So I would entertain a motion to provide the executive director the authority to execute 2024 comprehensive rail agreement between VPRA and Norfolk Southern.

Moved.

Ms. Bushue?

Aye.

Mr. Cardwell?

Aye.

Ms. Doersch?

Aye.

Ms. Drake?

Aye.

Mr. Jordan?

Aye.

Ms. Moses-Nedd?

Aye.

Mr. Payne?

Aye.

Ms. Rhinehart?

Aye.

Ms. Spore?

Aye.

Aye.

And also pursuant to our discussion in closed session,

Second.

Aye.

Ms. Bushue.

Aye.

Mr. Cardwell.

Aye.

Ms. Doersch.

Aye.

Ms. Drake.

Aye.

Mr. Jordan.

Aye.

Ms. Moses-Nedd.

Aye.

Mr. Payne.

Aye.

Mr. Rhinehart.

Aye.

Mr. Spore.

Aye.

Aye.

All right, thank you.

I believe I speak for the entire board when I say thanks to the staff, but also to these board members for their diligence and thank you, thank you to everyone.

So we are at the lunch break, I guess, for the public.

What is our

Schedule here.

We're actually about 10 minutes behind what's on the agenda, but we want to come back at usually 1.30.

What do we usually take?

30 minutes?

What's the pleasure of the... All right, so we'll plan to 1.35.

Does that work better to give you a straight up 30 minutes?

Okay, so we'll plan to start up again about 1.35.

Any emotion on that?

How about that?

So, as I mentioned earlier, we're going to go in depth on a few projects.

What I was focusing on today are ones that VPRA is leading the procurement.

As we've talked to some of you before, we have a whole matrix of projects that VPRA is leading or SAMSACS is leading, one of our other is now leading.

But we're going to focus on some projects that, frankly, you're going to come back in front of you for procurement.

Much like we reached out to you last year on Long Bridge North procurement, we're going to get into that in the next steps you'll see on

Some other procurements coming to you in the future.

Like always, we want to keep you updated and not to throw a permit at you at the last minute.

This graphic on the right is taken from the website.

There's a lot of projects out in the state from DC to Richmond.

And circled on them are the four.

Those are the four circled.

One circled on the right are the ones I've mentioned on the left.

So Long Bridge update.

Last December, it was brought to you by McCall.

He approved the

David Thrommes, Karen Kefleiteren, Scott Kefleiteren, Jordan Venture.

And this is a good graphic of Long Bridge and all the north package and the south package.

Obviously, you see the south package over the Potomac.

And as a reminder, the south package over the Potomac is a separate bridge from the current two-track CSX bridge, so we'll be adding four tracks.

That is the south package for Caramell, and that includes

W. Parkway, and the tie-in to the Algernon port tractor.

On the right in the yellow is the north package.

So in this slide here is the north package.

The update on this, you remember it's a progressive design build, so we have some steps built in to this.

And one is the initial binding construction price for both.

If you remember on progressive design build, we select the contractor, but unlike some other procurements, the price isn't yet determined, but we're

Undergoing that, we have some big milestones coming up.

As you can see, in October, the contractor's cancer plan will submit their initial price.

But I should stop, take a step back by saying they've been developing price.

We have something called an ICE independent cost estimator that's also developing price.

So we're continually talking.

But their official binding construction price proposal is due in October.

And we will review that.

get back to them at the end of October, and they'll continue to be in negotiation with them.

We'll have a, it says submit final BCPP, but it's really, we come to your agreement on that BCPP.

And if I say anything wrong, I'm going to let the others jump in, but we have to be, we want to be within 10% of the costs.

Otherwise we would come back to you and we would take this, we would have to change the permits instead of a progressive fire mill.

It would be the, it would be, we would continue on with the designer to 100%

If we don't come within the full price, we have to bid it out as a design bid bill, a traditional design bid bill.

Anything I said wrong there, Mr. West?

I said within 10% of our ICE, yes.

Of our ICE, I'm sorry, thank you for your time.

So that was in the procurement, because usually when you do a procurement, these costs are already in the procurements, their costs, the DPRA.

So what I'm hearing is, it has to be 10% of their costs in the procurement,

I'm getting your question, yes.

They're coming back to it from the construction cost.

We give you our budgets, that's the all in.

Right.

They're going to come back to us with their estimated construction cost.

Okay.

So what kind of estimate did they give you in the procurement?

Talk about the procurement.

You do not get pricing for the second phase.

We have our independent cost estimator on another track.

We have the contractor estimating our independent estimators cost.

I know these progressive design builds and some of that showing bypass CMGCs can be complicated.

We'll continue on.

I want to point out, I pointed out the

The construction factor is in the south.

The north went first because of the one through seven.

Most of those are in the north.

A lot more complicated in the north.

