Board of Directors Meeting   8/27/2026

Here are the executive director and members of the board.

Good morning.

Good morning.

All right.

Let's go.

If you don't know, my name is LaVara Bates, safety director for the VPRA.

Let's begin our briefing.

We are located at 919 East Main Street, over on the fourth floor in the Piedmont room.

The resonance, if you exit the left, around the corner on your left side, is the oneness restaurant.

If you exit out the right, around the corner on the right side, is the men's restaurant.

For safety assignments, calling 9-1-1, please raise your hand when I call your name.

Calling 9-1-1, Mary Estelle Douglas, secondary, Mariia Westermann, thank you, CPR, myself, Lamar Bates, secondary, Joan Verbonitz, Dean Ferschke-Sparnes, Michael Roberts, thank you, secondary, DJ Stadtler, thank you.

The AED will call the security desk.

The first aid kit is located on the table against the wall.

Stale Hills located on both sides near the restaurant, also a fire zone near the Stale Hills as well.

Fire extinguishers is near the Women's Press Room.

Also, if you go down the hall past the Women's Press Room, it's near the Time Board Room on the right side.

Evacuation, if we need to evacuate, such as a fire, we'll use the spare wheel.

We will go to North Light and Capital Square and show the person to your left that's present when we get there to your assembly point.

We'll go to lower level one or the lower level in order to exit the building to go to our assembly point.

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

If you see something, say something.

Contact security or call 911.

For those participating virtually, be aware of phishing emails and scams.

Also know your medical emergency and evacuation strategies.

Do we have any questions?

Alrighty, thank you.

So for those of you who are new board members, welcome.

And I just want to say, so for me, when I had joined, that was sort of a new thing of what just happened, which was a safety briefing.

And that happens at every VPA meeting.

Whether you're meeting with the team in their offices or we're having our board meeting, I know VRE does something very similar.

It's really a part of that culture of safety, which is very important to everyone in the transportation industry.

And I think particularly in the rail industry, you all are very focused.

We'll hear more about it.

But September, always a focus on rail safety.

If you see tracks, think trains, anything that we can do to make sure that those who work in the rail industry and those who might be riders or

People walking across tracks are being safe in doing that.

So again, I'm very excited that we have new board members here.

I also want to acknowledge our outgoing board members.

First, we have Charlie Payne, who had served from 2022 to 2026.

He has stepped off of the VPRA board, but I want to share that he was actually appointed to the Commonwealth Transportation Board.

So still very much will be involved in watching the rail issues.

both through VPRA and more broadly with the Commonwealth.

So we thank him for his service to the VPRA board.

Also, Benny Zhang, who served from January 2026 to June 2026.

And so we thank Benny for his service, even though it was brief, we were very happy to have him on board.

And so with that, I also am happy to announce our new board members.

We have Patricia Doersch or Patty Doersch.

She's known to many of us who's continuing her service on VPRA's board, advancing passenger rail through transportation law, safety, environmental compliance and expertise, supporting complex infrastructure programs and regulatory requirements.

So thank you Patty for continuing service on the board.

Terrific.

And Patty represents the Northern Virginia District.

We have Amanda Prater, who is the Director of Policy Advocacy at Gilead Sciences, where she leads healthcare policy, coalition building, and stakeholder partnerships.

And she's representing the Potomac and Rappahannock District.

Thank you so much.

Looking forward to leaning in and learning more.

and Prescott Sherrod, who is a transportation engineering and management leader and entrepreneur.

He is the CEO and president of, is it PEMCO, Inc., and also started PEMCO Logistics.

So he has over 30 years of industry experience and is here from the Hampton Roads District.

We're very excited to have you.

Thank you so much.

Well, welcome to our new board members.

And again, thank you to our outgoing board members.

Ms. Bushue.

Ms. Choe.

Mr. Crawford.

Mr. Delandro.

Ms. Doersch.

Mr.

Flowers.

Mr. Jordan.

Ms. Lawrence.

Ms. Pratter?

Here.

Ms. Rhinehart?

Ms. Spears?

Here.

Mr. Watkins?

Here.

Thank you, we have a call.

Next up is public comment and we don't have anyone who had signed up for public comment today.

Anyone online?

Alrighty, well we will move ahead and just reminding those of you who might be listening, we are always appreciative of any public comment that folks have to share with the board through our process.

So moving to item number six, we want to approve the meeting minutes from the May 21st meeting and so would request a motion to approve those May 21st meeting minutes.

Those opposed say nay.

And any abstentions?

Yes, we have Mr. Schrod, who is not here, and I assume also Ms. Satter, who is not.

Great, thank you for that.

Good morning everybody, Michael Westermann, General Counsel.

It's August, so we're doing our annual governance items, elected officers, doing committee assignments, and then we also have one more agenda item, pre-adopting the

participation polls, starting with the first one first.

Electing officers this year is the Board's duty by vote to elect a vice chair, a secretary, and a treasurer.

The first two happen to be board members.

The third one does not.

I have before you a slate of officers as vice chair, Mr. Crawford, and as secretary, Ms. Doersch, and then as treasurer, our CFO, Ms. Farmer, Beth

Those opposed say nay.

All right the ayes have it.

So we have two ECRVPRA for the new folks.

One is a finance and audit committee.

The other is personnel and compensation.

We had an executive director search committee in the old days.

We got rid of that one.

We don't need it anymore and hope to not need it for a very long time.

So, at least four members on each committee, and the chair of the board and vice chair of the board are automatic members of each committee.

You have a slate of committee assignments before you for finance, Ms. Doherty as the finance committee chair, Mr. Delandro as the vice chair, and then Ms. Spears, Mr. Watkins, Mr. Jordan, and Mr. Chirab as appointed members, and then of course, chair and board chair as ex officio automatic members.

When we go to personality compensation committee, Ms. Rhinehart is chair, Ms. Lawrence is vice chair, Ms. Bushue, Mr.

Flowers, Ms. Prater has appointed members, and then the next official members, Ms. Zimmerman and Mr. Crawford.

So that is a slate that's before you.

We can do that as one vote.

So before we vote, I do just want to flag my appreciation for Mr.

Flowers.

We made a slight adjustment.

I had noticed in the board committee assignments that we kind of had some years bunched up and it felt important for our committees to make sure each class, as I call it, was kind of equally represented.

So thank you, Mr.

Flowers, who adjusted to move from finance to personnel compensation.

Case folks are wondering why that shift had happened.

So thank you.

Those opposed say nay.

Any abstentions?

So annually the law requires us to readopt participation policies,

It's a unique requirement.

They came under the Freedom of Information Act laws after COVID when people wanted to start meeting remotely.

Two reminders here.

One, we have a written policy and we sent that out before the board meeting.

So if board members want to please follow the policy, we have a form to request for remote participation.

The board chair authorizes that.

We do that not to make life hard, but we get a lot of requirements too.

We actually make it as easy as possible to follow the requirements.

One more reminder, when you are participating remotely, please keep the camera on.

If you don't, your votes don't count.

You don't count toward a quorum for voting purposes.

So with that, there are literally no substantive changes.

I think the changes to the policy this year was the date at the top.

Anything else remains exact.

Let's take another discussion.

Ready?

All in favor say aye.

Aye.

Opposed say nay.

Any abstentions?

The ayes have it.

Thank you, Mr. Westermann.

Thank you.

I actually thought that governance stuff was pretty sharp.

Thank you, it's good to see everybody.

I had the same issue yesterday when we were re-compressing on VPRA as a whole.

I've got about four hours worth of stuff and I don't even give it 35 minutes.

So there's a lot that I'm going to go through.

I will say this, it has been an amazing few months since the last board meeting.

Anybody that goes into the city and sees the work on Long Bridge, sees the work on fourth track, sees the work on the bypass, and I go by a lot.

But every time you go by, it's, whoa, that client exactly.

So the progress has really been tremendous.

You all have heard me say, many of you have heard me say this before, planning is long, it's tedious, it's so incredibly important.

But when you see dirt taping, it is incredible.

And the team's going to talk about it more this afternoon.

We've had a lot of challenges over the last three months where you get in in the morning, you're like, wait, they ordered a cable and the cable was faulty and it's going to cost us 10 months?

Hold on a second.

And just the way the team has kind of stuck together and kept things on schedule, found ways to solve problems without making them

Mole Hills instead of mountains.

Solving them when they're mole hills instead of mountains.

It's just been tremendous.

So shout out to the team.

There are so many accolades we should be giving today that we just won't be, but the team has really, really done an incredible job, especially at this last quarter.

So just quick updates.

We were granted a couple of different grants, $25 million with BUILD grant into the BUILD program.

That will fully fund our Richmond layer facility.

As folks, I believe know, right now, many of our southbound frames stop in Staplesville.

because south of Staples Mill to the Main Street Station, it's about a six, seven mile run that goes through Accuyard, which is very busy.

There's no storage at Main Street, so to sewer a train, you've got to then back the train up, shove it back into Staples Mill.

CSX doesn't like that.

It adds congestion.

We are building a layer or facility just south of the Main Street Station that will allow trains to layover, be cleaned, be maintained, give us more options to bring trains all the way down to Main Street.

passenger rail works best when you go city center to city center.

So this is a huge, huge win for the Commonwealth and really for rail service on the East Coast.

This $25 million is the last segment of what's a $70 plus million project, and it's now fully funded.

