Board of Directors Meeting   10/7/2025

All right, Madam Chair, Executive Director, Members of the Board, good morning.

Good morning.

All right, let's begin our briefing.

You're located at 919 East Main Street on the fourth floor.

If you exit left around the corner to your left is the women's restaurant.

If you exit right around the corner to your right is the men's restaurant.

There is a fire, there's a stairway, and a fire alarm there at each restaurant.

There's a fire extinguisher across from the women's restaurant.

If you go down the hall from the women's restroom, there's a fire station to your right.

For our safety assignments, when I call your name, please raise your hand.

Mary Stell Douglas, we'll call 911.

Back up, Michael Westerman.

Ivan Bob Bates, we'll do CPR.

Back up, Joan Robines.

Michael Proctor, we'll meet the first responders.

Oh, besides the city.

All right, back up, DJ Statler.

There's an AED at the security desk.

There's a first aid kit on the table against the wall.

If there's a fire, we will evacuate their stairwells.

Now, if we must evacuate, ensure the person to your left is present at our assembly point at the George Washington statue of North Madison Capitol Square.

All right, if you see something, say something.

Contact building security, call 911.

If there's an active shooter, flee, hide, or fight.

For those participating virtually, be aware to see emails and scans.

Know your medical emergency and evacuation strategies.

Do you have any questions?

All right, let's have a safe day.

Thanks a lot.

Thank you.

With that, our agenda item number three is a welcome from the U.S.

I just want to say welcome, thank you for being here this morning, and thank you to all of you who joined us for our board dinner.

We haven't had the opportunity to do that since I've been in chair, so we missed a couple of you who couldn't make it, but rather than just learning, it was a nice time for all.

So I will turn it over to Harry Estelle so he can kick this meeting off with our roll call attendance.

Excuse me, sir.

Mr. Richards.

Mr. Delandro?

Here.

Ms. George?

Here.

Ms. Drake?

Here.

Mr.

Flowers?

Here.

Mr. Jordan?

Here.

Ms. Lawrence?

Here.

Mr. Meister?

Here.

Mr. Payne?

Here.

Ms. Rhinehart?

Here.

Ms. Spears?

Here.

And now, I wanted to comment, but I do not believe we have anyone signed up

He wanted to comment because he had misunderstood that thinking there was going to be no continued service to Hampton Roads during the Long Bridge construction window.

And we explained that that was inaccurate.

So I followed up just to make sure we had all his questions answered.

And first of all, I wanted to compliment the communications team because we went overboard saying that you guys did a really great job explaining and sending everything I needed.

And second of all, I just wanted to make sure that the board knows we're working really, really hard.

And we're going to talk about this later in today's meeting.

But the comms team and DJ are kind of meeting with a lot of people and making sure that our message is kind of on point.

and accurate to make sure the public understands what these interruptions will be during Long Bridge construction.

Moving on from public comment, I will ask for a motion to approve the August 26, 2025, VPRA meetings.

Thank you, Mr. Delando.

All in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Any abstentions?

Hello.

For anybody that I have not officially met, my name is Bonnie Hite.

And so today we're just going to give you, provide you a report of our FY 25 financial statements and the subsequent audit results.

We typically have our teams of PB mayors here.

They're not here yet.

They will be here soon.

If you haven't had the chance to read over all 90 pages

Charlie Page-Turner.

That is the financial statements.

It's okay.

We've got you covered.

We're going to go over some key takeaways today so that you just have a high-level, you know, overview of what happened.

So in just a moment, hopefully Dwight will be here soon.

If not, I can go first and then we can move on to his presentation because he does have some required communications as part of the audit that he has to do, okay?

But before I do, I do want to take a minute to say thank you to literally every department within VPRA because all of them, they all contribute to the production of these financial statements.

From the project managers who helped us get, you know, all the estimates for the project expenses, all the way to the comms team who developed the beautiful furniture on four colors.

Everybody contributed to this.

It was an absolute team effort.

We would not have been able to do it without them.

And we just want to say thank you.

But I also want to give a very special shout out to our finance team who is sitting right over there.

We are less than one person who is on well as our PTO today, but as you all know we are short-staffed.

Maybe a smidge.

But we were able to get everything completed in time just for Steve Pitter to be able to sign off on it.

This is the last official act of CFL as you guys saw when you received the email.

So we were very happy that we were able to get that completed in time for that.

And then that way we weren't, he was

He kind of put his thumbprint on that last set of financial statements with our very clean audit for the 50th round.

We were really happy about that.

So typically, I'll send it over to Dwight.

Dwight's not here, so we're going to go through just a couple of things that I want you guys to take a look at and draw your attention to when it comes to the financials.

Next slide, please.

So it was completed.

It was on time.

They did express an unmodified opinion, which is the coach took clean audits.

And it was issued as of September 30th for the second year in a row.

This is a good thing for us because the first three years that we were in operations we did not get it done on time for the September 30th deadline and for the past two years we've been able to get that done.

So we were really happy about that.

We did have a single audit that was performed this year and what that means is that we have federal expenditures this year, okay?

So we had five federal programs that we actually had some distance on our expenditures with.

We had to have an audit.

The LMB has not issued their official advice, their official guidance for 2025.

So the auditors did the audit based on 2024 guidance.

Once that 2025 guidance has been received, we will be able to finish up everything and get those opinions issued.

I don't foresee there being any issues, but as soon as those are given by the auditors, we will certainly pass them up to the board.

Okay?

Any questions about that?

There's only so much I can answer if I don't control the OMB.

Sorry.

And then also the last thing that we were able to do is one of the things you're going to notice in this year's financial statements is that the presentation is a little bit different than in prior years.

And that is really because we were working to make sure we were compliant with GFOA best practice.

GFOA is the Government Planning Officers Association.

I'm sure you guys have heard Steve talk about this the past few years.

This was something he really wanted us to make sure we tried to get done.

We were able to at least put together the statements so that they were compliant with that, and we will be submitting for that certification.

It's essentially a certificate of excellence in financial reporting.

The RE gets it onto the other authorities' units, and we want to make sure that we are compliant in that manner as well.

Any questions about that?

Excellent.

Next slide.

Okay, so just a couple of key changes that I would like to just draw the board's attention to.

Access and Liabilities.

So we did have a couple of new lines that, make sure you guys saw, so we did have a line for due from federal this year, which essentially means that we had some federal expenditures that we reported that we had not yet received reimbursement from the government.

So we expected, we probably already got that actually in July or August, so that those should be clear.

A couple of the big changes were really in relation to the two big agreements that happened in FY 25.

So you guys will remember the transaction with Norfolk Southern for the M Line, for the M Line purchase, and then the subsequent swap for the Seminary Yard and B Line.

And then also the agreement with VRE for VRE purchase Seminary Yard, broadband corridor, platform easements, et cetera.

So some of our additional lines were actually in relation to all of those.

So assets held for sale, that is just the assets we will be conveying over to VRE once that transaction completes.

And then the Duchovitz on sale of assets and liabilities, also part of the VRH, that's the $26 million that they gave us, that we have not conveyed them in the assets, so we have to hold it as a liability on our books.

We have a big increase in rail infrastructure on land, but we've bought a lot of land in the rail infrastructure for the animals.

Our construction and progress, you're going to hear about that a lot.

You've probably heard about this all year long, right?

So like in every board meeting we've been talking about all the work that we've been doing, that is just reflected here in the additional CIP that happens, roughly $221.9 million.

We didn't put two subscriptions into service, so we bought a couple of information systems.

So one was Kahula, our project management information system.

The other one was FlareKnox, which is a right-of-way acquisition software.

So those two increased those lines as well.

And then that last liability line, that was the $42 million that we had left to pay to work at Southern, which we anticipate in August of 2027.

Any questions about that, you guys?

Perfect.

Next slide, please.

These are just a couple of slides just to show you some of the changes over the course of the past three or four years.

Essentially, our net position continues to go up.

We anticipate that's going to happen just because we keep building assets.

So as long as we are building them responsibly and managing our liabilities accordingly, we should be good to go.

Our quick ratio didn't dip this year down to four.

That's just because of the reduction in cash because we traded our current asset for a long-term asset.

That's all there is to it.

But we still have enough linked assets to cover our current liabilities forecast over.

So I don't anticipate any issues with that.

All right, so statement of revenues, expenses, and changes in net position.

These are just a couple of the key changes that I wanted you guys to be aware of.

Again, this is just a fancy term for income statement.

It's just your revenues and expenses.

So we did have a big increase in other Commonwealth of Virginia contributions.

And really that was, it was just an adjustment in FY 25.

It was scheduled.

So it was our additional Fred X contribution from VDOT.

which we got $8 million this year versus $15 million in April 24 and then some also additional money from the Priority Transportation Fund.

All of this is on schedule and anticipated to be in this way.

And just for a couple of things, these are a couple of things I wanted to make sure you guys knew.

So federal grant funds, that's the new line that we recorded this year, $44 million.

We did have to record on paper a loss of the disposal of assets when we did the swap of the B-Line and the seminary yard because we had some assets that were building up at that particular point in time that are no longer going to be of any sort of utility to us, right?

But obviously the airline was a huge investment that has a significant long-term benefit.

This is a one-year loss to get us to Christiansburg faster, better, more efficient, and then less cost to the taxpayer.

Just one question.

Can I understand the revenues we receive from what you call FredEx?

It's bigger than last year but not bigger than anticipated.

We actually got a last draw on that of FredEx just today.

So that was $92 million that we received from them today.

And that was the last based on the agreement that we have with VDOT for that.

And these are toll revenues from the I-95?

Yes, right from the toll facility, yes.

It's not something that's going to continue.

And we take it as revenues and spend it.

Thank you.

So this is just what our position looks like.

It's been positive every year.

We anticipate that to continue as long as we continue to build assets and keep our liabilities in check.

Next slide, please.

And this slide just shows a composition of our revenues over the course of, I did FY22 to FY25, but 21 was kind of an anomaly because we had that weird like

where we brought over the Commonwealth of Virginia contribution.

But I think it's just important to note that operating revenues of the Commonwealth Rail Fund, relatively flat, they're going to stay within an average that we anticipate.

Things like other Commonwealth of Virginia revenues and contributions from funding partners, those are going to fluctuate just based on whatever agreements are happening at that particular point in time.

Our investment revenues did go down a little bit this year.

And in fact, mostly due to the interest rates obviously went down a smidge, but it's mostly due because we didn't have as much cash on hand because we bought the app.

So that was the reason for that.

What is our Amtrak revenue?

Is that under operating revenue?

Under operating revenue.

And that's down?

No.

Okay.

It's 16%, but okay.

Yeah, because that was our first year, that was F-22, it was our first full year of operations here.

Any other questions you guys?

Then I'm going to bring up Mr. Dwight Burracker, who just came screaming in, and you can go back a few slides.

This is Dwight Burracker, he is with PB Mayors, which is our external audit department.

We have a question.

Yes, sir.

Can I ask a question, please?

Thanks.

The federal programs,

So it was the Fed State partnership with Long Bridge, it was the Chrissy Grant with Etherick, and the Newport News station which we passed through the Newport News, right?