And I'm going to show you, if this works, the video which shows Long Bridge and shows in the north side, you have a lot of one structure bridges with four tracks on it versus over the Potomac you have two structures with two tracks on it.

So you got it.

Again, just under two minutes.

I want to show you about Long Bridge.

Any pictures, obviously.

That's Long Bridge Park, and you find extended there in the left, so we're still on the Virginia side now to get your barracks.

And we're going to take a right-hand turn here.

That's the G.W.

Park where we're hovering over right now.

You see on the right hand side is the current CSX bridge.

The new bridge will be built next to it.

And then the other bridge is the PED bike bridge.

It's part of our agreements with the EIS.

Yeah.

Yes.

And some of you were out there with the most, a lot of you were out there, this was in June, you're standing right over there, as you remember, thanks to the North Bank Potomac.

And over 395, we're just, we're not rebuilding the CSX bridge, we are building a new bridge.

But after this going north, it's gonna be one structure for all four tracks.

Again, we'll own two tracks, the two tracks, this goes to, we're talking about the Manassas Line, we'll have continual ownership.

The two tracks on the north that we own,

line up with the trains in the Union Station.

And you see the one structure, four tracks here.

And it's going over Ohio and Mayhem and the Federal Basin.

And the new wharf that's been built is just off the screen.

But one issue I have with this, there's a mountain of cars in 395.

It's been during COVID.

So let's continue on and go underneath Maryland Avenue.

It's a good reminder, I think it's a good visual, we got that recently from our designer, one of our designers, RKK, for that.

So again, I want to show you some of those one, two, three, one through seven bridges.

And the phase two negotiations that we're talking about will be happening.

So we'll submit the upcoming agreement in January.

And then after that, you have about a month that you cross the T's dot the I's.

And we'll brief you on this.

Again, we have a session in November and a session again in January.

So we'll be sure, as we've been doing continually, to continue to brief you on as we move forward.

So in the south package, we talked about this a little bit as far as what's working here.

And that's, again,

The main part is building span over the Potomac.

Now this one, our procurement director told me I can't say too much or can't answer too many questions because we're still in procurement on this.

Similar timetable last year, we hope in December, January to come to you with, let me give you the details.

So technical proposals are due next week.

That means from the final bids.

and then the month after that have been the price proposals due.

Then we have the end of October, very different period, some interviews and some decision-making, frankly.

And then we'll have a preferred proposal notice of intent is that just goes out only to the contractor we selected.

That is not a widespread type of announcement.

We don't do that widespread type of announcement until the board back.

Remember that very well.

Because that didn't happen in our tech.

I can see where you're building the two lanes and on the other side the bike pit, but then it goes into four tracks.

And so is this contractor building CSX tracks as well?

Yes.

CSX will be on the east side and we're already working with our contractors to make sure that traffic stays open.

And there's different elements that the team is working on.

because as we talked about earlier, this is CSX's main north-south route, and it's not something we can close.

Right, but we're working on various options.

Temporary, could be a temporary, it could be you also build two of the new tracks while you take some of the old ones out and build some more.

So we're working on that with our designers.

I'm still worried about 60% of the key phase coming in from Long Bridge North.

So, yeah, again, the notice of intent in the early November, and we have an, I believe, November 19th report briefing, and that will be an opportunity to review.

It might have to be, I'd like them to be in closed session because we're still in an active concurment.

So again, the initial notice of intent to award does not mean that they've gotten

That means preliminarily we've decided upon them, but we have to negotiate with them.

If negotiations fail, we can go back to another team.

So that's why we went into closed session with you last year.

That's why we did possibly might come closed session because we're still in negotiations.

And then NTP, one notice to proceed, that is for design.

So if you do decide this every January timeframe, we'll bring it again.

We'll have a detail briefing with you.

Do decide to select the contractor.

The NTP1 is for design, NTP2 is for construction.

And they will get out there pretty quick and start building some early works they need to do for the south package.

Abutment B, in case you're wondering what that is, that's the dividing line between the north and south packages, which is very important.

So the south package will build that abutment B

That's very important for the progress of the North Package.

We need that button to be built so North Package can continue on in their work.

Now, hopefully, substantial completion on 2030, by bridge will be done, but the way we're going to progress this project will be done after the bridge over the Potomac.

Any questions on Long Bridge?

And again, just want to brief you on requirements that are in some ways, because the first one progressive design build is still ongoing,

The second one, because this is definitely ongoing, but not yet selected contract.

Okay, another key project, and I neglected earlier to talk about the where and the why of this earlier today, Franconia Bypass.

We are purchasing, where the VRE stations are and where we're purchasing are on the east side of the tracks south of Franconia.

The Brook, Leland stations, most of them are on the east side,

South Franklinia, but the Beery stations and Amtrak stations are on the west side, north of Franklinia Station.

So if you think about the main Alexandria Station, it's west side.