So we thank the DOT for that.

We were also given, granted $15.6 million, almost $17 million for the Stanton station.

That's a station that we own.

There's not Virginia State Service there, but there is three day a week cardinal service there.

That said, it's right in downtown and it is long overdue for some repair.

Also, it's ADA compliant, but it's not ADA friendly, if I can say that.

The platforms are not in great shape.

If you stand under the canopy, it's great on a sunny day, but on a rainy day, not so much.

So we've been given $16 million to fix all of those issues about that as well.

And then not under our umbrella, but still good news, Chesterfield County got $2.3 million to address a great separation and close crossings in Chesterfield.

So shout out to them.

Anytime we close a crossing or address safety at a crossing, it's a huge, huge win for all of us.

One thing that folks have heard about, it's been around for about 22 years, is the Virginia North Carolina Interstate High Speed Rail Compact.

That was a legislatively created commission that partnered Virginia and North Carolina.

Senator Watkins was really instrumental in getting that going.

Anyway, that has been a really vigorous effort, and then it's died down for years, and then a vigorous effort died down.

Happy to say that it is once again becoming vigorous.

You see a map here of our current service and the proposed S line.

The dotted line going from just south of Petersburg to Raleigh is the S line that's being worked on now.

It takes you right through La Crosse, Virginia, which is a historic railroad town if you've not been there.

It's got railroad history older than all of us.

But we are reinvigorating the work that's being done here.

We've got a commission meeting happening next month.

So more to come on that, but good news that that is gaining legs.

Here is a snapshot of our 26 organizational goals.

We are almost done with 26.

It's a misnomer because it says fiscal year, the state fiscal year, as you know, goes from July to June.

But we actually track the amount of performance year which ends in September.

And you see for the most part, we hit or exceeded our goals.

We have a couple that we've talked about throughout the year that are off track.

As we'll talk about in a second for 27 goals, a lot of what we do is reliant on third parties, whether it's freight railroads or whether it's utility vendors that order their cables from Teemu or whoever it is.

Don't put that in the minutes.

There are things we can't control and we make sure that when we do these goals we number one make them stretch goals and number two make them not slam dunks because it is incumbent on us to work with our partners and get to the common goal.

In a couple cases where we relied on partners and

All right.

That maintenance responsibility turns over to us over the coming years.

2030 is really the big year.

And so what we have got to be ready for in 2030 is understanding where our assets are, when they were last maintained, what they're going to cost to keep in a state of good repair.

and so ramping up our whole program for that is going to be a big focus of the next two years and in fact it's our 27 goals will address that but the one thing that we have not yet hit but we're on track for is getting that contract signed by September 30th and we're confident it'll actually be signed probably in the next week or so.

So that'll close out our 26 goals.

Any questions on 26?

Okay, 27.

You'll see four very similar categories.

We know that we're

We talk a lot about capital projects, we talk a lot about building the bridge and putting in sidings, but unless we're getting people on the train, we're not doing our job.

So our top goal is always ridership and revenue.

We'll talk about it in a minute, but we're thrilled with a reduction of service of 25% because of the Long Bridge work windows that our ridership went down only a couple percent.

I mean, it wasn't down much at all.

We're continuing that path and we're looking for ridership to not go down.

Last year's goal was 1.35 million.

This year's goal is going to be 1.35 million.

As you recall, last year we had six months of full service and six months of the reduced service for Long Bridge.

This year we have 12 months of reduced service for Long Bridge.

So hitting that number is going to be its drag.

The Amtrak team has been a great partner in working on fares and putting sales in place when we need to put sales in place and actually we'll talk later and I think Jeremy this afternoon about the customer service standards that we have in place that really make the service great.

We continue to see when we put trains out in Virginia, people ride them, so we're comfortable with those goals.

Second category is Long Bridge.

Obviously, we don't get any new service until Long Bridge is done.

It's our biggest project, $2.8 billion.

These are stretch goals on both the north package and the south package.

They are ahead of what we would want the schedule to be, but again, they're stretched and we're comfortable that they are good goals for its purpose.

Third category is key milestones for other projects.

You see they're split between four different projects, three on the east side of the Commonwealth and then the New River Valley.

The New River Valley one going from the bottom up would be to get all of the Norfolk Southern work at the New Christiansburg station done by June 1st.

So that way we can start service next summer.

It's interesting when we talk summer.

Some people say summer is Memorial Day.

Some people say, well, September 20th is summer.

I think it's Memorial Day, but we'll talk about that.

But that's a big goal for us.

And we've talked to Norfolk Southern, and they're on board for that.

And then working up, we've got a goal for Frank Hunter Lowton Third Track.

We've got a bypass goal.

And then, of course, the fourth track goal, where you see the construction.

And then the last piece that we are putting in place for our 27 goals is under key organizational goals.

These two goals are right aligned with our asset management.

What these are doing is they're developing a map, an interactive map that will tell us what we own.

who owns the stuff by it and what state of good repair it's in, where the assets are, where the switches are, where the signals are, when the ties are replaced, all those kinds of things.

I'm proud of the fact that these are not goals that I sit in a room and come up with.

These are not goals that the ELT SITS alone comes up with.

We started this process back in March, April.

We sent these out to all the staff.

We said, look, give us goals that are stretch goals.

And we worked with folks, some folks said, you know what, we can probably do that faster.

Other places, they said, wait a second, you're being unreasonable.

So we came to a place where everybody in the organization, at least they said,

You don't want to put a goal in place where people are going to say, yep, that's an easy one.

And you also don't want people to say, well, we'll never hit that, so don't even worry about it.

And we think, again, we've found a good balance here.

Joan, do you want to?

I just want to say how much I appreciate the last goal here which seems very, I think people under appreciate how important asset management and maintenance is and as a beneficiary of well-maintained assets by VPRA, it's really important that this program's in place.

We have a similar effort going on at VRE and we're actually putting KPIs in place to determine, you know, to track the progress of as we

Continue our maintenance or improve the quality of our assets.

How does our service improve?

Thank you.

Yeah.

And in fact, one of the things and I didn't read it, but one of the things is our information has to be able to interact and talk to yours and to Amtrak's and to the freight's because that's critical.

It's kind of like payroll.

You don't really think about it, but when it's not done right, you know about it.

You know about it quickly.

I was going to also say I appreciated that work.

I know there's conversations that we've been having with some of our partners as well between DRPT and VPRA and VRE and localities around development opportunities around some of our rail stations.

And so I think the issue of ownership is more complicated than folks might imagine.

But being able to really have clarity around that data is useful.

I do have a question for you, Mr. Stadtler.

On the advanced key milestones for Long Bridge,

Could you give a little more flavor about what substantial completion means?

Sure.

So substantial completion, it's actually, it's a term of art.

It means it's done and it's all set.

Now, if they're punch list items, like we have to go back and make a small change here, but that's, it's done.

We've checked it off and it's complete.

You know, a lot of times you've like both have substantial completion of the bridge in 2030.

and it'll be operational and ready to go, but we'll probably be doing touch-up items into 2031.

It just basically means it's done, but you can't get caught on the, well, you didn't repaint that wall there.

I mean, it's, so it's that, Mike, did I do that right?

If Dallas is not in his head, I feel like I'm doing it.

All right.

Any other questions on 27 goals?

Awesome, thank you.

Passenger service updates.

I'm gonna go through this very quickly.

This continues to be consistent news, which is good.

Our ridership, as I mentioned earlier, was ahead of the previous year through about January, well through December, and then in January when we reduced service, it went below.

But as you see, in June, we were almost, we were very close to where we were the June before.

So over the year, we were down less than 1%, which with a 25% service reduction for half of the year is a huge, huge win.

Looking at 27 we've got our first month July of 27 and we were about 2% below July of last year and this is the trend that we've got to follow the previous year.

Here is the ridership breakout segment by segment.

You see we're above in Roanoke, we're above in Newport News.

The place where we're down is Norfolk because we went from three trains down to two.

And then also what you don't see here that's part of it is we used to have the Richmond service that started in Richmond and that service went away.

We still have trains obviously that go to Richmond because everything from Norfolk, everything from Newport News stops in Richmond and Ashland, Fredericksburg, et cetera.

But the places where we've not made service changes, we continue to see ridership growth, which really

It vindicates us for what we're doing.

DJ, I'm just going to ask a question.

No, no.

First of all, we knew it was coming.

So we plan for it ahead of time.

When we talk about the budget, you'll see it.

Our revenue is down, but also our expenses are down.

So, so yes, we're not pulling as much ticket revenue, but we're also spending less because we're not running those trains.

The buses cost us obviously, but it works out okay.

So we, we, we still are okay.

Okay.

Maybe just to flag it.

So the SFY is the state fiscal year, which started July 1st.

And that's something we track closely and as I mentioned earlier, we work closely with the Amtrak fare revenue team because we don't want to charge a ton of money and highlight revenue, but we also want to give away for free.

So we try to find that sweet spot where we maximize revenue ridership.

Some folks may recall a couple years ago we had some problems with that where our ridership was fine but our revenue was way down and so we've done a good job I think of working with Amtrak to balance that.

So here's Washington and Roanoke and I'll just flip through this quickly.

Washington Newport News, pretty much the same good news story.

I will point out that our customer on-time performance for the last few months especially has not been great.

64% is not a number that we strive for.