It was Fastlane and DC to RBA, right?

And we also, we actually have five because I forgot about CMAQ, would we not?

So and that was actually to pay for the additional trains

on Route 47 and Route 51, right?

Route 47 and Route 51.

And the expectation is how much more?

It'll be a billion and so we'll talk a little bit more.

We've got more CMAQ money coming for fourth track and we'll be asking you to approve that and agree to be out later today.

We're also working with the FRA to get the hundred million dollars for the bypass that will be coming into this next year's or I guess the current 26 financial statements.

So we don't anticipate any problem.

I guess I'm directing the question about where we stand with Congress and what they're doing to us.

Okay, we are monitoring that very, very closely and these are contributions that we've received thus far.

They've been clearing them in 30 days, no more than 40 days, I think.

It is a little early, but I can only give the information I have on me today.

Yeah, and it's hard to put a date on it.

I mean, if you're six months into it, I think we're having a very different conversation at this meeting.

But if it's 30, 60, we don't envision any impact.

We certainly don't envision any impact on rail service because Amtrak has got the service and then the Amtrak side, Bruno's got the line, we're okay.

Well, the biggest thing I'm worried about is some of our contractors that get reimbursed or get paid.

Are they going to start screaming?

No, not within 30 days.

But I think as Bruno points out, come 90, we're going to have some conversations about cash management if we're not getting reimbursed.

And a lot of the folks at the FRA are still working because they're not funded by the appropriated funds.

So, again, as Bonnie points out, we're continuing to give.

And we're watching very closely.

Thank you Bonnie.

Bonnie's still on my thunder, so we'll go through the presentation.

It's not as exciting as what she had, but next slide please.

So just to introduce myself, I'm Dwight Verakker.

I serve as an audit partner on the engagement.

Also part of our team, Mike Garver.

He's our government niche team leader.

He's the concurring reviewer.

Every report that we issue

from GB Mayors has to have two sets of reviews.

So Mike is that final reviewer before we can release our financial statements.

Tyler Farnsworth, the director, he was the one that kind of made us the day to day operations, does all the work, I just get to show up and present to you guys.

So, next slide.

In the report, there are two opinions.

Both opinions are unmodified.

There's an opinion on the financial statements themselves.

They're located on pages nine through 11.

If you have the

The financials in front of you.

That's the highest opinion that we can issue as auditors.

Those are, it's one of the only pages in the report that belong to us.

No items to report as required by gas standards to follow.

That opinion is also unmodified and that's on pages 80 and 81.

The gas opinion speaks to internal controls of the entity.

We didn't have any, when we did our testing, all controls were operating, really things of that nature.

The audits were completed as planned, not a lot of significant changes to the approach we used from our planning phases.

The one item that I would like to point out, the financials, they were issued on September 30th this year.

It was due to the APA, but we kind of wrapped things up earlier, just going through final reviews, making sure all the items are dotted to either profit or not.

Just to commend staff here, they kind of get put behind the eight ball a little bit.

We don't receive all the information we need from the state to wrap up the audit.

And so there's some reporting that comes out that results in some significant adjustments and things that they have to go through, staff does, in order to finalize the financial statements.

So to turn things around in that 30-day period, that's just an accomplishment by the

Also this year with the federal funding that Bonnie mentioned, there is a single audit report that is still outstanding.

OMB has not issued their final guidance that we have to follow.

It's in draft format.

And until those standards have been released, we can't finish the same audit work.

But as of now, based on the draft compliance supplement, things of that nature that has been provided, we don't see any issues, but we just have to wait until we get the final guidance to finish that work.

With the government being shut down, not sure when we may see that.

So it could be next month, could be towards the end of the year.

There is one other report that we issue an examination related to BRS compliance centered around your pension plan, the state plan, things of that nature.

So, next slide.

These items Bonnie already touched on but I'm going to highlight them.

As she mentioned, net position increased $361 million this year.

Our unrestricted net position was kind of available to us to spend, $570 million.

We do have some restrictions on some of our budget, $50 million and that's related to the course of our revenue received and then net investment in capital assets that represents the infrastructure, CIP, right to use lease assets, things of that nature was $1.2 billion.

at the end of the year.

This just summarizes some of the significant estimates that are in the financial statements that auditors, we have to audit and make sure we're in agreement with those estimates.

I'm not going to read all of those, but those are the ones, those are the significant ones that we have to take into consideration each year.

As part of our audit, there were no audit adjustments.

So again, great job by staff.

Very frequently do we have audits where we don't have some adjustments,

They did a great job again this year.

Some of the items that we're required to communicate to the board are listed here.

Accounting policies and practices, adoptions of new accounting policies.

There was one new standard that we had to implement this year.

GASB 101 relates to how you calculate compensated absences, which relates to leave time, save time, things of that nature and the liability that we have to avoid.

Didn't really have a significant impact on the financials.

once we went through that calculation or once management did.

Next slide please.

There was no disagreements with management.

We didn't consult with any other accounts in order to complete the audit work.

Staff at VPRA, they did hire an outside consultant related to the M1 transaction EOI.

They were valuation analysts that helped with that transaction.

that we had to get an understanding for an audit as part of the audit, but we, the VP mayors, didn't consult with any other accountants.

No significant issues discussed with management, our difficulties in performing the audit, and then there is, included in our package, there is the engagement letter and representation letter that would be an issue as part of our audit.

Next slide.

Other areas of my discussion,

For broader legal activities, we weren't made aware of anything of that nature.

Independence was maintained throughout the audit.

We did issue a management letter.

And I just want to point out a couple of recommendations that were in the letter have already been addressed by the management at BPRA related to some hot seat work that we did.

As part of the engagement of last year, there were 14 items that came up that did not process.

All 14 of those items have been addressed.

kind of lingered into this fiscal year, but they've already addressed those issues and have taken care of those items.

Next slide.

Again, just want to thank the BPRA finance team, DJ, Bonnie, XF, I don't see Steve here.

He's here talking now on the phone.

They do a great job and prepare for the audit.

And like I said, with some of the reporting that doesn't get released to them until

mid to late August really puts us in a time crunch to be able to meet that September 30th deadline of the APA.

So we appreciate that.

All right.

If you guys have any questions, if you want to dig into the detail and geek out with me on financial statements, I'm happy to do so.

Just reach out to me and that's it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Good morning, everybody.

Thank you all for coming this morning.

We're going to do a brief executive director's report this morning because we sent out the September item a week ago.

We're getting to the point in the month where a lot of it's old data and I don't want professional data, but that shouldn't keep you from asking questions if you have any questions.

Just

The chair started off raising our communication team.

You're going to hear a lot of that today because we have a lot of outward facing work that's going on.

And here you see they do pop ups and just continue to try to educate the public on what changes they're going to see.

Here you see we're promoting safety and we're working with the State Police Trucking Safety Month with September.

The governor did a proclamation of Rail Safety Month and we really had a lot of

Interaction in the public just talking about the importance of rail safety as I think we're all aware that rail learning is a very unforgiving industry and there are so many distractions that we all are subject to whether they're earphones or phones or people in a rush you've got to be careful when you're anywhere near train tracks to be safe and to make safe decisions and the team has done a great job of going out and reinforcing that message so

Kudos to them for the time they spent and we just get incredible feedback from the public about those events.

In addition, just a shout out, we did win Amtrak Virginia once a Plier of the Year from the Virginia Restaurant Logic and Travel Association.

So we had 1.4 million riders that kind of helped bring tourism and economic development to the Commonwealth.

And we're recognized for that.

So congratulations to the team for that.

This came out last month to the EMS.

We got the submittals for our enterprise asset management system.

As we've talked about in the past, and Bonnie alluded to it in the financial statements, part of our mission is to buy and own capital assets.

And we are the railroad owner.

We own the maintenance.

And the upkeep responsibility that transitions to us in the next few years as all these construction projects are done and we need to make sure that we as an entity have a management system that says here's how many switches we own and here is the last time the switch was upgraded, etc.

And anybody that's been a major railroad or major infrastructure operation knows that the validity of that data or the accuracy of that data is so critical to making sure that you have a good railroad.

So we're starting that process now of putting that system in place so we can get information from Norfolk Southern and CSS and in good shape for when we take over the maintenance.

These are the 26 organizational goals.

My goals, the goals of the organization.

We present these every month, as you know, and we give you an update of where we are on track.

These goals started on October 1st, and we're on the 7th.

We've not completed a single one, so sorry about that.

As we go through, we'll continue to track how things are going.

And in the last meeting, we went through these in pretty good detail.

We spent over an hour on these goals.

But any questions on these?

OK.

All right, passenger service updates.

This is the ridership from the month of August, but we continue to see good news.

We saw a 9% increase in ridership across Virginia, which continues to show that if we put the trains in place, people will buy them.

We'll talk later about proposed service changes for Long Bridge.

And one of our biggest concerns is balancing the ability of our construction team to get the capital work done.

with our desire to continue to keep people off the road.

What we don't want to do is build a brand new bridge and then add new trains and no one wants to ride them because they're so disgusted with what the train service has been in the past five years.

So that balance is important.

You'll see, I think as we go forward, how that construction impacts our ridership and we're working.

We're going to be very nimble and make changes as we

Here's the ridership broken out route by route.

It's good news across the board, and it continues to be, which is great.

Overall, FY 25 to 24, we saw almost a 5% increase across the board.

This is indicative of what we see across the country, but Virginia continues to be a leader in ridership and ridership increases.

We're really setting the bar pretty high for everybody else.

One of the things that we do that we don't talk about a lot in Virginia, Jeremy talks about it in his presentation just about at every board meeting, but Jeremy does not have a slot today.

So I just wanted to bring up, we are the only state that Amtrak deals with that has a customer service standard program.

And we put this in place over the last couple of years to make sure that, yes, the trains

We're not getting the experience that they deserve, that they pay for, and actually that we pay for as well.

It's not a success for us.

And so the Amtrak team worked with us.

We developed a set of standards with metrics that say, okay, here's what you're meeting, here's what you're not meeting.

We go out, we do 60 to 70 inspections every month.

Everyone on our team has an app on their phone, so if they're riding a train for business or riding a train for personal reasons, they can say, hey, the announcements were really good, wow, the trash can was full, I went to the station and the PA system was broken.

All of that feedback comes in and we rate and track on how they're going.

You can't, you'd have to count it yourself, but when we first started this program, they were compliant on about four out of 15 of the measures.

And you look nowadays, they've got almost all of them.

So they've really been great partners on this.

And if you talk to the folks that are on the train, the onboard service folks, they really like this.

They don't see this as a, hey, I got you, you're doing something wrong.

They see this as an ability for them to go to their leadership and say, look, we've had Wi-Fi issues on this plane, on this train, excuse me, over and over again.

The only way to make the Wi-Fi better is to address the equipment on the train.

There's something broken, we've got to fix it.

Additionally, they real time, if there's a PA broken, we'll bring it to their attention.

They'll say, well, we didn't know you could hear us in the Ford car, and they'll fix it right there.

It's just been an incredibly positive program to keep the customer satisfaction as high as it can be.