The Longmont, Crystal City Stations, west side.

So the passenger trains if you're going from north to south, north, have to cross over.

That creates a traffic jam.

Just like if you're in a traffic light in the car, you have to take a left hand turn.

Might have a conga line to take it over.

So we're building the Franklinia bypass down the Franklinia-Springville area.

This is one of the phase one projects that is key

to getting more service in phase one on the CSX line and the Manassas line.

The board, at the same time last December, we did award the construction manager general contract to Flatiron and Herzog, and now we're currently at 60% design.

The construction cost estimate is due in October, and similarly to the cost negotiations with Long Bridge North, we're gonna have it with the finance.

Next year, early next year, with 30% assigned due, and they're trying to work at a guaranteed maximum price.

I know there's, first one has ACCPA, and this has GNP.

It's more or less, in theory, the same thing.

In reality, the same thing.

We also have an independent cost estimator here as well.

So they also, similar to that 10% also, we're working on independent cost estimator, a little things, guaranteed maximum price, but we do have an independent cost estimator.

We need to come through an agreed upon price, or else the same thing's going to happen.

We'll come to a degree upon price that will, the designer on hand will continue on to 100% design and then we'll have to put out procurement and come back to you for another contract for traditional design bid bill.

Hopefully that makes sense.

They're a little different PVV design bill from design bill versus Long Bridge South and then construction master and general contractor.

But again, we'll be continuing to brief you on these as well.

The last two, we haven't talked about much.

I want to talk about these.

Phase one includes three sidings, and CSX is leading the track work for all three, but two of them are road tracks, and we've had some good conversations with VDOT, who have given us some extraordinary improvements to allow us to go move forward with the road contracts.

Well, let me talk a little bit about the why of the rail.

So this is in the, this is in the Saturn County area, north of Fredericksburg, as you can see,

Thelma Creek Third Track, almost four miles of third track.

And actually the picture in the next one, it really says a thousand words.

So right here, you see two tracks here.

We need to expand to the third track.

But as you can see, the VDOT structure there is too narrow to add a third track.

So we need to add a third track.

We need to rebuild the bridge in the railroad, yes.

And

because we're actually going to increase for up to four tracks because the end goal of everything we're doing, especially at four tracks, definitely in the VRE territory down in South Romanian, so we can control our desks in the future.

So we're going to widen this.

VDOT, Stafford County have been very, very helpful with us.

We have public meetings coming up right now, public meetings.

I just won a conference call the other day on this.

We were at FAMPO last week on this.

So we are doing some outreach on this to let people know that the road closure is not coming for more than a year, but we're telling people in advance about the road closure.

This is not a main arterial.

I'm going to get to that in a second with a different project, but we're still very sensitive to road closure.

We'll add three minutes of time to travel during the year and a half or so, leave the road and be closed, but we are communicating with the locals there.

We're right next, but we are going to come to you with a procurement for

Someone to design, build for the road project only.

CSX for our matrix is building the tracks.

We need to coordinate that at the same time.

We need to build the road over, rebuild the road over.

This is just north of the intersection.

No, we will be owning the east side of the corridor.

If there's three tracks in the ground, we will own one.

There's crossovers up and down.

Crossovers up and down?

Okay.

And VDOT's fine with that.

We said rather than go back in at 10, 15 years.

The bridge will be big enough, right?

Yeah, the bridge will be big enough, yes.

This one's just a two-lane bridge, one lane each way, or on top of it.

So any questions on Leland, the Safford County?

We just actually, it was just last week, we had a, right John?

We had an industry call to get people ready for the contract that's coming out.

So when will you break ground on this?

Well, there's actually quite a few things we're doing in the area.

We're doing, in addition to the traffic work, we also have utility relocation.

We're working with Stafford County on that because they have utilities in the area too.

So now it's not just, CSX has a lot of perpendiculars.

The gas lines, if you will, but counties have a lot of sewer, wind, water, other type, that type of

utility work that needs to be done in that area as well.

So we'll be kicking that off into next year or so.

This break will be down for a year and a half.

Yeah, but it needs to be done.

The folks down there, we always start with the why we're doing this.

The why is we're adding more trains.

People want the weekends and nights.

Thank you.

Those DJ rides on Amtrak.

Weekends on Amtrak ridership is

is the highest that they've ever been.

If you look at what a lot of ridership, while they, that's not a lot of ridership, it might not be where it's at.

The weekend off peak hours are higher than they were pre-pandemic.

So we, adding that, or groups with CSX, you build up the phase one project, this is one of six, you get more service.

You build a phase two project, including Long Bridge, Smothers Siding, we get more service.

A lot of that is ninth weekend service.

That's people in these areas.

There's a housing development right near there.

People are clamoring for weekend service, and people in Stafford, they get it.