We like to be above 80% routinely.

Jeremy's going to talk about this this afternoon.

The good news is that a lot of our late trains are not

Really late.

They're just missing it by a little bit, but it's still 64 percent is not good.

Amtrak gets that.

Beery gets that.

The freight's get that.

And we're working together with all of them to say, OK, why are these trains not working as well as we expected them to?

So just on that, since you brought it up, because I noticed that you on time performance and it's not just this line, it's a bunch of them, right?

And it's not due to like excess ridership.

Right.

Is it due to factors outside of our control, weather, freight?

I would argue that weather is outside of our control.

That's correct.

But we know over the summer, we're going to have slow orders because of heat.

And what we do is we adjust the schedule.

So folks know they're going to not be on time.

There has been a lot of freight train interference.

We have had some weather issues where there have been trees on tracks and those kinds of things.

You say it's not because of excess ridership, but surprisingly there has been an uptick in dwell time where it takes longer to board and get folks off the train, get folks off the train and then report the train.

And that's something that people don't really pay attention to, but if you're on a train that's got 10 stops and each stop it takes you an extra minute to get folks off the train with their luggage or get on the train, that's a 10 minute delay and all of a sudden you're on a late train.

So that's something that the Amtrak crews pay close attention to.

It's something that we watch as well, but there has been an uptick in that.

Right, and I think Jeremy will cover this in his very, very dative, dense slides.

One of the metrics, right, that we judge Amtrak on, it's one of their own metrics, is like, are you helping people get on and off the train?

Coming on today, I mean, those stairs, they couldn't be steeper, and you're carrying a bag that's much bigger than hand-loaded, right?

So part of that is we want to help people get on and off the train.

Right, and that's one of the things, and I forward it a little bit to customer service standards, that's one of the things that we track on customer service standards because we've all seen it.

Some conductors are like, hey, let me help you with that, and they've really tried to move it along, and they're like, go ahead, get on board.

And we've seen, as you can see from these scores, really a shift from the, all right, get on board, to the let me help you, because they're watching it now as well.

But it's just like anything.

If you watch it, it'll get better.

DJ, to Patty's point though, 12 times.

Will this eventually, though, be solved as we get our station improvements, right?

Because if we don't, a lot of our station improvements now will be the forms will be almost not grade, but like vehicle height.

Right.

So that you can kind of walk onto the onto the onto the carriage.

Right.

It's easy for me to say yes to that, because in some cases it's very true.

But in some cases you can't.

So level boarding, you're talking about level boarding and we've got level boarding now.

at Newport News.

We've got level boarding at Roanoke.

We'll have level boarding at the New River Valley Station.

You're absolutely correct.

Just walking off is much easier when you've got luggage, strollers, whatever, much easier.

There are some stations where the platform is on the main line.

So the track that we stop on and people get off the train is also used by freight trains.

And the window or the envelope that the freight train uses when it goes won't allow for high level platforms because their train car conflicts with the platform.

So you can't have level boarding everywhere.

I guess in a perfect world, every single station could have a sidetrack or a pocket track where it pulls off of the main, lets people off, then gets back on the main.

But that's not contemplated for everywhere.

So we will have this issue for the foreseeable future in place.

But there are some projects like at Alexandria Station where they're not building high level platforms, but they're going to be an improved boarding experience.

I think new stations at Crystal City and Long Front

I think will help there as well.

So when there are opportunities, to your point, even if it's not at the high level to improve it even by a few inches, we collectively, whether it be

VRE doing the work, or VPR doing the work, or CSX or something are taking that opportunity.

Yeah, no, Mike's exactly right.

So you, I'm sorry, you want the, in a perfect world, you want level boarding.

The next world, which lets freight go by as well, you want eight inches over rail.

If you go to Alexandria, it's four inches below rail.

So that extra 12 inches adds a lot of time as people let go.

Do I have the yellow step stool there?

We're going with our four tracks and two are ours and two are others, right?

Can we get level boarding on our two?

Part of the agreement we have is it requires interoperability.

So if there's a bridge on one track, we've got to be able to have the freights.

There are places, though, where we've got projects.

We talked about this at the Crystal City Station, where you'll have half a platform that's high level, half that's not, where you can get a gauntlet track that it moves it over.

There are ways to get around this, but it's not a problem that's going to be solved when Long Bridge is done.

OK. We sit here and say, oh, when Long Bridge is done, we can do this.

This isn't something.

This one's not on us, really.

Yeah, awesome.

Let me just go back.

This chart we talked about, we continue to see in Virginia compared to other states that per train ridership, we are pretty consistently above other states, which continues to be a good news story for us.

Customer service standards, I just mentioned this a little bit, but here's the snapshot.

You see when we first started in 2024, you've got a lot of red with the lines in it.

And now after the second quarter, second calendar quarter of 2026, you only have a couple of things that we're watching.

Just speaks to the Amtrak partnership and the good work that's being done by our team and by the crews.

This year, every year we allocate part of our administrative cost to capital, and last year our capital spending was just about where we expected it to be, a little bit lower, but this year the capital spending has really ramped up because of all the construction that you see.

So the rate for allocation that we used last year on capital allocation is not appropriate this year.

We reset that every single year, and so when that gets reset, that will drop down probably

in the low 70s, maybe around 70s.

This is what the numbers say now.

You'll see this is through May.

We have financial data that is later because obviously, the fiscal year ended in June, but our auditors are working on that now.

We won't have final reports until probably sometime late next month or middle next month.

We still are thrilled with the number we have, even if it's not 96, it's still a good story.

and then here's our operations budget.

This is a great place to see it.

So our budget expectations for our revenue, we were slightly below where we thought we would be.

So we thought we'd get 87, $88 million in revenue and we ended up getting 85.

So we were off by 4 million, but our expenses were off by much less than that.

So it turns out that we turn out okay from a budget point of view and then pretty much straightforward, but it's all good news and as expected.

And here's the same information route by route.

It's pretty consistent.

Nothing revolutionary there.

Any questions on the passenger ridership before I turn it to Mike for some very quick capital project updates?

Mike.

Mike's going to go through this very quickly because this afternoon we have a more in-depth project updates.

We try to make sure that every month, obviously, as you know, when we have a board meeting, we present the executive directors for here, but when there's no board meeting,

We like to put the same format out.

We send it all to you.

We post it on the website.

So we like to keep it consistent.

There's a lot of information that we'll go over in more detail.

It is amazing to me, and it's really something that we take pride in.

Every time we publish the executive director's report, without fail, the next day, we get a comment from somebody somewhere across the country, not even the Commonwealth, who reads it, says, hey, I saw on page 22.

Is this new?

I mean, people are really paying attention, which is exciting.

For a long time, people

didn't pay attention to passenger rail, and they're paying attention not only to us, but as we talked about earlier, folks all across the country, we need to continue to make sure that when they talk about Virginia and passenger rail, that we're with glowing headlines and not some of the other end line.

July board meeting, I believe it was, Katie.

VRE announced, so in that month, you had both the $25 million grant from U.S.

DOT and you announced your contractor, which is a familiar name to some of us, Skanska.

Skanska is our contractor for Long Bridge North.

Long Bridge North ends at Control Point L.A. Long Farm.

So there'll be the same contractor that will be building

Long Fun, the Myler Cell from the head of the Long Bridge Project up to Union Station and building Long Bridge North.

So that was just a part of the procurement process that was not predetermined.

I just want to be very clear about that.

Yeah, no, you said it, it's a happy circumstance that we have the same contractor.

It's not the same team that's building it, so we're not worried about resources.

But certainly from a coordination standpoint, that will make it easiest.

We do have a year's worth of preconstruction services that are now underway with Skanska.

And there may be some early construction packages and early procurement that happens within that year.

And thank you for inviting us to participate.

Jeff Pelletier, who's in the corner of the room and will speak later, was a participant in a lot of these deliberations with regard to the reselection of a contract.

That will, the project there will again will be the last mile of ADU station, but also create that island platform that you can serve from two edges.

Right now, a lot of the final platform is only served from one edge, so you can't have two trains there at the same time.

But a feature of a lot of projects coming there in Crystal City are you can have an island platform, which means train control from both sides.

So that's a key aspect of adding capacity and equal, so trains won't be queued up.

I'm going to move very quickly through the next few, because we have not only people presenting, but we have a video coming up.

Long Bridge, just want to point out, retaining wall L, you've already heard of once it was in our goals, that is just south of Maryland Avenue and goes to Main Avenue.

Retaining walls are one of those costs of the projects that people don't think about, but are very expensive, so they're very important as well for the projects.

and anyone who's been up there, you know, there has been traffic shifts with regard to Main Avenue.

And if you're giving us apologies for that, and we're working through it, but I think so far things are going well.

Long Bridge South, DJ and I had the opportunity to go out there last month and at the northern shore of Buttman B, that's the northern shore of Potomac, they're putting the support piers for the future bridge into the ground.

As you might expect, when you're only about 50 feet off Potomac River, people that are working with crews that have their materials out are wading in water.

There's a couple feet of water.

So you can't look at the arc, which is the very bright point of the

of the sheet metal workers and others who are doing their work because it's that bright but so they're taking protective measures to make sure everything's fine there but it's it's interesting to see the work that's happening to see the actual bridge being built again just on the north side of 25, 50 feet from Potomac Bridge.