I mentioned earlier, we're the only state that has it.

with great power, great responsibility, and other states just inundate us with, hey, come talk to our state.

How can we put this in place for us?

Jeremy and Ashwini have done a great job.

They've presented at the state Amtrak Intercity Passenger Rail Committee.

And this is something I think we will see as a country roll out more in the future.

Any questions on this?

For this data, we have one person who rides the trains pretty much non-stop and fills out the surveys, and then anyone on staff that is riding fills it out as well.

And it's interesting to compare the information that we get with some of the customer service surveys that Amtrak gets.

I mean, sometimes they're aligned, sometimes they're a little bit off.

We ask a lot more detail about that.

In here, I talked about this a little bit earlier.

You can see our train, Virginia trains, our ridership per train is higher than some of the other big states, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, et cetera, continues to be a trend.

We've been ahead of the other states for the last few years, and we don't envision that changing.

Cost recovery, Dwight and Bonnie talked about this.

We did get our final books closed September 30th.

Steve signed it and then went out the door.

We achieved a cost recovery of 76%, which is a good number for any public transportation.

If you look at buses or subway, you're not going to get that high.

We're comfortable with 76%, but we want to continue to bring that higher.

Cost recovery is basically what we pulled in from the passenger revenue compared to what it costs.

In a perfect world, you would make more money on revenue than you spend on expenses.

But in public transportation, we are comfortable that that's not the case.

We would love for that to be the case in a couple of years, but that's continued progress.

Oh my gosh, yeah.

It's not 84.

The long distance service in the 30s, that's for most of the loss.

It's that high.

Right.

Right.

Do we ever compare ourselves like we have the different states?

California's... We're proud of our 76.

We love all the other states and we're proud of the 76.

Among the states, it's the top.

I didn't want to say that because they're all doing a good job.

They're all doing a good job.

We're proud of our 76.

You're our favorite state.

And just further into that, so here, and I don't want to go line, but if you want to go line by line, you're welcome to, but this chart shows you the revenue.

So our budget, the operating revenues, this is just what comes in from train operations.

You can see how our revenue was higher than what we budgeted and our expenses were lower than what we budgeted.

So just on those two pieces, we were pretty close to break even, and then you've got to add all the marketing and other things, but this is what feeds into this

76%, every single line item we look at how we can boost revenue and Haley and her team work on marketing.

We go out and we do, we go to like festivals and say hey ride Amtrak.

We have a lot of public events that encourage folks to ride the train and we also work with the operations team on okay how can we with Amtrak get the cost down, how can we become

Here's the breakout by route.

We include this every month just for your information.

It's pretty straightforward and thankfully it doesn't fluctuate all that much.

So how we pay for train operations, last month Ashwini did a presentation on how the 209 agreement works.

Just as a reminder, PREA was passed in 2008 and what that said is that all states need to pay for their Amtrak service.

Through the course of the last decade, the 209 policy, so it's under section 209 of that code,

It created the state supported service and there's a 209 methodology that comes through and says okay if you want to run this many trains here's how much you're gonna have to pay and it really goes into a lot of detail.

We have an annual agreement with them, knock on wood, that starts every October and ends in September.

That becomes a little painful because the numbers are not always available and we frequently have

Well, we're finalizing numbers.

And in fact, right now we're at the sixth of October and we're still working on last year's agreement.

So we're close to being ready to sign the next agreement.

What we're looking to do now is

All of the basics of our relationship and then just every year the numbers would change.

What we're looking to get today from you all is to give me the authority to sign that long-term agreement.

We have the FY26 numbers.

They're not final, but they're really, really close.

If you looked at the chart before, last year we were right in the just over 90 on revenue, just over 90 on expenses.

We expect that to be the same, in fact, estimate as of this morning.

was total cost of 92.8 million and total revenue of 91.9.

So they're right balanced.

We would hope that you would grant me the authority to enter into that agreement over the next couple of weeks as those numbers are finalized.

And then, of course, we can send it out to the agreement itself was sent out to in advance.

It's longer than Bonnie's financial statements.

So we read hers first.

But we would like to request approval to allow me to enter into that agreement.

Mr. Westerman, anything I missed or anything you want to add?

So just, we're the first in the country to do a long-term agreement.

Amtrak does annual agreements with every state.

There's an appetite to do a long-term agreement because eventually we're going to use the ticket revenue to go into financing.

So it looks good to potential creditors, so we have a long-term agreement to get that revenue straight at the door.

And that was Mr. Westman's idea and Amtrak wasn't a huge fan of it at first but he showed them the telling argument for why we should have it and if that is approved and goes forward it's going to be a huge win for us.

Amtrak will probably then look at all the other states and they'll say well why don't we have this so it will change the way they really have agreements with the states which is good.

So just to clarify, today we will be voting to authorize you to execute the FY26 agreement that is in this new long-term agreement structured form.

And that is not explicitly setting a number of years in the term.

Yeah, you're right.

Other question, what are any of the downsides?

Well, the con would be, I don't know of any con, meaning it locks us into using Amtrak as a provider, but we're locked into Amtrak as a provider anyway, as part of our overall deal.

The numbers, as the Senator pointed out, the numbers will change every year and it's part of a policy, the computer just spits out the numbers.

We're beholden to Amtrak for 40 years, starting back in 2021.

This agreement will not, I guess it could go that long, but that's not, it's not contemplated.

We will not refresh this and just make sure that all the parameters make sense.

So I guess my answer is no.

One final question.

In terms of Michael's thing about we want to bond against the ticket revenues, we've already gotten Amtrak to give us the ticket revenues, not just a credit, right?

That's correct.

But this is just an addition, like belt and suspenders?

By far, by far.

And this will just get us out of any criticism, if we've not heard this criticism, any criticism that says, well, wait a second, you've only got an agreement with them to get this revenue through next September.

What happens October 1st?

And we say, well, we'll extend the agreement like we have every year in the last 10 years.

This gives us more.

That would be our hope.

Definitely lowering the risk, for sure.

Good job, Michael.

Let the minutes reflect.

Good job, Michael.

Any more questions?

With that, I would request a motion to approve authorization for the executive director to execute the new FY26 Amtrak 209 revised agreement.

Thank you.

All in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Any abstentions?

And just confidence, Michael Westerman was really a huge part of this, but Jeremy Ashwini, the team, really have worked with Amtrak to get them comfortable with this as well.

So there are more people than Michael to recognize, but it's a good thing for us and it's a good thing for Amtrak.

Capital project updates, normally I would punt this over to

We're going to take it myself because after this item, we're going to do it more detailed construction updates, which Michael will be leading.

So I am going to run through this.

I reserve the right if you ask me a question and I look like a deer in the headlights.

I may look over to Mike and he's going to jump up, but I feel pretty good about this.

First and foremost, we talked about communications team.

We have a lot of links in this month's report and we have a lot of videos that we're not going to play today.

However, we are going to take those links and we're going to put them in the chat area of the YouTube video.

These meetings live on

This is a construction disruptions map.

The team has put in place a map of our entire project area that is interactive and allows folks to click and say, okay, I'm a boater.

I know there's construction going on on Long Bridge South.

What impact will I see, if any, during this time frame?

You can click right on the river and it'll say, oh, there's a marine warning.

There's going to be equipment there.

But during these dates, it probably won't be in the river.

So you should be fine during these dates.

Long Bridge North, click on it.

Main Avenue is going to have a lane closed from this day to this day.

So it gives the public an interactive way to look at how their commute and how their traffic flow both on land and on water is going to be impacted.

We piloted it, we did it internally.

Jerica and her team had very thick skin because a lot of us were, we had a lot of constructive feedback for it, and it's really in a good place now.

We're comfortable producing it.

So I know Jerica got a little PTSD there, but it's out there and people use it and it's a good tool, so we'll send you the link for that.

Update on Francando Springfield Bypass.

We have the final 100% design and we are reviewing that.

We started construction on the shoe fly already.

We've got some pictures that show that and we continue to be on schedule to get this done in 2029.

Here is some of the outreach I talked about earlier that the communications team has done to let them know, hey, here's what's going to happen in your neighborhood.

Here's when you're going to see some changes.

The good news is on this project, there's not a lot of traffic change because it's in an area where there aren't any roads.

I mean, it's thankfully pretty far away from neighborhoods all being considered.

We've got the neighborhood right by the Springfield Metro that will be bringing equipment through.

But other than that, this one doesn't have that big of an impact.

I will point out, I mentioned this earlier, as part of our funding plan back in 2020 and 2021, PDOT agreed to give us basically $70 million worth of CMAQ funding, and CMAQ is congestion mitigation funding.

That comes from the federal government, flows through state transportation entities,

We have an agreement with VDOT where we're going to get $70 million.

$56 million comes from the government and the other $14 million is going to be provided by VDOT as our non-federal match.

We're asking today for you all to approve, approve, authorize me to sign the agreement with the FRA to take that $56 million.

It's revenue that's going to come in and go right to our projects.

We're going to ask for that to be approved today and then this afternoon, because that's over $50 million.

This afternoon, I'm going to email you a notice to approve a second agreement, which is an agreement between us and VDOT to take that other $14 million.

So that's the whole seven.

This is the agreement with FRA.

This allows us to accept $56 million to go to the projects.

And then this afternoon, I'll send you one that's only for $14 million.

That one you don't need to vote on.

You just need to be aware of it.

I wanted to talk about it first before I sent you the notification just because it's confusing.

Wait, this is CMAQ.

This is CMAQ.

The total will be $70 million that we will get through congestion mitigation funding.

This has been a plan for a long, long time.

DJ, from an accounting perspective or body scene, do we consider our CMAQ funds other commonwealth sources, or are they considered federal sources, right?

It's in one split.

So that typically tells us if it's 80% federal, 20% state.

If it's the state fund that goes into other than Commonwealth of Virginia contributions, if it's federal, it goes into federal funding.

And as such, are we getting part of this $56 million that we're going to get for big CMAQ funds?

Yeah, that's exactly right.

So every year they do the six year plan and then they break out the CMAQ into a bunch of different projects.

CMAQ is only for federal.

It's only the federal revenue coming in.

It's a federal, in itself doesn't have it somewhat of a safe

So it's 70 total, 56 is federal, and 14 is our match, this Virginia match that's coming from BDOT.

Any other questions?

Hearing none, I would request a motion to approve authorization for the Executive Director to execute the CMAC grant agreement with FRA.

Do I have a second?

Thank you, Mr.

Flowers.

All in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Any abstentions?

Just one sec.

Excellent.

Thank you.

And then reminder this afternoon, I will give you a notification of five days from now, we're going to sign up for the other 14 million with VITA.

Here's an update of the signing projects.

Pretty straightforward.

Things continue to move forward pretty well.

We're going to talk in a second.

We hear the other capital projects again.

No, no really red flags.

Things continue to progress forward.

It's no news is good news and we're surrounded by good news.

We'll talk about grants in a minute.

Here are the capital project expenditures, FY25 budget to actual, pretty much where we expected to be.

As we've seen many projects moving into construction, this money is going to flow more rapidly and Bonnie and Selma and the team are ready from a cash flow point of view.

So we're in good shape there.

People are just going to be out of confidence.