They're like, yeah, we want to see the weekend service count, because everyone knows 95 is just as bad on weekends, and sometimes more unpredictable weekends, because you don't know what direction the tollers are going than it is during the weekdays.

So the next one is Hanover Third Track.

This is not in Ashland.

It's trying to be very clear, not Hanover Track in Ashland.

It's north of Ashland.

Also a third track, putting a third track

I'm going to go right to the picture.

This is two tracks underneath Route 1.

And Beth, if you want to be safe, we're talking about, we'll turn those off at 81, much like if you've been on 95 and Waze or Google Maps gets you off 95.

Many of us have probably been over this bridge.

You probably have not realized it.

This is Main Arterial off of Route 1.

We've worked with them and we understand their recent

We can't close this for like we are in Leland Road.

The Leland Road, again, is just one lane each way.

This is two lanes.

This is two lanes each way.

This is the main arterial.

So working this is going to take a little longer, cost a little more money.

I should have some of the prices.

Our budget, this is the road work.

It's just as expensive, $70 million as the track work.

At Leland, because we're closing it, it's a lot cheaper.

$24 million range, whereas the track work was $157 million reading our budget, unless Steve's changed it in the last few minutes.

But it is required to roll the board because we can't close it because you have to base it longer.

It's going to be just actually $72 million more than the track work, which is $7 million.

So as you can see, it's very narrow.

You can't fit a third or fourth track in here.

And we're going to widen this and allow four tracks.

And for those who don't know, in Ashland, it's two tracks.

and there was a big hubbub back in 2016 about adding a third track through Ashland.

So this, what does that do with this project?

So if there's two tracks in Ashland, that's where a train station is, that's gonna cause congestion when the train stops.

So CSX, when we're doing our agreements from 2019 to 2021, identify the siding needed north of Ashland because you need a place for the train to get over inside to decongest downtown Ashland, because you're naturally gonna have a lot more congestion there

trained in north and south stopping the map speed.

So this is north map in Hanover.

And again, this is a project that will allow the area, will add the third track, will widen it for four tracks in the future.

Although this area, we probably won't see four tracks for market segments outside of the Erie territory.

So again, these are another procurement that should be coming to you.

That road procurement is something we'll take to you and see a section for procuring the track.

We're procuring the road.

Any questions?

Did Mike ask you to ask that question?

We have discussed that with VDOT.

We're discussing that.

We'll continue to discuss with them.

None of these are new bridges, though.

I will say that.

It's not like Nureville last year.

So there's three projects.

There are three projects, right?

Five of you include the two Long Bridge projects.

Oh, they're one and the same.

They're one and the same overall project.

So, Potomac Creek, Third Track.

Because we're doing a third track, we have to do the Leland Road reconstruction.

It's one aspect, Leland Road reconstruction, one aspect of the Daytona Creek third track.

See the Leland Road station?

Yeah.

And Mike,

Well, half of it's owned by them, and half, we're still going through the survey work, but we'll only have it within a year or so.

It's already railroad land.

Although if we have to make major modifications to the road, then you aren't talking about dealing with Stafford County and possibly others.

Okay.

Okay.

We're going to get into some more property issues coming up next, but for these two projects, yes, it is a lot easier if we're dealing with

the accountant who understands why we're doing this.

So again, yeah, so you could break it down into multiple projects, but Siting A has a rails and road project.

A rail is only necessary because of rail.

Any other questions?

And I wouldn't be surprised for sightings DE and F, which are phase two, these type of things seem to come up.

There are some other projects we have to... Carol Rowe and some other things we have to modify as well.

Question, we kind of need to probably talk about this a little bit, even in our next session.

Thank you, Mike.

All right, so we actually have a closed session coming up again.

This one's on a different topic.

Mr. Chairman, I move that the board convene in a closed session pursuant to Virginia Code Section 2.2-3711A8 for consultation with the VPRA Council regarding specific legal matters requiring the provision of legal advice

Thank you.

Ms. Bulova?

Aye.

Ms. Bushue?

Aye.

Mr. Cardwell?

Aye.

Ms. Doersch?

Aye.

Ms. Drake?

Aye.

Ms. Moses-Nedd?

Aye.

Mr. Payne?

Aye.

Ms. Rhinehart?

Yes, absolutely.

We are now going to take, let's see.

Our discussion is, yeah, right here, okay.

Take a roll call vote.

and I ask that each member indicate their agreement following.

In the interest of our knowledge during the closed meeting, the only matters heard, discussed or considered were those matters lawfully exempted from meeting requirements under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act and only those public business matters as were identified in the motion by which the closed session or closed meeting was convened were discussed with exception.

We did discuss some rail safety issues at the beginning of our closed meeting, in addition to then our discussing our real estate issues, which was in the motion to go into closed session.

Seconded.

Thank you.

Ms. Bulova?

Aye.

Agree.