We have plans to take the board out for a tour in November so you see about this bridge.

Alexandra Fortrack, DJ mentioned earlier a lot of work going on there.

And that's from Alexandra South and Alexandra Station up to the Potomac River.

in Arlington.

And a lot of activities are happening there.

You might not be able to see it.

The work you will see in the area is the next slide.

Alexandria Station in King Commonwealth, which is BPA funded for the most part.

Well, all of King Commonwealth is funded.

VRE is leading, coordinating very closely.

And if you happen to be out there, stop and take a look when you were on the

Northside, Westside of King Street.

You will see the where they're starting to build the walls and you'll see the difference of going from 40 some feet to 80 some feet of the width underneath King Street.

I had to stop and do a double take because I get off there every day.

I first saw it a couple weeks ago.

How much wider the berth will be underneath King Street especially.

That would be a great improvement for the for the city of Alexandria because with modern technology we have been jumped over the

King Street, much more broad pattern.

The Frank Hurley Springfield Bypass, again, we're going to talk about this in a little bit, including utility relocations, even having good conversations with fiber optics and in Oregon who runs a gas pipeline up to a national airport.

Prenkody Lord and Vertrac in that same area.

Similarly, we are working with utilities there.

But also the big news here is that CSX did put out their procurement, their bid for their work leading the construction of this.

On August 7th, those bids are due back in mid-October for not just Prenkody Lord but also Newington Road.

For those in that area, we're building a new bridge over Newington Road, and it's going to be widened to allow for one lane of traffic in each direction, right now it's just one lane in total.

So work that is happening there includes railroads interlocking.

If you do take the train, see a lot of signal work going on there, they're starting to wrap that up.

Other capital projects, I mentioned Newington Road, and we'll hear more about Fairfax County Utilities related today during the budget announcement.

As a reminder, Fairfax, the utilities that need to be moved, they have agreements with the freight railroads.

They have to move their own costs, but we're helping them out by fronting the money up front and

and moving the utilities for them and they will pay us back over the lifetime of Fairfax County and Stafford County and this one is Fairfax County and that procurement was released and we expect soon to issue that utility relocation for Fairfax County and that Franconia area soon.

Siding projects.

These are all in, except for siding A, the rest of them are all in early stages of design.

Actually, we've updated each of these, and I don't know if you saw it last month, but on the right-hand side, you see the existing rail and where we're adding the siding.

So this is when we first did transfer rail in Virginia agreement with CSX.

These are strategically placed

additions to infrastructure where there are bottlenecks that will make it operationally easier to operate.

Also, spoiler alert, if you look, many of them are right next to a big body of water, like just north of there's the Occoquan River.

Eventually, when we get to phase three and four, we'll be building a big bridge over the Occoquan River as well.

Big bodies of water, often to no retaining walls because the water

that sometimes you have to drill more retaining walls the closer you get to water.

Moving further on, 90D, again, that's a project that we are in 60% design, so I should stop and note that these projects are in 30-60% design.

By the time we get to next year's budget, which starts in, well it will come to you in January, our staff are starting to work on it.

Next month, sooner if not now, we'll have better cost estimates.

So we might come back to you with some updated cost estimates in next year's budget, which again is just in a few months.

Again, moving further south, Siding E, which is near the Brooke Station, I often think of, we're Siding D, in the Woodbridge Station, Siding E is near the Brooke Station, Siding F is near Spelzburg Station, Siding A is near Leland Station, for those who might be reading, know those stations.

So, fly free, because Siding E is near the, again, also in the 30% design, we might have updated cost estimates coming to you.

If not, maybe even before January, we might have some updates for you in November.

and Givlin South, which is further along since we started the project earlier, since it's a phase one project has to be.

And Lila Road Overpass is a, so a lot of you noticing a lot of these projects could be broken up into segments.

That is an overpass that CSX is now building that we are building in coordination.

Well, we got permission from VDOT to do it.

We do have a contract with that.

Again, I mentioned the utility locations.

and Siding F again.

That's a very important siding because that, I consider that the study, but people didn't need to have those 500, you have a starting line.

You need to have the cars lined up before they go.

And you have, because there you have the VUE trains lined up because that is where the VUE trains start just before the sponsoring station there.

Crossroads Yard is literally adjacent to the sponsoring station.

Signing C is one we moved, we worked with CSX to move and some Hanover County because we didn't want to build without a new bridge.

And I'm going to skip over some of these.

One I want to point out was original air facility, which DJ mentioned earlier, we got to receive that grant.

And I believe there will be a budget adjustment for that coming up soon.

Stanton, if you want to point that out, we did receive money for that as well to rebuild

Platform and a canopy which are if anyone's been out there in the state of This repair should know there's while there's limited service there.

We consider this a generational investment Amtrak does have a quarter ID Application and to move that to seven day a week service meaning that being Cardinal service So right now there's only trains Three days a week east and three days a week west, but there's a possibility that could be seven day a week service

Richmond to Raleigh.

DJ, when you mentioned the compact, one thing that we're currently doing with North Fine is going through conceptual design for Richmond to Raleigh.

That will give us cost estimates for things such as the bridge that has independent utility that could help places like Hens and Rose.

Again, in New York Valley, we're gonna get into this, but we are getting to the point where

We're only about a year away.

Maybe a little less.

What?

Maybe a little less than a year away.

We're going to have a video discussion later.

Western Rail Project updates, Milksville to Calverton is a double-track project that will help with service to and from Roanoke and also all the way down to New Orleans.

Roanoke Yard is necessary to get the trains quickly from Roanoke through the yard to New York.

Yeah, we'll talk about right-of-way later, but right-of-way just continues to be good news for making great progress.

As folks know, a couple of years ago, this was a big, big challenge for us, but we have worked with CSX, we've worked with our incredible right-of-way team, and we're on a good path forward here.

Yes.

When we finish, everything is aimed for a period of time

About 2030.

We'll do everything to be complete.

Are we putting together what we planned back in 2030?

Yeah, so there are two

things that are being put together for after 2030.

The first is what trains are coming back and when, what trains are being added and when, because you're not just going to go and say, oh, we've got eight new trains starting today, let's go.

So we're working on those schedules with Amtrak and with Viri, but we're also working on, okay, it's now 2026.

If we're going to be doing construction at the Maddox River Bridge or Petersburg, we've got the Ettrick Station that we're doing work on,

Occoquan River Bridge.

If we're going to be doing construction on those things as the construction on Long Bridge and the fourth track winds down, we've got to start design sometime for the next 12 months.

Yes, we're beginning those planning now.

We've talked to the Secretary's office about here are the priorities, here are the dollar amounts.

Some of them are really, really big dollars, but here are some small things that we can do quickly.

Yes, you'll see a lot more of that conversation

Well, I mean, the whole purpose of the compact was to fund another financial avenue, if you would.

On both sides of the border, yeah.

Well actually on three sides, so south of us in North Carolina and also north in DC because a lot of what the S line benefits is the long distance transit on Amtrak.

And so what happened was, and Mike, step in and correct me when I'm wrong here, but in February the FRA

Finally obligated, not the right word, but finally obligated the $58 million grant to North Carolina to do the design work.

And they were very clear, North Carolina, you're the lead on this.

You've got 12 months.

You need to get the design work done.

So we know whether this is a $6 billion problem or a $12 billion problem and how we can stair step in and get things done more efficiently.

So their deadline, our deadline working with them is February of next year.

We'll know a lot more then about what kind of money we're looking for.

And if I may as well, with the North Carolina work, they have been working very closely with FRA and their delegation as well.

I think they're feeling pretty good about the relationship that they have with the federal government.

They also received a very significant FED state partnership grant that was announced the same time.

Too many grants.

But they also received a significant grant for some of their rail work.

Part of what we've been talking about with the Virginia North Carolina Compact, which will include members of our House and Senate as well as members of theirs, North Carolina does not have a dedicated sort of trust fund the way we do in Virginia.

And they're very interested in trying to get their legislators on board, if you will, with that.

But I think we've been thinking a lot about

both you know what happens in that short term once 2030 is here just to be able to support the operations but what comes more long term and so I think that's feeding into the statewide rail plan that DRPT is leading the effort with VPRA and VRE and others that statewide rail plan we did a little briefing on that in the last meeting we're looking to have that it slipped a little bit getting some data that we needed which is another story but it's largely on track

that we should have a version of that in January or February.

And that will really be looking at that 20 year horizon.

And we're planning to brief the Commonwealth Transportation Board in December on that.

We can come back to obviously this board as well and keep you all informed of what that long term picture is looking like as we look at phases three and four.

of Transforming Rail in Virginia and some of these.

I think the other thing we are trying to think about with that, we have an uncertain federal landscape at the moment.

So both, how do we ensure that our federal delegation knows how important rail is to Virginia?

So we welcome everyone from the board helping to educate Congress on that.

There was also a development on the acquisition side.

Virginia was able to acquire the Virginia section from CSX.

North Carolina was not able to acquire it directly from CSX.

Amtrak though has stepped in and we have agreed to acquire it on their behalf.

And so our board approved that at our last meeting.

There's still some due diligence work that needs to conclude.

I think we are tentatively scheduled to close on that property with CSX in mid-December.

Grant update, the Chair mentioned all of the grant programs that are out there.

We have been fortunate to get a number of grants here to snap out of those.