Bonnie is a little less confident.

So we're in good shape there.

Here is the breakdown of Western Rail.

We have a video to show shortly.

This is one we actually will show of the work that's taking place in Western Rail, specifically at Cambria and Radford.

The dirt that's moving there is amazing.

We're both Southerners making great progress there, and I think you'll be excited to see that.

The communications team is going to be out there with a small group of folks, the mayor of Christianburg and a CTP member, just to look at that progress.

But that

And as I think folks, Ms. Rhinehart and others will know that that whole community is incredibly excited about what's happening there.

So, let me think quickly.

All right, property transfers.

This is what I wanted to talk about in a little bit more detail.

So you have all heard over the course of the last few years some of the challenges we have had in reconciling what we thought we were purchasing and what was actually being purchased.

I'm thrilled to announce that in the five big jurisdictions, we've made it through the entire progress.

We've gotten all the survey work complete.

We've high-fived with CSX and said, yes, we agree where the boundary lines are.

We've dealt with the local communities.

We've dealt with the core folks and said, yes, this is where the boundaries are.

And we just two weeks ago received and recorded the deeds of confirmation.

So this land is officially ours.

All the project work that the design was held up because we didn't know if our line was here, if our line was here.

All of that has been resolved, and we can rest easy that for these five big jurisdictions, all of that work is behind us.

That's a huge piece of good news.

Joe Yogman on Michael Westman's team was just pivotal.

We've got our real estate team has been working hard to just get this in place and do the right thing.

As we've talked about, we had the opportunity.

We could have moved forward with design, not confirming these until later, but we didn't want to do that.

That just put us at too much risk.

Ms. Doersch, exactly, we don't want to do that.

So this is all done and we have confidence that we know what right-of-way is ours and what it stays at.

So that's just a huge piece of good news.

Specifically project by project, we have slivers of land that we need to acquire right away, we need to acquire.

Here's the status, we continue to make good progress there.

And none of this activity is impacting any of our project schedules at this point.

So continuing good news there as well.

Capital and Operating Grants update.

We have the Staunton ADA and State of Good Repair Improvement Grant that we put into the Federal State Partnership Program.

Unfortunately, FRA has decided that they are not going to issue NT 2024 grants and they have encouraged us to reapply.

So we will put that application back in for what will be a combined 2024 and 2025 process.

If there's a lot of work that needs to go, we met with them a couple months ago, plan on going up again.

Getting that approved would be good, but we can't until we get any federal funding, we're not going to, we just can't put that forward.

And then the Richmond Layer Facility, the Central Virginia Transportation Authority put in, Enrico put in on our behalf a request for $15 million, and we'll find out about that sometime in a couple months.

We had earmark, I'm sorry it's not an earmark, we had congressionally directed spending that was in the appropriations bills of two million dollars for the fourth direct project and that with the entire budget being in limbo is also in limbo, but that we'll find out when we find that.

Any questions about our grant funding?

All right, here's the final FY25 budget actual.

And then here's the Western Rail stuff, notes for the Calvert team, the double track, Norfolk Southern is going to put that out to bid.

We expected that to be done by last week.

They have a little bit of a permit issue with VDOT that they don't want to put out to bid until that permit is done.

It may be a little bit of a delay, but nothing that they can't make up.

And then the work in the Roanoke Yard is ongoing.

We don't have a video of that, but there's a lot of work.

Revenue and investment.

Everything continues to be good news.

Our Commonwealth Transportation, Commonwealth Rail Fund, excuse me.

We are right on schedule starting FY26.

You see July, we were a little higher than expected.

August, we were a little lower than expected, exactly the way it's worked for the last four years.

No reason to believe that we're not going to hit our flow 26 revenue of about $170 to $1 million 172 years ago.

So good shape there.

Investment, we've got about $500 million that we're investing over the first couple months of the year.

So far, two months, we've got about $3.5 million of income, a little higher than what we expected.

So that's good news, but we continue to move forward.

Low risk, protect our capital following the investment policy.

Everything's in good shape there.

Here's the breakout of what we have through all

Thelma Drake,

continue to sit on a good cash violence.

And this is a critical thing for us because with Long Bridge with the bypass, when we put the contracts out for bid, the potential vendors knew that we had the cash in hand, that there wasn't a risk of the project going to fund halfway through.

So this is a big part of why we've been able to get good competitive bids.

And here's the 12 month return through August.

Again, pretty much as expected.

I wish I had something exciting to show, but it's just all continued goodness.

Norfolk Southern is doing it.

So as part of the original Western Rail Initiative, we had $36 million that was set aside for the Roanoke Yard.

and others said that they needed to get that work done in order to, right now the trains stop in Roanoke.

If you go further west, the first thing you can get to is Roanoke Yard.

So in order to get to Christiansburg and beyond, they said they needed a clearer path through Roanoke Yard because they didn't want the passenger train to get in the way of their freight trains.

They said that it would be a $36.5 million project that they would do and our agreement gave them $36.5 million.

Since then, they have made some scope improvements

and the price has gone from 36 to somewhere in the 50s.

But as part of the original agreement, it was $36.5 million for the yard and then $13 million a year in what's called the Western Rail Initiative Fund that Norfolk Southern could draw into for any improvements on that infrastructure that would improve the fluidity of passenger service there.

And basically they have to show us that, and Mike, if I say something wrong, jump in.

That was part of what we do.

VPRA.

They've come to us and said, 36 and a half, we want to do more.

We Norfolk Southern want to pull from that Western Rail Initiative fund for female and we said, we see that it does improve the passenger flow.

If I can, we've learned from experience in the past that if people didn't get into a railroad to build through a yard,

The Amtrak train operates at a certain speed and in our agreements it has the speed chart in there so they have to maintain that speed for them.

It maintains the speed of Amtrak.

The Amtrak train is going to be ripped 2 miles from 3 yards.

Yeah, if I could see what the freight would do.

Yeah, they don't put the yard all right.

We're going to actually put these kind of charts in the agreement to make sure they get through any time of the fashion.

Plus, they have an incentive plan that if they reach a certain percent of on-time performance, they receive all that policy.

The more that on-time performance goes down, the less money they receive.

And knowing that, that encourages them to continue to get through, grow in their yard as fast as possible.

Good, Mike.

That's smart.

For clarity, Mike earlier said that we've learned from experience.

Yeah, good for you guys.

Good.

Yeah, that is speaking of it.

As Mike pointed out, in our agreement with Norfolk Southern, we pay them an access fee, but if the on-time performance is less than 80%, we don't pay them the full access fee, we pay them a portion of the access fee, and if it goes down below I think the number 30, we pay them none.

And they get it, they know that.

So administrative updates, just to be quick, pretty much steady FTE.

We've got jobs open, no new hiring activity in September.

We've got two folks that come on board in October.

And then here's the final administrative budget as of the end of FY 25, pretty much on track.

We're starting now where we'll be tracking the 26th budget to actual starting next month.

And then

We'll be working over the course of between now and January to present the 27th budget to you all.

Hard to believe it's fantastic.

That is the Executive Director's report.

And I'm three minutes early.

Then we'll move right along for our construction updates report.

I'm going to ask Shirley and Jack one more question.

So DJ said we're moving to a slightly different model where the major projects, since they're getting to construction, they thought we'd have a separate section.

I'll kick it off and hand it over to Charlene and then Jeff.

Just to kind of set the table, we're talking about the major projects under construction, which really works in other packages.

We have something called, notice receipt NTP, ER can be the package.

It's a way to speed up the process, the construction process.

So I'm not going to read all of these.

We're going to go through the projects anyway.

So talking about Long Bridge North, the first Long Bridge package that was a notice to proceed.

I had a question about that.

Just to be clear, this one was issued notice to proceed in January of 2024.

That was to take the design from 30 to 60%.

Then we also had a notice to proceed for the early works packages, the early, early works packages.

That was in January of 2045.

So you're going to see pictures of the work that has been produced because of that early works NTP.

And then finally, we did have the negotiation period to negotiate the price for this package.

Remember, this was progressive design bill that took a good nine to 12 months straight to get through, Michael.

But then the notice to proceed for phase two was on July 3rd.

So there's like a progression of notice to proceeds, but we have been working in the field to negotiate that contract.

So recently completed, we did take the disused track that was under the Maryland Avenue overbuild out of service.

We removed it so that we could make way for the construction of the reinforcement of the crash walls under the overbuild.

We did do the demonstration, drill shafts and micro-piles in East Potomac Park right there along the Washington Channel.

And then we also did a traffic shift and closure along a series of these over the years.

I was out there yesterday, and I was shooting by the area.

You know construction's happening.

Yeah.

There's quite, so you can't.

Yeah.

It's quite some big machinery out there, digging up the old roads.

Yeah.

And we have pictures of them.

There's a lot more of them.

So ongoing, again, we're doing a fresh wall strengthening of the entire lab.

We have been removing trees as we're getting approval to do that in various areas where we get property rights.

And then the CSX Duck Bank relocation.

That's another major element of work that we had to get the trees out of our way first.

And we will be doing that directional bore very soon, probably in a couple of weeks right there at East Potomac Park.

Additionally, upcoming, this installation of additional construction lay-down area at East Potomac Park.

If you've been out there, there's those raw fields.

Right there, kind of in between Washington Channel 395, that's going to become one of our major offices out there and the modular buildings for that are supposed to arrive in the middle to end in November.

Also, utility relocation, we're going to Nathan Lane and Main Avenue, that's what we did the traffic shift for.

That actually is occurring now.

Washington Gas is out there doing their relocation.

So that's pretty exciting that they're out there, as you know, that can sometimes be a source of delay.

And so we're very excited that they're out there.

So just some pictures from recent work.

Here's where the disused track was made, taking way through the crash wall work.

And then pictures from over the summer when we were doing the natural shafts and micro piles in East Potomac Park.

All that work is done out there, you just see it on the field.

Then here, this discusses the traffic shift that we did.

Basically, we're making a read for all of this work that's going on right here, right now, most of that being taken up by Washington guests.

and we can just see some of the pictures from the Institute of that shift.

It's been very successful.

Basically no changes to the experience of the driver going through this work zone.

That will come later, but for now it's very smooth sailing out there.

And then just some pictures under the Maryland Avenue overbuild of the crash wall reinforcing work.

We are basically done with the first element here of crash wall D and then crash wall F which reinforces

The Twelfth Street Overpass, DDoS bridge, and then we're moving on to Crash Wall C, which is closer to the portals development on the west side of the project.

That work will be a little more substantial where we'll hop in to make the walls much thicker and then deeper.

It's to protect the bridge?

It's a very busy area, Natalie.

We're right on the floor.

Well, there's that.

But then they're also building another building right behind portals.

Yeah, it looks really dangerous.

Yeah.

They're not tearing it down.

They're taking off the casing and they're adding a couple more floors and then redoing the outside.

Wow.

Yeah.

Have we figured out, we're going to be really close to, is it Salamander now?

What's the name of it?

Salamander?

Yes.

Right next to it.

Right, exactly.

When you go into the tunnel underneath, going north to Salamander is on the right.

Enter this tunnel.

So it's nice in some ways because there's other disruptive stuff going on.

Hopefully we can just get all these projects done.

That's really dangerous.

So yes, and we will be doing the crash fall on the other side next to salamander 2, but that's a couple years down.

And then this is the area where the by the ball fields will be particularly

Those are just where we play professional softball.

We're only taking one of the two fields there.

All right, and then any questions on North package?

Let's move to South, which is also underway and doing lots of work at the field, or at least they work.

They were going through their scope validation period.

That's basically a six month period from when they received, you know, they didn't have some delays getting onto a lot of property, getting onto CSX, NPS property.

And so we haven't given them an extension for those areas in terms of their scope validation, which is fine.

So they've done all of this work, utility searches, surveying, monitoring structures, and then the geotechnical warrants, we'll show you some pictures of that, that was a very impressive operation they had out in the river this summer, they are completed with that work now.

So it can be from the scope validation period,

A lot of bridge surveying and existing long bridge surveying, we need to do that as well.

And then obviously getting all these permits has been a huge undertaking.

You know, from FAA, from NBS, from building environmental perturbation agencies, it's a huge undertaking to get all the permits necessary to move on to the next phase, which will be the test pile program, both on land and in the river.

We are basically ready to go, but that's just waiting on those permits.

So that will be the next thing that you see out there.

And in addition to the construction of the marine bulkhead, which they will need one on either side of the river and that will help with the test file work of the river.

So just some pictures of that soil burning work that Natalie and some of the people showed you a video of their work on that screen.

I think that's very interesting.

With that, I think that's it unless there's any more questions.

Charlie, just a quick question on the south package, right?

I'd have to say the government shutdown hasn't helped, right?

The permits that we were expecting are the ones that we asked for.

So it just depends on how long the shutdown lasts.

If they're under a position that they're not going to issue any more permits while they're shut down,

To that end on permits, are the Long Bridge projects subject to like kind of the kind of one federal decision policy, right, is that we have to go to each of these agencies individually, right?

I know there's been a lot of attempts to kind of consolidate the permitting process, right?

It is far more streamlined than it used to be.

You still have to go to the Army Corps of Engineers to get their permit and the DOE and DC to get their permit and FAA to get their permit, you know what I mean?

So there is a bit of shopping around to get your permits just because they each have their own expertise.

But they do work together, you know, we have 20 meetings with them, so everybody hears what the other one's doing.

I just want to thank you for seeing that activity.

If you know, if you remember in May, I was critical of that.

Long Bridge North, so thank you.

I do have a question on Long Bridge North.

And then we did another one in January 2025 for these early works packages, the work that you saw on the screen, that's because of that FTP.

And then we finally issued the last one.

Is that usual?

That was when we issued the first one.

Maybe not for the early works, I don't know.

It was shortly after the award, right after the award in December of 2025.

And there was a press conference.

We sent one out, but did the vendor, I don't think the vendor did, because you saw a lot of activity in 2025.

I saw a lot of activity in 2025, which is great.

But we did, they did, that was great.

And now to see it, so thank you.

I know that it may sound shallow, but it's just real important, I think, that the people see activity.

Yeah.

And to your question, is this normal?

It's really a function of it being a aggressive design building.

I still don't understand that, but I'm looking forward to watching it and following it.

I'll probably speed up a bit more here, but we're a little bit beyond, not as far along as Long Bridge is on our works package and whatnot, but as many of you know, we have briefed the board over the last few meetings.

We had a CMGC delivery for this, so our contractor worked with us for the first year to advise us how to build the project, how to design it.

And then this past June, we executed an agreement, what's called the phase two amendment, which basically turns on the GC function.

So now they are truly our general contractor, provided NTP for the shoe flight package in June, which I'll be clear in just a minute.

And they've been gradually ramping up in the field.

They've been mobilizing, they've been getting access to the site.

Unlike Long Bridge, which is wide out in the open,

Bypass is about as remote as you can get in Northern Virginia and it's tough to get to and it's tough to see.

If you do want to see it, I recommend you get on a train with them, whether it's on the VRE Fredericksburg line or one of the Amtrak state supported services.

But we have been mobilizing.

We've done kickoff with Virginia DEQ for our construction general permit.

I know that may sound a bit boring, but that actually represents a really important step for us.

That means you can get out there and start disturbing the ground and actually doing more

We were doing brush clearing site surveys to get ready for the shoot fly work and we've been you know mobilizing equipment in here doing utility surveys.

One thing that's happened since this kind of went to press that hadn't gotten into the slide is that CSX has been building some railroad crossings for us.

We have three crossings throughout the bypass footprint that need to get put in place

They take a lot of work and pre-work to get into place because they have to be registered with USDOT.

They have to be very actively surveyed because of positive train control so that CSX and their dispatchers know where those crossings are.

And those have been under construction since late last week and they should be completed until, I would say, sometime next week.

With some of the ground that we have to build up near them.

Yeah, just the work CSX.

So that really opens up a lot of space for us in the area to actually go back and forth across tracks, because it is tough to access certain parts of the site.

We're going to continue in the coming weeks with erosion and sediment controls.

We do have noise and vibration monitoring requirements.

We do have sensors that we're going to be putting out in the field that have remote reporting capabilities to us.

We mentioned the two flight tracks a few times, just so you're aware, the bypass of the one mile long bridge that flies over the existing tracks, we are in what we call the fouling zone, almost all the time when we build the

So that really limits our ability to do the work.

So one of the things that our contractor came to us with during the CM phase was the idea of shoot-fly tracks, which is to push the tracks as far away from the work as possible so we're not fouling as often.

So the shoot-fly tracks are what we're going to be building over the next year in order to keep away from active tracks as much as possible so we don't have to shut down work and we can be productive.

And you get an idea of that in some of those cross sections you see there.

The following includes not just people but equipment so if you have the boom of a truck or a crane that would foul the tracks that's also considered fouling as you see with existing tracks.

Good question.

Did we have an issue with this design, engineering issue early on regarding the overpass though?

No?

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

It was the graphic.

That's right.

Thank you.

The fact that we are in the field doing environmental ground survey work really is important.

A huge step in projects, some of the survey work project work.

So Frank Tiller in third track falls with you.

The bypass does fall within the six mile Frank Thunderwater third track project.

We have kicked off some early works with CSX here.

What you see here is early works to replace the Ravensworth airlock, right where the bypass is going to be.

CSX has been under construction for a few weeks now.

They have, you see the materials for the switches.

and the turnouts that are there that are going to get put into place over the next few months.

Thanks, John.

Appreciate it, Pete.

So, I'm going to leave it fast because DJ allows to show it to me.

Just to get everyone's bearings, I knew we were about to pass through our project.

It's really two project sites.

We have the

I agree with what we call a cadre site, it's pronounced Christiansburg, that's where the old Norfolk Southern Depot was.

That's what we call a railroad north, even though it's kind of east-ish.

And then we have the layover site, which is around for almost 10 miles south of there.

And again, I'm not going to read all these words because the video is going to show a lot of this, but there has been a lot of grading going on out there, and you'll see, well, let's go back to the pictures.

You can see from the pictures, one of the first things we did, construction began actually a long time ago,

about this time last year when we had to move the Venice folks there to a new building.

So on Railroad North part of the site, we paid for Norfolk 7 to build a new maintenance away building.

And you see that again, that's heading toward Charlottesville, Washington DC, so forth.

You also see some sheep powwow work happening.

This is a good picture.

We talked about jack and boards.

That's a great picture.

I'm glad we added that as well.

And this is the Cambria site.

There is on the other side of the tracks, a small creek, always worried about water, but not as much water as some other sites we had looked at a couple of years ago.

Can you keep moving on?

This is the old station that hasn't been used since 1979 for passenger services.

It's been used, that was used by the NS

N.S.

Maintenance Away folks as their day-to-day facility.

That will be handed over to the Numa Valley Station Authority, and they're going to reconstruct that, if you will, to allow for a passenger station.

But to get your bearings, the track is right here.

It's close.

So the platform is going to have to go right there.

Hence why you see some of the work happening there.

Heading south.

A couple more pictures.

This is the Radford sign.

Again, this is where the labor facility is going to be.

It marks a yard there for Norfolk Southern, and they're giving us a part of the yard.

You can see those are stands for Radford athletic facilities.

So we are right up there with the university there in Radford.

And again, more of the light toll foundations, other things have been constructed.

Also, new signals have already been noticed.

This is the entrance to the yard.

That's why you only see two tracks.

So that was a great video.

We do have a drone out there.

Hence, we'll be able to continue showing these type of videos.

I should state,

Isn't it?

And all that work, the drone really shows you how much work is going on out there.

And our partnership with Norfolk Southern and the pivot from the other location, and this one that DJ engineered, has been really key for us.

Curious, whose voice is on the video?

Jerica wants to put a computer in this seat for the next board meeting.

Okay.

That's it.

Chair Portman.

My name is Jeff Phillips.

I'm the Senior Director for Northern Virginia Projects.

I wanted to update the board on three projects in the Alexandria recorder that have reached the procurement milestone that are ready to move into construction and provide some place on the status of those procurements, as well as a preview to the board by resolutions that you'll see after lunch.

I'm going to start with Alexandria Fourth Track.

I know many of you know about Alexandria Fourth Track.

It was one of the first projects that kicked off the TRD program.

It picks up where Long Bridge leads off at the RO interlocking in Arlington and it's going to construct six miles of new fourth mainline track all the way to the AF interlocking in Alexandria.

AF is a really important point on the Virginia Railroad map.

It's where the tracks from Richmond and Point South

meet up with the tracks from the Massas Line in Points West.

We have five tracks that merge into three, and that provides a significant bottleneck that we need to relieve.

There really is the nexus of passenger rail traffic in the Commonwealth.

Our N-tracks, they support service, long-distance service in both the VREs lines that meet that AF as well.

Fourth track is also the first project that has been designed and will be built by CSX in the lead in our portfolio.

And it's also important that it enables other projects within the footprint.

So it's going to enable the replacement of Crystal City Station in Arlington, and it also enables the Alexander Station improvements project and the King and Commonwealth brief replacements.

I wish it was as straightforward as this, but for a significant portion of the fourth draft, it actually is fairly straightforward.

We have the space to build it.

There are some tricky places along the interlockings and along the bridges, but we have the space to build fourth draft.

What is challenging about Fourth Track is how you access it, given that it's mostly an urban environment, and also that we need to sequence it with all the other demands in the corridor, whether it's the other projects we're talking about, or maintaining the consistent passenger and freight traffic along the Alexandria corridor.

So I guess the bottom line up front for the Alexandria Fourth Track project is that it's ready for construction.

We've completed design,

As DJ showed earlier, right-of-way acquisition is nearly complete.

CSX put out their invitation for bid back in June.

In August, they received four very competitive bids.

Based on their preferred bidder, we've compiled a proposed budget of $30.4 million.

That is higher than our current budget, but there's a couple reasons for that.

One is that

The budget that we currently have up to 10.5 was developed about five years ago based on preliminary engineering.

It was before we really understood the full corridor and the extent of the existing conditions.

As again, as DJ mentioned in his update, we've since done a survey of the corridor and the boundaries.