The big changes are we had the Feds State Partnership grant up on the upper left.

We had asked for money for the Occoquan Third River, Occoquan River Third Track design.

We were not selected for that, but we also have that in the Chrissy.

Application Round, so hopefully we'll be there.

And then Richmond Layer Facility, we had asked for that under Fez Day Partnership, but we were given $25 million under build, so that really goes away.

The next grant announcements will be Chrissy, and hopefully you see the four that we've got in there.

Stan can come out because we got that already and ask for Richmond Layer Facility.

So that's the grants.

Slide provides a rolling total analysis

from the grub fund.

I'm pleased to say we didn't meet the estimates for fiscal year 2026.

That will be displayed in future updates to the board as we close out the financials from that year.

And so this reflects the fiscal year in July and no reason to be concerned yet.

To deliver all of these projects, the revenue stream we've been provided has been collecting over time to help sustain this enormous program that VPRA is administering.

And so over the year to date, $765 million average invested balance over that period of time, we invested in both the local government investment pool, or LGIP, as well as a managed portfolio.

And in July, we earned $2.4 million.

This slide just provides the base versus market value and the gain attributable for July of 1.6%.

And then the next slide is just the liquidity and the view of our current investments.

As they reach their final maturity date, we have a lot coming offline in the portfolio in the current year.

and we've asked the advisor as they come home offline to reinvest them for the end of 2028.

Our strategy is to work down our LGIP balance and then move into what's in the portfolio, the sustainable future and then capital program delivery.

I'd be happy to answer any questions that you have.

As a reminder, our goal is not portfolio growth, it's capital protection and the team does a fantastic job of investing and making sure that we have the money we need when we need it to get these projects.

You said that we want to reduce our LGIP assets.

Forgive me if I misunderstood you.

Because the National Program is really going like any of us, for the last three months alone, we spend about $18 million a week on projects and the agency operations.

Okay, administrative updates.

We have been here five years and we thought it was a good time to do an employee engagement survey.

One of the things that we talk about continuously is culture and making sure that we understand or have our thumbs on the pulse of the culture, so to speak.

That's so cliche.

Sorry about that.

So we did an employee engagement survey, we opened it in May, it was open for a couple of weeks.

Thrilled to say that we had 80% participation, so 53 is 66 folks.

83% of the responses were favorable.

We've got a lot of detail about this and we can answer questions that you have.

Here are some of the things we've got highest scores on.

Integrity was big, which is something about the time.

I enjoy working with people on my team, and I think that included me, so I think we're good about that.

Vision, mission, and goals are important to me, personally.

I mean, these are all good things.

On the right-hand side, you see how our scores compare to the global scores, public administration scores, and transportation scores, and you see we were higher for the most part than most of our peers that we were looking at.

That said, we have opportunities for improvement.

Here are our lower scores.

People talk about the workload.

We've got a lot going on, as we see me putting eight hours' worth of stuff into 35 minutes.

So there are places where we can make improvements.

We've already started talking to managers about scores, and we've got an all-staff meeting in September where we're going to talk about, here's what we heard.

Can you validate this?

Are we hearing the right things?

And here are the steps we're taking to address some of the concerns.

But overall, good news.

I think we have been consistent over the five and a half years of working very hard to make sure that VPRA is a place where people are challenged and a place where people understand that there's a heavy workload, but there's also a good, good reward.

We're doing something that really makes a difference.

And so we were pleased with these results.

More information to come.

So here are the next steps.

We talked about that as well.

Administrative budget, pretty straightforward, we're in good shape.

We spent a little bit more on payroll and benefits than we expected, but we were able to offset that because we spent less on consultants.

This was a big shift this year.

We talked about it at our December all staff meeting that we now have experts in the areas we need experts, so we're going to rely less on consultants and more on ourselves.

And you see that we, again, made that shift, surplus on consultants, but a little more spending on personnel.

No budget adjustments to report in July.

Here are contracting updates.

Every month, we update you on any contracts between $250,000 and $5 million.

Pretty straightforward.

This is work on the sewer location, relocation that Mike talked about, some design work at ETRIC.

We had to renew what we chose to renew our IT services.

Does our IT security assure?

Does our IT service backbones work?

And then every year, we've got insurance, so that was $1.2 million.

Active Procurements that are ongoing now, you see these here, pretty straightforward.

The one I just want to highlight is tree felling.

So part of what we do in all of our projects, and you've got to bring trees down, it'll surprise I don't think anybody that there are certain times of years that things happen in trees that we shouldn't be interrupting.

That's all I'm going to say.

Some of these projects, we had construction plans that overlapped

So these are like nesting birds or something?

Bats.

But so if we take it in-house, we can cut?

It'd be great.

How do I make that work, Mr. Westermann?

The schedule is such that CSX's procurement is going to, and I'm making these dates up, CSX's procurement is going to be finalized in September.

They're going to choose a contractor by the third week of September, and that contractor will get a notice to proceed the middle of October.

Unfortunately, our time of year restriction starts October 1st, so they would show up and say, well, we can't cut any trees until January.

What we're doing is we're signing our own contract so we can get folks out before October 1st, fell the trees before the restriction starts, and then CSX's contractor shows up and the trees are already gone so they don't have to wait to do their track work.

Sorry, I wasn't clear on that.

And that, a minute late, ends my presentation.

I apologize.

No, thank you.

So thank you.

I appreciate you for that.

So let's move to our next item, the FY 27 Budget Amendment and Management Reserve.

And I think Laura and others are going to be walking us through that.

who we met in May that we'd like to amend to the budget.

I'm the Director of Financial Planning and Analysis.

And as everyone mentioned, I'm going to be talking about our fiscal year 27 budget amendment and our management reserve.

First, we're going to start by looking at a bird's eye view of our financial plan.

which compares our sources, which are our revenues, to our abuses, which are the expenses from inception of our report program through fiscal year 31.

So I'm going to focus on the bottom section of the slides.

The top section we reviewed during the debate we're leading.

So the bottom section only reflects the changes since then.

Our sources increased by $72.5 million

So they went from $7.97 billion to $8.04 billion.

Our use has also increased by the same amount of $72.5 million.

They went from $7.88 billion to $7.95 billion, which results to a net zero impact to our management reserve.

On the next slide, we're going to talk about

and the USES side of the changes.

And as was mentioned previously during the Executive Director's Report, the Richmond Layover Facility project increased by $70 million.

And this is because of funding that VPRA received to fully fund the project.

We received a $15 million

Grant from the Central Virginia Transportation Authority.

We also received $30 million from the from Amtrak IIJA federal funding.

In addition, we received a $25 million build grant from the FRA to fully fund the project.

Lastly, we have a $2.5 million increase in the Fairfax Utilities Project.

And this has resulted to a general increase in construction costs and an addition of a solar road that was required by CSX.

This slide just summarizes changes in our sources and uses.

We talked about the sources on the previous slide and as well as the changes in the uses.

So the net impact to our management reserve is a zero impact as we have received all the funding for our uses.

Slide again shows no change in our management reserve balance

Our program cost estimates increased by the $2.5 million of additional funding and increase in project costs.

And finally, this slide shows our preliminary results for a couple of our revenue sources for fiscal year 26.

And I just want to note that our fiscal year 26 results is currently undergoing our annual audit.

So once our financial statements are issued, we will reconcile the pedals or results of our sources and uses.

And those will be presented to the board in a future reporting.

Sure, just, we're pleased, as I mentioned earlier, that the Commonwealth Rail Fund exceeded the estimate by just over a million dollars.

What we had planned to receive from the 66 and 70 facility is slightly short of the estimate we were provided from VDOT, and so that delta of $4 million will make up a future adjustment.

In the current plan that VDOT has presented to the Commonwealth Transportation Board, we will receive more pay go in the current year of 2027 that we had not planned on dedicated to Long Bridge.

And so that will more than make up for the difference if it meets its estimate.

So that's a good news story.

The sources and uses, I understand, $70 million in sources is three grants.

That $2.5 million, that's going to come to us eventually.

We're going to be reimbursed by Fairfax County.

Okay.

Someone, Laura, can you talk about, in the slide, is that, so the $4 million that were different because of the off estimate from VDOT.

What's our plan?

Did they, did we get any detail about like what roads that is the, I guess the current 26 off between their projections, right?

No, so this is actually a VDOT operated facility.

Inside the Beltway is VDOT, it's a construction feature.

So the inside of the Beltway is what's dedicated to the Long Bridge construction.

So we can receive PAYGO funding during this.

We're also going to benefit from the funds in this way.

It's estimated at $104 million available.

What this means is that they estimate they derived in the spring of 25 for how the facility was going to perform.

They have to present a budget to the CTB with a waterfall of expectations.

And our pay-to commitment comes from the O&M as a facility, the commitment to transit in Northern Virginia, and then comes our commitment.

Any other questions?

All right.

There's a second.

Ready?

Those opposed say nay.

Any abstentions?

The ayes have it.

Alrighty, and so next on the agenda is to discuss the VPRA Amtrak 209 agreement.

In case folks haven't heard, Amtrak is in the early stages of a major restructuring designed to increase the transparency and service provided to states and to inform this process, the USDOT has selected a small group of industry leaders to participate in a U.S. delegation on a passenger rail and modernization governance focus.

Both DJ Stadtler and Jennifer Mitchell have been selected to serve as members of this delegation.

So I think that's really great for Virginia to have you both there and participating in that.

As part of this program, the group will spend a week in Austria and Spain learning about their rail companies are structured over there, how they manage relationships with national and regional governments and how they manage fleets and facilities.

So this week includes site visits as well as meetings with rail companies and national and regional

leading officials.

So again, pretty exciting if you, you know, have travel photos or things that you want to share with us.

I'm sure it'll all be work.

I'm sure it'll all be work.

But the Amtrak restructuring is a pretty significant thing as well.

Again, it's in the early phases, but we also, I think, benefit from having Jennifer Mitchell on our board who's been involved with that work too.

So Jennifer,

Sure.

So this process began in January of earlier this year.

This was, I would say, brought to us by USDOT.

And we have, however, they've been very clear that we at Amtrak are the ones taking the pen on the actual restructuring plan.

So, as Mariia mentioned, the goal to this is really to improve the transparency, the accountability and focus of the organization as well.

I can just say from a personal standpoint, having been in Virginia for eight years and then at FRA for three, I have worked for the Amtrak in a lot of different

Capacities, and now under their sort of in the organization.

And I can say firsthand that, you know, the organization really does suffer from having a lot of conflicting missions and a lot of conflicting mandates, everything from operating the Northeast Corridor at a profit to rebuilding the Northeast Corridor.

We're now, I think, depending on how you count it, either the fifth or the 12th largest construction company in the United States or as well as then operating state supported service

kind of as a service provider, but then also operating long distance service as a public mission.

So the idea behind this is to create a single parent company with three separate subsidiary companies underneath it.

They would still be governed by a single board, as we have today.

And I should also say this will all be within existing statutory framework that we have today.

We're also not going to change any

of our collective bargaining agreements with labor as well.

So we are working on the I'd say the organizational redesign and placement of functions in these three separate subsidiaries.

One of those subsidiaries would be an infrastructure manager.

One is be a operating company.

And then the third would be a rolling stock manager as well.

And then again, under

A parent company that would still have responsibility for strategic alignment of those groups and also shared services.

So our board met in July to sort of consider the first iteration of this plan.

They gave us the direction to continue moving forward on it.

We would expect that if the board decides to approve this to establish those three subsidiaries in December of this year and then continue to move forward with the reorganization really in 2027.

However, the long tent or long pole in the tent is really the IT and financial systems, which is going to take probably two to three years to get that fully established.

So.

That's where we are happy to keep you all updated as that proceeds and what it may also mean for our agreements with VPRA.

That is still TBD.

But I would say for this purpose of the agreement today, I don't think it should change anything that you would see in the 209 agreement now.

Do you think, Madam Chair, listen, I think this is, it's good innovation for Amtrak, right, as a whole.

I do think is that in terms of this agency and this authority, I just, you know, my hope would be is that we maintain the same, I think, a comparable level of

Understanding with whatever these new entities are the same way that we do with Norfolk Southern right when we talked about that you know any successor organization based upon their corporate merger like that the same things that we agreed with and that there's the same level of understanding us particularly and the businesses that are both going to shift into the infrastructure operators but then the asset operators when we talk about like the rolling stock right because for us right those things hit you know

They're interoperable even if, then, when our partners at Amtrak, if they are separate functions.

If I may, I think you hit it right on the head.

Is our 209 agreement going to be with the operating company or is it going to be with the parent company?

And you could argue either way, but a lot of what we do, especially our capital projects, ties right into their infrastructure, that's my line of business.

And then also we're reliant on their fleet line of business as well.

So it's going to be, I think the devil's in the details, I so cliche today.

But I think the good news for us is unlike like railroad mergers,

Okay, all right, I'm out of time.

I'm like Roman Mergers.

The people that are running Amtrak are invested in passenger rail because their board of directors, their little board of directors, and also that 535 person board of directors across the street from them, are all invested heavily in state's port of rail.

I mean, there are 20 different states, 23 different folks, sorry, I switched stations, and each of them have two senators and each of them have a number of representatives that are watching this very, very closely.

Well, I would also think as we, hearing that timeline, which is a pretty aggressive timeline to move forward, and for some of us who lived through like the creation of DHS and other things, like when you have that level of transformation, it slows, it's a big slow down on the system, right?

Just even if everything goes perfectly, but there's always the unknown.

And so I think given our very aggressive timeline for what needs to happen over the next year as well, it will be important to

Ensure close coordination and we hope and appreciate that Amtrak.

And we are setting, we're actually engaging in a very robust public input process right now that was very, very high priority of our board as well over the next several months before any final decisions are made.

We also would be, we're planning with the SAPRC, which is the state organization,

that Virginia is also a member of, to set up a working group of state members.

That's sort of in process right now where that working group will provide us with a lot of input on these very questions about where the agreements should lie, what they should look like.

Thank you.

Thank you, Jennifer.

All righty.

This is the best setup for my presentation.

I feel like I could smell yourself.

But I'm Shrini Tamane.

I'm the Senior Manager of Operations from EPRA.

and today I'm here to talk about just a quick 101 on what the 209 agreement is, the genesis of the 209 agreement and the state supported routes, who the major players are and what the role is in this whole framework and the benefits that PPRA leaves from this relationship.

So, PRIA 209, this is a term you'll hear time and time again with the state supported agreement.

And the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act, which was passed in 2008, has a section 209, which specifically deals with state supported routes.

And what it did was it delegated the responsibility of running

or sponsoring any routes less than 750 miles to states.

And that was the genesis of Virginia's service starting up.

Virginia was one of the first states to sign the two-line agreement in 2013, started October 1st.

I want to remind everyone that there is an action item associated with this after this presentation.

setting that up.

Rail Virginia stands in the northeast region as we are in the tail end of Amtrak's NEC Corridor, which runs from DC to Boston.

With that strategic location, we are able to put down equipment and service down to Virginia.

There are a lot more players in this very highly dense passenger network on the northeast

with a lot of commuter agencies also operating in the same territory, one of them being VRA, operating in Northern Virginia region.

So state procedure, Jennifer already mentioned this, State Amtrak Industry Passenger Rail Committee.

So when the 209, the PREA-209 Act was passed in 2008 and state supported services was born,

The federal government quickly realized that the application of the policy needed a framework and needed a body that made it uniform throughout the country.

Every state can do it and they don't want to.

So, secrecy was funded by the federal government.

It is a staff agency.

There are 23 state agencies which are partnered with secrecy on the committee, 20 states, and they oversee

32 routes, four of them being in Virginia.

The committee is comprised of Amtrak, FRA, and state partners.

We are one of them.

And what this gives us is a ticket to an exclusive club.

We cannot, of course, we cannot find for ourselves individually, so we go at it collectively and through state procedure with Amtrak to not only implement a 209 policy, but to refine wins or settle disputes when they arise.

And specifically,

begin with the PR21 section.

So who are the major players?

As I mentioned, there are three entities which are major for the state Amtrak relationship.

SaferSea, their biggest role is implementing and refining the 209 policy.

We started the refinement process of the old policy in 2022, implemented in 2024.

We are still in the process of developing the capital policy.

SaferSea also

We also develop standard rates for the whole country, for all states.

The rates married with Amtrak operating metrics gives us a forecast.

That's how the costs come to our operating agreement.

But SABRC also plays a big facilitator role.

So for the aero procurement, states have a single voice through SABRC to say this is what we want and be part of the RFP process.

As Jennifer mentioned, we also have a voice through SABRC for Project Orion.

And whenever any discrepancies come up, SABRC is the body where the FRA, States and Amtrak work together to solve them.

Amtrak's role in all of this is not only to work with States, but also with SABRC, you know, deliver service.

But also whenever we find policy refinements, the biggest element is implementing them back in the Amtrak system.

You know, refining the financial allocations.

And so they also, Amtrak plays a big role in implementing the policy on a consistent basis throughout the country.

What this gives us is some service rights.

So we not only pay for our service, but we also able to

decide our schedules or work with Amtrak to come up with schedules.

We can work on station staffing, equipment, service metrics, and then there's other initiatives like the customer service standards agreement, PICS improvements, the big items that leads to the betterment of our service.

So the 209 agreement is what enables us to do all this work with Amtrak.

And then lastly, as I mentioned, there is an action item associated with this presentation.

The FY 27-209 agreement will have the operating and capital forecast, schedules of staffing, it's all laid out.

But the biggest thing that also is a benefit of the agreement is we have quarterly meetings between Amtrak and VPRA, and that's a requirement.

and Jennifer attends a lot of those quarterly meetings.

Other EFT members attend those quarterly meetings and we preserve any issues or get consensus whenever there are issues pending between Amtrak and VPRA.

So the 209 actually enables us to have that kind of relationship with Amtrak.

And then a big part of how the Transforming Rail in Virginia program was born was it came out of the existing 209 relationship for the state supported service with Amtrak.

We already had service here and we built on it.

But the TRD Partnership Funding Agreement, which Amtrak contributed a big amount towards our program, apart from the capital projects, we have customer service standards, which is called out in the Partnership Funding Agreement.

We have service performance that Jeremy usually presents on.

to improve on-time performance in the state.

So those are the big umbrella programs under DRV, but also, you know, PICS improvements, that came out of the customer service standards programs, what we do with Amtrak day in and day out.