We realized we needed to acquire more right-of-way than we originally thought and more expensive right-of-way.

So right-of-way budget now improves.

We also didn't really understand

I do want to go through a little bit of some of the phasing that we've come up with for the fourth track project.

Just to give you an idea of the work that's had to go into actually making this project happen, what you see here in open up, you see a couple of versions of this in the track line diagram.

So the green lines are tracks in service, red are tracks under construction, yellow are tracks that are out of service.

What we did here, and I should also say to the left in Railroad South, is the AF interlocking that's five tracks to the right in Railroad North, Long Bridge, and the

What we did some time ago is we got a group together, a small group, CSX, VPRA, and VRA, and we had three overarching principles for how we needed to make the AFRO or the Alexander Ford Track Project work.

And that was that we needed to keep two tracks in service at all times to maintain service.

We needed to keep two boarding platforms in service at all times at Alexander Station, and we needed to keep a platform in service at Crystal City.

And for basically the next 18 months, we just hammered out the plan for how we're going to do it at every component, whether it was the King Commonwealth project, Alexander Station, or just the phasing for Fourth Track Loan.

We worked through it in great detail.

We have this set of diagrams, we have a schedule that goes with it.

We also have a plan for how CSX is going to manage all the phasing of its signals.

So we have efficient and safe transit through the Alexander corridor during construction.

And Mr. Richards is part of that group and can attest to the amount of work and the amount of effort that went into making that happen.

And I think it really is a great example of the partnership between VPRA, CSX, and VRE to make this happen.

In terms of the Alexander 4th Track contracting seat much moving forward, you see the red line, that's where we are today.

CSX has really completed its procurement at this point.

They've given us their all-in price for construction.

They're going to be coming to the board in about an hour or so with our amended budget.

If the board passes that budget, we will update the project addendum, which is our agreement with CSX to complete the project.

And with that addendum, CSX will execute a contract with their preferred contractor with the name of having NTP by the beginning of next month.

I should also note in the top right corner there, you see we are concentrating and working on a joint groundbreaking for the projects in mid-November.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Thank you.

Okay.

We got to Alexandria, again, as important as aware, last December, VPRA and VRE decided to partner and unify the design of these projects in order to deliver them and construct them together with VRE as the lead entity.

This very busy graphic shows you why the projects are so close together.

They're so tightly intertwined that it's virtually impossible to do work on one without affecting the other.

and the idea of having two separate entities, VPRA and GRE, trying to do this work with two separate contractors at the same time and say footprint was a rescue disaster.

So we decided to work together, put the design together and to prepare it and execute it together.

Again, to orient you to this photo or this image here, to the right in Railroad North, you see the bridges for Commonwealth Avenue and King Street.

In the middle, you see the existing

Alexandria Station next to it is the west platform that will be extended and rehabilitated.

Okay, both of them.

Yeah, so these are the two bridges.

They are sitting now at about 120 years old.

They're certainly in need of upgrading to moderate design and safety standards.

They have very tight clearance, both vertical and horizontal, specifically at King Street where you have about a 13 foot clearance.

We've had a number of bridge strikes over the years, which essentially stops, you know, service throughout the quarter and really the east coast.

So the bridge can either be repaired or inspected and put back into service.

So the new King Street Bridge will have a higher vertical clearance, but will also, for both bridges, they have longer spans, which provide a lot more space underneath the bridge for roadway, for sidewalks, for station entrances,

The city of Alexandria is currently working on the design for that streetscape and they plan to start construction on that once the rail operators are in place.

The station project has a lot of great benefits for passengers both on access and safety.

For one, you're replacing an existing tunnel that goes under the tracks, putting in new elevators, and that's going to eliminate the need for that night brake crossing that you see in the bottom photo right there.

Those of you who have viewed Alexandria Station know

It's an operational and safety challenge to have passengers coming across the tracks to get to platform two.

So, you know, that is one of the main goals of the project and one of the reasons why it's been funded.

Another great outcome of this project is that we're going to be bringing these platforms up to modern standard.

That's why I stood up.

I'm a daily, not even in Fredericksburg, I'm a daily rider, but I'm not down here to Alexandria.

And there are some people that struggle and sometimes I struggle getting off the train and it's different where you are on the platform.

So it can really slow down service as well because you have to bring either, not just a yellow fiscal, but sometimes they'll bring over steps.

Dallas, anything you want to comment on?

Just exciting.

Like we're really close.

And I echo the sentiment about the collaboration.

The fourth track project was chosen as one of a handful of projects presented at the ARIMA conference this year and touted for its coordination and delivery.

And so we're very, very, very excited.

What kind of feedback did you get?

It was all positive.

Usually they don't exhibit projects that are not constructed yet.

This was just delivering the coordination that it took between the three agencies.

Also mentioned too, the reconstruction of each platform is going to have boarding edges on both sides, so we'll end up having three boarding edges at the station, which again, provides a lot of flexibility for dispatchers for operations at the station.

Jeff Jones has one.

I'll take that one.

The existing tunnel is aged about 120 years old.

We are putting a precast concrete tunnel.

It will be wider, taller, brighter, cleaner, much better than what we have today.

By virtue of this project, these two projects being done together, it gives us

As I mentioned before, VPRA and VRE entered into a joint funding agreement last December for the unified project.

VPRA funds the bridges, VRE funds the station, and then we share the cost for rated based on weights of those two projects for things like construction management, mobilization, environmental controls, those sorts of things.

VRE had its procurement, they did it, IFB back in June, they opened bids in early September,

Three of the bids came in less than 10% of each other.

One of the bids was not responsive and was removed.

So based on the apparent low bidder, the various provided us the cost of the bridge.

We've agreed on our portion and shared costs, which comes to a proposed budget of $97.7 million.

Again, that's higher than our existing FY26 budget for a couple reasons.

One is that our original budget was developed before we had that supply chain plan that I showed earlier.

The design was based on a construction method that just wasn't feasible to drive, which is benignly important.

So the design that we went back to and sequenced is now reflected in the documents.

I should also say that all of those diagrams I showed earlier have been incorporated in both CSX's contract and the VRE's contract in this special provision so that any contractor wants to make a change to that schedule, a change to that plan, all of the projects have to review it and approve it.

Otherwise we'll have some captivating effects of each other.

That a bid that we've received, that the VRE has received, is indicative of the plans and sequencing that we move forward with.

We should also note the cost of steel.

We have seen some increases, significant increases in the cost of steel this year.

And that is reflected in the bid.

So you said it's higher.

Well, we're hearing from industry is about 20%.

Really?

Yeah.

but some of that is nationwide, so it'd be different.

The contracting sequence finally for the unified project.

Again, we're in the middle here.

We're following VRE's procurement method.

So they've given us the all-in costs.

We're proposing amendments to the budget for today.

If the board approves that, VRE will be able to take the unified to their operations board

For approval to execute a construction contract, there are two operations board meetings in the next two months.

There's one next week, one later next month.

Depending on that board's approval, VRE will be able to enter into a construction contract with their preferred bidder, or their perpendicular bidder, with a goal towards NTP in the early December.

I could offer a little color commentary.

I first worked on, just for context, in about 1999, first worked on replacement of those two bridges.

And it's been that long, they've been known to the city that they needed to be replaced for geometric reasons, all sorts of things.

And these three projects, and they're really three projects, like the fourth track, the station, and the bridges.

It's a once-in-a-career, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do them all at once.

Because if you don't do them together, there's sort of this trickle-down mess that makes it even more difficult to do any one of them.

Technically the city.

I should say, of course, Alexandria is a member of the commissions that make up VRE.

Right, right.

And they're contributing $200 million to the

RFMP, they're contributing $155 million to the Manassas Line and Seminary Yard, which is going to segue into some of our next items in that Seminary Yard work, which is just your AF point Jeff mentioned.

It's very important work you're doing.

Thank you very much.

I should have done this at the beginning of the meeting, but Dallas, it's really timely that you're here.

It is Dallas Richards' first VPRA board meeting as acting CEO of BRE since Rich Dalton's retirement.

Welcome, a belated welcome, and thank you for being here and thank you for your comments.

So we'll move to agenda item number 11.

We're going to talk about construction windows and service plan.

And we have DJ, our executive director.

Wonderful.

We talked about this a couple times in April.

We first introduced this topic to you, and then we talked about it again in May, and we talked about it again in June, and then in August.

This is just the next phase of those conversations.

We're going to talk about some construction windows and some changes to schedules.

I want to be very clear, these are proposed.

We don't have approval yet for CSX.

We don't have approval yet for Amtrak.

We do have approval from Peter Reed, but as changes are made, we continue to talk.

The goals that

Jeff Shreyas, Bottom Line and Front, we need to get Long Bridge done on time.

And in order to get Long Bridge done, just like any major highway project, you've got to close a lane, you've got to make some adjustments, some short-term hay for long-term gain.

We have worked very hard over the course of the last, I believe, nine months.

We started this process with Amtrak, TAC, and Jane Moray to figure out how we can give the construction team time to build the bridge and impact as few railroad passengers as possible.

You've all heard me say this three meetings.

If we get the bridge done and we go from what we started was five trains up to 13, but everyone is so soured on passenger rail, they don't ride the train.

So keeping the momentum, you've seen brake ridership increases, you've seen great passion for both ride and rail.

You've got to keep that passion going while getting this bridge done.

So the big issue that we're going to talk about is the Long Bridge project is going from the left

to the right starts in Virginia, goes across Potomac River.

That's the south package.

Then we've got the north package that starts at the shore and goes all the way around and up to Lafont Plaza.

It's not a $1.8 million project.

Again, two different projects.

However, I'm going to point out that the Washington DC line is right there.

So at the edge of the river that touches Virginia, that's where the DC line is.

Part of why we're having these conversations is if you're doing any construction in DC, you can only do construction between the hours of 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. because they've got noise issues, they've got vibration issues, and that's a regulation that rarely ever gets waived.

They will waive it in certain circumstances, but when they do, it's for a 30-day period to do one certain piece of work.

And then after that 30 days, your waiver expires and you've got to be live.

In that 30 days, a member of public complains.

It's a big process.

We are not counting on getting any waivers.

We can ask for waivers.

We're in that process.

We want to do as much work outside of peak as possible.

Who issues the waivers, DJ?

The District of Columbia.

Oh, DC.

So, here is the bridge project.

This is the existing.

I'm going to start, if you look at the right-hand side, this is the existing Long Bridge.

Everybody talks about it.

I'm 20 years old.

Then you have the Wamanani, the Yellow Line Bridge.

Then you've got 395, 14th Street Bridge.

We are building our new infrastructure right in between these two bridges.

We're building a new bridge.

and then we'll build it to the pedestrian, the bike ped bridge.

Coming up, again this is all VC, come up here you enter into the DC proper of the land, you see the metro tunnel, the metro bridge goes under a tunnel and then this is where our two structures will become one and then we're going to be adding two tracks and adding to the structure all the way up here.

You see how close that is to 395?

There's not a lot of room there.

See how close it is to the Washington Channel?

There's not a lot of room.

This is the artist's rendering of what it's going to look like when it's done.

This is going north.

kind of lends off right at the end of it.

Sure, existing Long Bridge, new Long Bridge, you see just as I said earlier, the Metro goes in there and then they become one structure.

Building here is a little bit easier because you can do structure work here and not foul this crap.

You can be for the most part, there are some things you do going to be fouling the track.

But when you're building separate structure, it's easier to let trains continue to go through.

When you're here,

You're right on the same structure as the train, so you cannot do construction work if there are trains going by.

It should wait too close.

So I think that just gives an indication of the challenges that we have as we build this bridge.

So what are we doing?

What we're going to talk about today, we've talked about it before, we're looking for how we can most efficiently build this bridge, getting it done by 2030, and impact it as few folks as possible.

This is the Long Bridge traffic.

These are the trains that on any given weekday go through from Alexandria up to Lafont during the hours.

And remember, we can work from 7 a.m., 7 p.m.

So somewhere in that window, we need to find time for the construction team.

When we first started talking about this in January, we had talked about doing two separate windows.

Let's do a window right before me, do about three hours,

Take a break in the day and let a bunch of trains go through, and then do a window in the afternoon.

The more we looked at it, and actually it was the Amtrak side, Amtrak said two, three-hour windows doesn't make sense, because in order to have two, three-hour windows to start the work, you've got to set up all the equipment, then you can start work, and then about two hours later, you've got to bring the equipment off the tracks and trains can go through.

Additionally, in the afternoon, especially in the summer, your trains are less reliable, you've got heat orders, and you're doing trains late,

And as soon as the train is late, it backwardizes that window and it gives the construction folks less time to work.

So, Amtrak proposed, let's just do one five-hour window, start it as early as we can in the morning, and then give them five hours, get the work done, and then open up the road again so it's like a break and we can get trains clean.

We considered, and again, our focus here is to impact the passengers in the house.

We considered starting right at seven o'clock when the noise and vibration lifted, but all of these trains here, these are weary trains, where most of the trains are weary trains.

If you don't run those weary trains in the morning, then not only do you impact those folks, but you impact all the folks in the afternoon because they're not going to take a train one way and then not the other way.

So we made the decision where we start the window, and this is the vibration, start the window right after that morning rush, take about five hours to one o'clock,

and then let trains go through and then keep going.

So what do we have to do?

We have to move a bunch of cranks.

We have to change schedules, make changes.

Here is the cuckoo, no.

Here's the current proposal.

So the current proposal is we have got to, the window geographically starts now is the entry.

The last two Madison Line trains, the latest two in the morning, the last two Fredericksburg-Trent Line trains, they will go to Alexandria, let folks off in Alexandria.

Folks can then get on Metro and then take the Metro to wherever they're going.

And then they will shove that, so they'll go backwards.

As Mike pointed out earlier, we own Seminary Yard, we purchase Seminary Yard and we rehearse it.

They can shove back and they can sit in Seminary Yard and stay there.

So we will continue to have folks get to the city

After that 815 window starts, they just need to get off in Alexandria National.

And then the other proposal is we'll have two trains, or two, excuse me, what is this, from Hanford Roads.

Right now you've got three trains to Norfolk, and two trains to Newport News.

So a total of five trains.

The proposal is starting when construction starts, you would change that, you go from five trains to four trains,

But you would add two buses, so you'd go from five options, basically, to four trains and two buses, so six options.

So you'd have an extra option.

The challenges would be a bus, not a train.

So that's the current proposal.

This is the slide that we showed you back in

We showed it first in April, then May, then June.

But in August, this is where we were.

CSX had not yet agreed to move that train.

Didn't make any sense to let one train go through the middle of the window.

So now they have agreed to move that, and then that will move over further outside.

Both of those trains, the south and the north, will move outside of the window.

If you look at, and then again, once one o'clock comes, construction folks

Pick your equipment off, and then all of those trains go through and we get prepared for what is the afternoon rush.

Similar story on, well again, CSX has approved, so this is the change since what we showed you.

Same thing on the weekends, you see that it's not as busy because you don't yet have VRE weekend service.

What they will have though, and in fact is agreed to do a step-up program again.

So the step-up program is if you've got a multi-day ticket on VRE,

You can just get on whatever the next train is.

Well, for that reason, if the next train is a state-supported train, you can use that for your e-ticket for, I think, $4.

You can provide whatever train you want to include work on the weekend.

So even the re-reservice on the weekends won't start until Long Bridge is done.

DJ, if I can, I'm one of the testers.

I think Jeremy Ladd, I'm running a team also, who's one thousandth of a semester, if you're testing it, worked yesterday.

and a couple of buttons.

It's nice and easily set up.

The Amtrak conductor just takes his little phone scanner thingy and zaps it and it works.

So there's a lot of work that happened behind the scenes.

But we're testing it out now so we can, I'm not sure when I'm going into effect, but it's working well.

And there'll be 30 seats for Amtrak train and it shows the train number, number of seats available, so on and so forth.

And one of the things that we've looked at, going back to this, so if you look at the VRE trains, the VRE ridership every day is about three and a half times the Amtrak ridership, so looking at the number of people impacted, we wanted to impact as few people as possible.

Many of the folks that ride these trains now that will be stopping in Alexandria, a lot of them get on in Fredericksburg and get off in Occoquan, or get off in North, or get off in Alexandria, so their rides won't be impacted.

Yesterday morning I gave a presentation at the Fredericksburg area, that's probably a planning organization, and VRE had numbers there that I can't quote, but it showed that really the number of people that are impacted will be less than 10% of the riders, they said about 150 people

That's not great.

We don't want to impact anybody, but we want to make sure that, number one, we impact as many people as possible, and number two, that we give folks advance notice so they know how their commute's going to change.

Mike mentioned earlier that he's now a daily VRE rider, so he will stand up for me on this.

I rode VRE for two decades, and I got on the train five o'clock in the morning in Fredericksburg.

If I got on the train and every once in a while it rarely happened, my seat was taken by somebody else, I would flip, imagine my seat.

You want to go CJ, huh?

We don't make these decisions.

But your other options are how are we going to get the bridge built.

We looked at, okay, what if the shorter window is a 24-hour window and we can adjust it a little bit.

For every hour we take off that window, it costs us $300 million.

This is a high little estimate and it adds the past six months to the scale.

And we just have to have a pace.

We talked about the weekend, it's pretty similar.

We're making the same types of decisions.

Here, you see all of the projects going on at the same time.

We are hoping and we're working with Amtrak.

Amtrak is a Morgan Union Station.

As we put this proposed window into place, Amtrak is going to also take advantage of the, hey, there are no trains going through that tunnel.

They have identified the tunnel that goes from Union Station out to La Font.

There are ventilation issues, there are switch issues that need to be addressed.

DJ?

Yes.

The work window is six days a week.

It will keep the work window schedule because equipment goes down to where it's going and then a lot of places spend tonight and then it goes back in order to go back just for the one day to the normal schedule.

The equipment wouldn't be positioned correctly.

Excellent point though.

Where are we well aware that between January 2026 and when the bridge is done in 2030, there are a number of high profile events that we're going to need more people for.

Fourth of July in 2026, I think that's a big anniversary.

That's a big deal.

The annual draft is going to be in D.C. during this time period.

It's going to have a huge 250 celebration, Virginia 250.

CSX is going to deliver packages for Christmas and winter holidays.

So there are times when we are going to get the best of them, be flexible on these, that it's too high of a graphic.

We want to get as many folks off the highway as possible.

As I started with, we're still in negotiation with Amtrak and CSX.

We want to get this done as soon as possible and efficient as possible.

This is an incredibly important point.

When we agree on the schedule changes, and first of all, we're working hard to get them communicated out to the public sooner rather than later.

What we don't want to do is on January 5th say, oh, by the way, starting tomorrow, this is going to happen.

We've met with mayors, we've met with city managers, we've been in the transportation organizations, and we'll continue to do that.

It's never good news when somebody gets on that train at five o'clock in the morning, somebody's in their seat,

to accept.

The point here is though, after a couple months in January, if things aren't working the way we thought they would, if Amtrak long distance trains are late and they're violating the window, we'll have to look at how we can make adjustments to continue to give that construction team the five hours a day they need to get this done.

So we're going to be nimble, we're going to continue to make changes as changes make sense.

This is, and you've seen this multiple times, this is the service the way it exists now.

The two trains to Roanoke, one of those is going to change time.

You've got the ones that come down to Richmond and then the three to Newport News, excuse me.

When the construction starts, this becomes two in Norfolk.

We keep the two that are Newport News and it goes from five to four.

That still has the two, okay, I misspoke.

When the construction starts, this is going to change.

This doesn't happen when the construction starts.

We don't get to New River Valley until 2047.

But this is what it'll look like during that period.

And then the two buses that are going to go into play, they'll actually start in Virginia Beach, they'll go to Norfolk, go to Newport News, and then they'll go all the way up to DC.

So you will, if anyone hit the roads, you'll be able to take any one of those connections.

Additionally, the first train out in the morning will be a

So anybody who's trained out to beat the window will have the opportunity to do that.

And then when Long Bridge is done, three trains to Norfolk, three trains back to Newport News, everybody gets their slots back.

And then when we finish all of the phase one and phase two projects, which will be shortly thereafter, then we get to Nirvana and we've got the 13 route every single day.

And in addition to this, VRE has the extra slots that they can have

not only extra trains, but also nights and weekends.

So that is where we are now.

We're hoping to over the next week or two come to final agreement with CSF with Amtrak.

As is often the case, the closer you get to saying, yeah, we'll sign, there are a lot of questions, well, did we ask this?

Yes, back in February.

Did we ask this?

Yeah, we talked about March.

We've looked at that and we've actually talked about that.

I'm glad you brought that up.

We've talked about the fact that I'm not making any judgment on the noise vibration restrictions.

However, if I'm looking at that, they apply a lot more when you're underneath the sound of the canal than they do when you're in the middle of the river or on the south end of the river where there are no businesses.

No one lives in there.

I'm not committing to anything.

We are looking closely at that.

We are hopeful that if there's any lenience, it would be towards that end.

That said, even if we get the south package done more rapidly or we get a little grace and lenience on the south package, we still can't start service until the north package is done, which is where the big fouling issues are.

Now to the extent that it saves us money or frees up, yeah, but we're looking at that.

Speaking of looking at all options, we're also looking at, okay, fine.

So during the work window, you can't go to the north of Alexandria.

VRE trains are going to Alexandria letting folks off and take the metro.

Can we run other trains that, you know, Phyllis and Fredericksburg that are going to have fewer options, can we let them have an extra train that goes to Alexandria?

Yeah.

We would like to do that.

We need to make sure that we can do our Amtrak equipment.

They don't have a ton of equipment now and you need to bring your shoving back like that.

If you're pulling into Alexandria and going north and then backing into San Fran and Art, you can do that with a locomotive up front.

But you really, if you're going to run service, you need a locomotive on both ends.

And Amtrak just doesn't have them available now.

We've had many conversations with Amtrak.

They've got the new aerotrains coming, Pacific Northwest, and then they're coming here.

That could free up equipment.

If I were in Amtrak, I wouldn't be committal to this either, but they understand that this is an important need for us.