But again, the backbone of that relationship between Amtrak and VPRA is the 2019 agreement.

You know, I would love to see where this goes, but to hold members comment earlier, you know, it's a good mechanism to keep both, you know, all parties accountable for delivering service.

Thanks Ashwini and I'll just add to that.

We are uniquely situated.

When you look around the table at Safer Sea, there's a lot of animosity might be strong, but we really pride ourselves on the strong relationship we have with Amtrak.

And Amtrak and VPRA, we feel like we're working together for the betterment of passenger rail.

And there are a lot of states that feel like they're working together for the betterment of their state.

Because we're so closely connected to the Northeast Corridor, we want everything to be successful.

And that puts us, I think, in a good position to be successful and to be one of the leaders of the states across the country.

So thank you, Ashwini.

What we're looking for today is approval for me to be able to enter into agreement the next year's 209 agreement with Amtrak,

None of the rates are finalized, but it's also not something we can negotiate because it just gets spit out of the Saferty model.

Thank you, TJ.

So, yes.

So moved.

All in favor of granting the authority to execute the FY27 agreement.

Say aye.

Opposed, say nay.

Any abstentions?

I just had it.

Thank you.

Okay, so our last item before lunch, make sure we're on a time check here.

Yep, we're looking good.

Chair, members of the board, it's a pleasure to be here.

My name is Benjamin Jarvelo.

Those of you who are familiar, I've been doing this for a little under 30 years and have previously led COMS operations at three other Virginia state agencies.

Very happy to be here.

It's a very exciting time to join the team.

Good afternoon, everyone.

My name is Jess Bagley, I'm the government affairs manager here with VPRA.

If you didn't know, Congress, the House, and Senate have been in recess for the last couple of weeks for August.

they'll return next week Monday, August 31st.

When they return they have a couple big pieces of legislation that they really need to figure out before they recess in October for campaigning for the November election.

That includes the FY 27 budget and then re-operizations of the investment infrastructure and jobs, FKA, or the search transportation re-operization package.

Both those are set to expire at 11 59 on September 30th.

Before the House left a couple weeks ago, they did pass a continuing resolution that would fund the government at its current funding levels until December 4th.

The Senate passed a different continuing resolution that will fund the government until December 11th at the current funding levels.

The Senate's CR also included funding for the surface transportation reauthorization programs, so it would continue that funding until December 11th as well.

The ICR did not include those advanced multi-year appropriations that we saw in Division J of the IIJA, so it would be an immediate decrease in transportation and rail funding in the future.

The House is expected to take off the Senate's version of the CR when it returns next week.

Hopefully they'll pass it.

It'll get signed into law.

I will have a little bit of time for Congress to figure out a full FY 27 budget and a net service transportation reauthorization package.

Before the House left, they did pass their version of the IIJA reauthorization.

It's called the Build America 250 Act.

It passed as a committee bipartisan.

However, it has not come up for a floor vote.

There's some difference in opinions as it relates to the two crew freight rule in there and then fees on electric vehicles.

The Senate has yet to release a package for the surface transportation reauthorization.

We're still waiting to see anything come out of that.

So hopefully when they return next week, we'll be able to pass a continuing resolution on both those pieces of legislation to give them a little bit more time to negotiate two full packages.

I will mention it's Virginia.

We have an election.

We have an election every year.

This one is for the federal election.

It's on November 3rd.

Early voting in Virginia actually starts in September on the 18th.

All U.S. congressional members are up for election.

33 senators including Mark Warner here in Virginia and some local elections depending on where you're at are

in November.

There's a couple competitive races here in Virginia that we are watching.

We could see some new members of Congress next year.

One of the competitive races is Congressional District 1, which is represented by Republican Congressman Rob Whitman.

He's in that sort of central Virginia area.

He is running against Democrat Shannon Taylor, who, if you didn't know, she ran in the Democratic Attorney General primary last year.

And then the other race we're watching is Congressional District 2, which is Congresswoman Jen Higgins.

She is running against Democrat Elaine Maria, who was a former congressional member in that seat a couple of Congresses ago.

So just keep your eye out.

We might have some new members that will be needing to brief these projects on in the future.

Okay, as for the state legislature, quick reminder of what we did this year in 2026.

VPRA elected two pieces of legislation that were ultimately signed into law and they became effective earlier this year on July 1.

Those bills are HB 141, which was led by Delegate Reed,

This bill was just really focused.

It was a clean-up bill.

It was really focused on updating the exemptions that are in our enabling legislation and then garnering us some exemptions that other transportation agencies like BDOT enjoy that we thought would be useful in the future to help us stay on time and on budget for our projects.

The second bill was HB446 which was led by Delegate Simon.

It really focused on clarifying our eminent domain and quick take procedures so it aligns with the rest of Virginia common doors including VDOT.

The board voted on, oh sorry,

I did miss a portion of Delegate Reads Bill, sorry.

There was a second portion to that bill if you guys voted on it last for related to our procurement bylaws.

It basically just increased our threshold for project interim caps for architectural and engineering services, and it's going to mostly be used for planning purposes in the future.

Sorry about that.

Like I said, Delegate Reads Bill, Delegate Science Bill was really focused on aligning our commitment to the main process with the rest of Virginia.

As for this upcoming General Assembly session in 2027, it is a short cycle.

It's only 45 days long compared to the 60 days we experienced this year.

So not a big difference.

It will start at the beginning of January.

We do not have any bills that we are leading at this time or planning to lead at this time.

We probably won't have anything.

Our main focus will be keeping legislators informed of the upcoming construction impacts that we're going to see throughout the state, particularly over in Leland Road and Newington Road.

Okay, and then there was a mention that we'd like some updates on Quarter IT.

If you guys don't know what Quarter IT is, it is a federal program that helps divide rail borders through early system planning and project development so that they can be competitive for federal construction, federal funding in the future.

We have two corridors that are in the Quarter IT process.

One of them is Bristol to DC.

The other one is the Commonwealth Corridor, so Roanoke, Charlottesville, Richmond to Williamsburg.

In July of this year, DRPT, who is leading the quarter IT process, submitted the step one application to FRA.

This process includes creating a scope of work, a schedule, and a budget.

They're expecting FRA to advance our step one into step two sometime in the fall of this year, but please note that it's all based on the federal government obligating additional funds to quarter IT, so that is something we'll be compact to make sure that that funding is included in either the FY 27 package or the surface transportation reauthorization bill.

DRPT is expecting the service development portion for both quarters to last about three years.

And so they'll continue working through this process with us and other state stakeholders.

And hopefully we'll see some funding for these quarters move through.

I know that was a lot of information in a very short amount of time, so I'm happy to answer any questions.

If you would like to just make your way to lunch, please know that I'm always available.

I'm happy to chat in more details before, after, or at a different point.

Thank you guys.

All righty, thank you.

We will break for lunch.

We're just a couple minutes over, but hopefully it still works to reconvene at 1230.

Alrighty, we will now move into what is always, I think, exciting for us is to get the project and construction updates.

Alrighty, so thank you.

Here's our picture of right-of-way acquisitions.

Folks who are new may not remember, when we talk about right-of-way acquisitions, this is when we're doing a construction project and we need to use somebody else's land for a purpose.

Maybe it's accessing our project site, maybe it's a permanent purpose, maybe we're going to locate a bridge through there, but we don't own enough land ourselves, so we have to go to the adjacent landowners and acquire property interest from them to accomplish the projects.

So just kind of going down the list, I'll say every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Right now we're in the middle of right away story.

The beginning chapters were not so great though.

We remember some of the early discussions about the evaluation maps and boundary lines and deciding the boundary lines and understanding

The actual ownership of paint leaves.

Well, the good news is we're not sold everywhere.

We have five days away.

We have surveyed boundary lines.

We have recorded them in clerk's office on the courts.

The official boundary lines of the rail are so we know exactly what we need to acquire.

We know from whom we need to acquire.

We know the exact rights we need to acquire.

So that hard challenging stuff from a couple of years ago is behind us.

So now you can see we're in the throes of it and we are acquiring property interests

Rapidly.

Starting at the top, Long Bridge North, you can see we've acquired three out of the 10 necessary parcels.

That can be a little bit misleading, only because we're a little farther along than that would indicate.

Of the remaining seven, only three are private parties that we're acquiring from.

I would describe all three of those as on the one yard line.

Before we step into this meeting, the council of those landowners

and those are going to be applied immediately and be available at the next time.

The balance, the other four interests are public safety, whether it's the district of Columbia, whether it's WMATA or National Park Service.

Those public health acquisitions take us to the agency as a counter plugin.

The good thing there is we have access to the parcels for construction purposes and a permit for those governmental entities.

And it's just a matter of time.

So, although it shows three out of ten, we're actually in very good shape and on track to do both of those parcels.

On the south, we have one outstanding parcel, again, without limits.

That's from Park Service, so while we know we're going to get it eventually, we're going to work under a permit if we can acquire those entries, so we have what we need for construction purposes as far as asset.

Again, we're a fourth track, we're an almost identical posture, we have three remaining parcels to acquire from the model.

Everything's acquired from bypass.

That's good news.

And okay, so where is it really?

Let me skip these two projects right now.

ETRIP, we're showing one of two since the day we made these slides, since Anderson and Ford, we acquired that second one.

So we're fully completed for ETRIP.

So where is the real work happening?

It's happening in these two projects.