This infrastructure improvement impacts DC as much as it does us, impacts Maryland, impacts others, and I need to say for the record, DC has been a great partner.

When we first started these conversations, we had to work hard to establish a relationship with them, but that relationship has become quite productive and has been very successful.

We're preparing for the worst and open to this.

Okay.

So somebody asked me how we're communicating this to the public.

I'll talk a little bit about our communications and outreach approach, temporary changes, lasting improvements.

We have a dedicated website,

that will have guides, fact sheets telling our passengers and the general public, FAQs, all the information they'll need to know about upcoming service changes and information about Long Bridge and all of the related projects.

We've also created a video just introducing the service changes, outlining the animation that DJ showed about the congestion at the Long Bridge and what it will look like over

It's a computer.

I wanted you to do vocal rest because you have to do the presentation.

But it is a four minute video.

So in the interest of time, we have shared it with you all.

So please, please watch it.

But this video is a great little just

Introduction of why we are doing what window lights needed and it's the first of a couple of just introducing what we're doing and then we'll have a series of shorts about navigating what's happening and then this is part of the larger effort of what we have going on.

So we have, as Jeremy mentioned in August, he has a joint group of folks from

VRE, and Amtrak.

We have a joint communications working group that we meet with for VPRA, Amtrak, VRE, and a joint communications plan where we are sharing information.

This also goes for the honor for good evaluation and crisis communications.

So the same way they'll be monitoring and working with the construction teams to make sure things go wrong, we'll be doing the same thing on the communication side.

But on the proactive communications,

Working on our digital communication strategy.

So like I mentioned, our website VRE is working on a website landing, making sure folks know if they're on the app.

I think Mike showed me on his app.

There's a little pop up down on the VRE app.

Right, yellow.

Right, yellow.

So yes, implementing a lot of proactive communication strategies, website landing gauges.

If you go to amtrak.com slash virginia, which is our sitelet, we will also have information about our projects and the upcoming service changes on that.

We also are working on a joint media release with ERE, Amtrak, see if that's

to let folks in the media know what's happening.

And we'll put DJ in front of the camera as well.

We've also done legislative community leadership and stakeholder outreach, and then we'll have a direct-to-consumer communications plan as well, including station pop-ups and letting folks know we'll have postcards with QR codes that we'll just hand out at the stations for folks who are the 5 a.m. train riders who just aren't connected any other way just to let them know what's going down.

and as DJ's mentioned, he's very busy.

His schedule is pretty booked.

We're putting him out there in front of a lot of organizations.

He was at Vampo this week.

He'll be at NVTA and then other transportation organizations.

Some other members of our team are also going out there.

So we're not putting them out there alone.

We're implementing in all of our just regular construction communications and project communications meetings we're already having.

our community advisory groups we've added, started adding some information about the service changes.

So we have some tags coming up and we'll be talking about it.

DJ is doing the town hall with Virginians for High Speed Rail on the 10th.

Christine Fisk, who is our planning director, will be speaking to a meeting of the statewide MPOs coming up.

So we have a lot of stakeholder outreach coming up just to make sure we're hitting

all of our bases to let folks know, let as many folks know as possible what's happening.

CJ likes to say, no surprises.

And that is the perfect communication strategy, I think.

So we're trying to be as proactive as possible.

We have our general inquiry, contact us, email inbox.

We also have set up a construction inbox and construction hotline that we have on all of our construction communications.

So,

Is that the left side?

Any questions?

I can't, we already mastered MPOs, so we're gonna have them help us with communications set.

Charlottesville area, they're trained to be delayed a couple hours, same with Roanoke.

Richmond area as well, Richmond's losing a couple trains.

There is- Definitely scheduled to be moved.

Scheduled to be moved, sorry scheduled to be moved.

I'm gonna sit on the train first, guys.

Could I make a recommendation?

In North Virginia specifically, the Chambers of Commerce are really, I think, big stakeholders.

DJ, if we can get maybe not, there's somebody, I mean, the DC Chamber, the Alexandria, the Arlington, the Fairfax, because those are, you know, business people, employers.

No, I totally agree.

Totally, yeah.

It's a great audience, too.

I mean, you know, supporters, but they're also affected.

Yeah, and that's why Regime for High School Rail, we met with them last week.

They're the same folks that have wanted this stuff to be done.

So in the beginning, if you need to understand it, there's going to be temporary advocates to say, here, I understand why we're doing this.

This makes perfect sense.

That's why we're getting out and getting ahead of the message.

I really believe in Northern Virginia.

I know they grumble, but you know, when you see that your tax dollars are working for you, that's why, and I've been kind of insistent regarding Long Bridge, when they see it, they really don't grumble as much.

I'm thinking that

It probably would be a good idea to put something together, a handout if you would.

It's a little comprehensive to put in the hands of every state legislator.

Come January or February.

I wouldn't do it first off when they come in because you're going to have a lot of new people.

You're going to have a new administration.

But if you figure by the time they get midway through the session,

They'll be hearing from the public with questions about this, and we could have something to put in their hands and say, here's who you contact, and here's what's going on.

In fact, somebody said to us, they said, hey, why don't you look at not starting these type of paintings still after General Assembly?

But no, we've got to get them done, and we're not going to have them missing.

In everybody's defense, everybody we present to, they look at it and they say, yeah, that's a challenge.

Any other questions or comments?

It goes without saying, we thank all of you for your support.

And DJ, I'll make sure that DJ gets all the information that we're sending out so you all have it as well.

One more thing if I can, I'm not a day go by that DJ just asked me and Jeremy, can we do this?

Can we move it?

We're in the way.

This much or clear?

This train, he's always pushing us to, he won't say it.

We didn't talk on Sunday.

No, I think I had some text messages.

So he's always pushing us to try to do the best we can for our

He's not going to tie his own back, but I just want you to know that he does a great job of doing that, of really pushing us to think outside the box.

And some of these points made up here fit in great as well.

So thank you for your suggestions coming.

Thank you.

Anything else?

Thank you, Mike, and thank you to all the board members for your great suggestions.

Thank you, DJ and Jerica.

We are going to recess for lunch.

Okay, I'm going to call our VPRA board meetings back into open session after our lunch break.

And we are ready for agenda item number 13.

So I'm going to turn it over to Selma to talk to us about our board management reserve and FY26 budget amendment.

Good afternoon.

My name is Solomon Ivanovich.

I'm the FP&A Senior Manager.

I'm going to walk you through our fiscal year budget amendment and board amendments.

As noted during the private updates,

We are seeking approval to amend the Fiscal Year 26 budget due to two projects that are under construction contracts, the Alexandria Fourth Track project, the budget increased by $27.9 million from the Fiscal Year 26 approved budget, and the CUNY Commonwealth Bridges project increased by $13.6 million from the Fiscal Year 26 approved budget for a total

I-95 corridor increase of $41.5 million.

These two projects are the primary drivers of the decrease in the management reserve.

During the last board meeting, I presented for approval $71 million board management reserve as of 1.26 in those two changes and increases.

Impact from the management reserve brings it down to $29 million.

And you'll notice there's no changes in the uses for this first quarter of fiscal year 26.

We are currently doing an update to our fiscal year 25 actuals to the sources and the uses using the final audited numbers.

So any created result from that analysis can be captured in the 2B26 management reserve that will present both due and approval.

So just as a summary, if anybody has seen this slide before, the graph to the right shows the trend of the Management Reserve.

You know, back when we started this whole initiative about having a reserve, it was at $15 million, so we're still all above our initial implementation of the Management Reserve at $29 million.

and you know, it's a little bit lower than we've all seen, especially throughout fiscal year 25.

And the pie chart to the left shows that we have 77% of our program members.

So that's the biggest driver.

And it's important to note that, you know, these trends have upset the disability of our program cost.

We do, thank you.

Thank you, Selma.

So moved.

Thank you, Mr.

Who was seconded?

Thank you, Ms. Spears.

Any opposed?

Any abstentions?

Thank you.

We will move right along to item number 14, Long Bridge Construction Phase Project Addendum.

So,

Now we're going to talk about an agreement that we were working with for CSX for some time.

I think you've done these before for other projects, but basically this allows us to on CSX property and when CSX adhering to certain terms and conditions of the construction.

So, it says legal instruments, there were CSX portions along with what we delivered.

It includes the project's scope,

funding requirements, roles of the parties, payment terms, private record agreements, and requirements to resolve non-funding work.

Our primary roles are basically to do anything that CSX doesn't do.

Do the right-of-way acquisition either or directly via Amtrak, doing the private acquisitions in DC.

Utility coordination and then e-mutation of FRA, any environmental, so the different issues that we call it.

CSX's primary will be to construct signals and active track tie-ins.

They will provide funding resources and they will procure various track materials.

And we are still negotiating this agreement.

There are a few terms that, you know, yesterday we were trying to work out.

And we don't have a final estimate for their portions of the work.

It will be forthcoming within the next few weeks.

Sure.

Yeah, so we're asking for

So we're at the point, just like when we got into deciding to get any less, sign us some PD, dial us in, track over to this year,

My best friend is here right before we need to enter into construction phase and bring the CSX.

So a few points on how this works.

First of all, the CSX was documented, but they charge us actually.

So at some point, we'll finish providing a bit of a need for that cement, the evidence, the philosophy.

That will happen in the next few weeks hopefully, and then we'll be able to sign this agreement.

That's just the best we need to carry this case on.

Actually, yeah, no profit.

They didn't get a partner here, but what they did had a cause for this.

You know, in reality, it's not like a lot of insurance agreements we come to you with have a competitive impairment.

We have only one counterparty possibly.

That's why we're coming to you now to say, hey, we're ready to enter this agreement.

There's still a few details to be hammered out over the next couple of weeks.

Those are going to be done and due for the rest of your talk about the project so far.

And so we're looking for that.

It is an addendum because we have a master construction that sets the rules of the road for construction projects.

So they're uniform, plus everything we do is between us and CSX.

When we get to a specific project, we enter into what's called a project.

It's a big addendum.

It's under the umbrella of that master payment.

So it only has that project established in a way to be more efficient.

So instead of doing a full fund, let's say a 100 page construction agreement, we do like a 20 page repayment on that.

That's the project that's going to be stunned and says, okay, in this case, CSX is going to do this scope of work.

They're going to procure this particular material.

Are there any other questions?

If not, I would request a motion to approve authorization for the executive director to execute the Long Bridge construction phase project addendum.

So moved.

Thank you, Mr. Delandro.

Do I have a second?

Second.

Thank you, Mr.

Flowers.

All in favor say aye.

Aye.

All opposed?

Any abstentions?

Thank you very much.

So moving into item number 15.

Thank you, Shirley.

We are going to

move into a closed session to discuss the executive director performance.

We have an annual requirement to do that.

I move the board convene in a closed session.

One, to move that the board convene in a closed session pursuant to Virginia code 2.2-3711A1.

for the discussion of the performance and compensation of a specific public employee of VPRA, namely the VPRA executive director's performance during performance year 2025.

Second.

You both took the same time.

Thank you, Mr. Payne.

All in favor say aye.

All opposed.

Any abstentions?