For ETRIP, third track and siding A, we are very much

We're working diligently to get all those parcels acquired.

I believe we have offers out to all landowners, just about all landowners.

And we have that.

We have seven condemnation cases of these projects.

We have a few more in the pipeline that we're likely to follow.

Just so everybody understands, we are impacting very few private entities, private landowners.

We are generally requiring LLCs, developers.

One of our biggest activities is interprofessional parking.

We've acquired a large gravel parking lot as a construction laid out area for.

The impacts we're having to actually private residential folks are very minimal.

They're

and Patrick Eastman.

Strange Eastman's played on Eastman's low dollar values and also low impact on the actual folks that say that.

So you don't, you hear me say confirmation for not taking power, kicking folks off their land right where they are, having very minimal impacts.

So I guess that's the right of way we've been updated in a nutshell.

Can I just add, not only are we only taking slivers, there are multiple situations where we've gone to property owners and said, hey, this 10 feet of land that you own in your backyard, we'd like to take that from you and compensate you for it.

And they've come back and said, I don't own that, the railroad owns it.

So these are not huge undertakings.

They're huge undertakings and you're right at the beginning of the story.

I don't know whether it's comedy or horror, but we're in a good place now.

And when we talk about condemnation also, we have situations where we have a homeowner's association that we need to give a certain percentage of all members of that

Okay, we need to go to court and actually proceed in condemnation.

Nobody's mad at us.

It's not controversial.

We just can't get spokes' attention to actually acquire the land.

There's another set of folks who are heirs to a deceased person, siblings.

They can't all agree on how to, you know, how to do the land transaction with us.

So we have some who would like to cooperate.

It might impact the project schedule.

A good thing for the landowners is when we do the report for it, the foundation, we have to deposit with the Corps the value of the land, and the landowners get that money immediately.

As soon as we deposit it in the Corps, they can have access to it.

So they don't have to wait for the money.

We're arguing about valuation, so they get, or feeding the land as far as they might have to actually go through the process to figure out if we should pay more or less.

So, all right.

So it's initiated by us.

Yes.

And kind of the way you describe it seems like it's a bit of a strategy.

Can you expand on that?

How do you?

That's a really good question.

So

Live in America, private property rights, sacrosanct.

Individual liberties are sacrosanct.

So when you have a set of laws that say a government can come and impact private property against the will of a private owner, we have a law on this procedural law that we have to follow.

Notice of phrasing, making plans, giving them the power of their project is going to be impacted by making an offer of just compensation based on the appraised value of the land,

and going through a certain period of time trying to negotiate in good faith with the landowner to acquire a volunteer.

Only when that breaks down do we then go to condemnation.

And we don't go right away.

We keep trying to get a voluntary transaction with the landowner until we look at the project schedule and say, okay, the project schedule is now in danger unless we are going to, unless we go to file appropriate paperwork to actually apply our title to this land against the landowners.

So the short answer is, when it's going to impact our project schedule and make it late, that would be the deciding factor to take that last option.

Okay.

Okay.

I'll change the hour.

So recall,

Back in May, we talked about utilities and utility relocation.

So we thought we'd bring in John Carney, our resident expert.

John, for years, came up building the Silver Line.

So he has a lot of experience dealing with utilities.

So when he introduced John, the vice president of construction,

And again, we'll get into a little more details.

Now, keep in mind, we didn't go into closed session back in May, because there could be some aspects of this that could impact some of our contracts.

So, we still thought we should brief you today.

John Barney, thank you for the discussion and I appreciate that Mike said that I'm an expert in utilities.

No one's an expert.

It's ever changing.

So the industry is an amazing industry.

But what it does in the field, it's just very complex.

So what we have is all of these utilities that are actually routed along the railroad corridor.

Because it is connected.

Realize every time that they change an intersection on a highway, modify highway, then modify those utilities also.

Put them in a railroad corridor.

Most times those are going to stay there for a long time, very often.

So what's happened now is, here we come, we're building projects.

We have to bring up all these giants and get them to people that are material.

Not easily done.

So a friend of CSX have those arrangements with each one of the utilities that's been on the corridor.

So the utilities have to abide by whatever CSX says.

We work with them to get them out of the way.

We did not have the access to each one of those utilities because again, those were under CSX.

Here at this time, some of them getting the projects built.

So we've worked out an arrangement with Rail Pros, who was the CSX

and Michael's help putting together an arrangement that we would work with rail firms.

We now have the ability to communicate directly with the utilities.

We also have the ability to use rail provision as an agent working for us to move things faster.

Through all of this, we've gone through quite a few efforts to get everything organized and the future slides will show that

As you can see, there's several different types of utilities that are out here.

Mainly the ones that have caused us the biggest difficulties are not the ones you would think.

It's not power companies, and it's not the water companies and things like that.

It's more of the petroleum mines that are out in the ground.

To date, Michael's benefit and the help that Michael has given us has been great because we now have a range complex movement.

One of the barriers for the signal

Let's just say it's a lot of the government segments go through the building systems.

So then we also have agreement with Kinder Morgan, which is the petroleum pipeline that runs along the length of the corridor.

So I'll get into that a little bit.

Okay, this looks complex.

This is my life.

So, this schematic is actually on the right.

I apologize for this, but it's very detailed because if you look on the left side of the screen, that's where the Pentagon is.

Look on the right side of the screen, that's where DC is.

So, there's a lot of coordination between everything between those two points.

That's what this represents.

This is what the Long Bridge Project brings to the table.

So, through that, the majority of the utilities

It says, you know, the fiber ops that are shown here, the others, most part have been already moved aside.

We do not have Kinder Morgan this far north.

They only supply fuel up to the pagan airport and it comes up the corridor.

So you'll see that in the future.

But that pipeline not being here is a blessing, to be honest with you.

But we get across the Potomac River with all this material.

This actually indicates right and left, right again.

And actually on the bottom, it shows that we're in the

The existing manhole systems in DC, so we don't have to actually add any of this in.

The effort is to take all the utilities, get them out of the corridor, while we build modification, put in a new pathway for them that we will transfer over to CSX, bring all those utilities back in.

That's mainly just with the communication lines, so that is what this represents.

We do have a concern about the timing of cable deliveries for Gloomer, that's Windstream.

We've been able to, through Michael's help again,

We've been able to get support through the woman organization that they moved the deadline of when they said they would bring our cable that we now have confidence that that'll be in time to support this project for the Long Bridge and Windstream also.

Their dates were actually sliding.

We were able to get their attention.

They actually worked with us to bring it back into line.

Working our way south, this is a picture on the right that once again shares what you find when you do a little bit of excavating out in the field.

And Dallas is very familiar with this.

So this is an area where we see all of these varying conduits that are running in the ground.

And when you open it up, you have no idea who's in there.

So we work through each one of the companies that we know are out there participating and have lines.

We get them relocated.

We know that they're out, but we still have other conduits

So the city of Alexandria still has a sanitary line that we're trying to work through, getting that relocated so we can modify the track locations on the south end down by Telegraph Road actually is where that one is.

So again, Windstream is one of the outliers here that we're trying to make sure that they have the cables here along with both.

Working your way down again, this is the Franconia Quarter.

This includes the bypass.

So we have the area that on the right, it's just showing coming from up at the Franconia Station, MCI, which is on the bottom here, and the drills underneath the existing platform and the future platform expansion and the tunnel that will be built by the VRE at that station.

So coordinating that to make sure that all happened in time working out with auto because it really immediately adjacent to their property.

All of those things are things we had to work through.

Henry Morgan, we've been working with them.

Michael, again, stepped in, helped us to turn this forward to where we believe we have to have forward to get this working to cover a little bit of time that we are expecting would be a problem for us.

And then the human issue on top there.

We have confidence that they have now secured the table to be able to meet our schedule.

for our schedule, if that's possible.

And then Siding A, down in this map again.

So this is, again, Kinder Morgan.

You're going to see them all through most of the core.

And this is now, let's get some, look at the subsequent river.

And we ended up coming up through here and they actually are right in an area that they actually

that we are going to be building for the future Leland Bridge expansion.

So we're doing it.

We haven't supported getting them moved in time.

That is one of the things that we're working very hard to get that range so that they meet our schedule.

Again, same situation.

They're out there.

They're in an area that we have to have them relocated.

They've been out there putting conduits in the ground.

So they're supporting us.

They're moving forward.

They're in construction.

The Horizon and then the secret to NCI,

Both of them are working with us to get this done.

We've all coordinated in the field.

We have everything arranged, fabric and sewer.

This is an ongoing effort to get things coordinated so that we can continue to move things.

I think that's it.

So in terms of the people that you're working with, Kinder Morgan, MCI, what have you, is there any obvious risk to one or another project being put at risk if they hit a roadblock?

Yes, there is always that risk with any of these utilities.

If their fabricator doesn't supply them with that material in time, if it comes out that's not adequate for their purposes, they can't accept it.

That pushes against our schedule.

So those are always the risks.

We've had that as a risk, and it would always be a risk until we actually turn those over where it's in the new position.

No, it does.

It does.

I just didn't know whether or not we were just so dependent on one contract or one partner or another.

It is.

Some of them would start with another.

There are the ones that I've been referred to that had a problem with delivery of their material and through that fabrication issue or the testing of that, that it didn't actually meet the signal strength that they needed to be able to carry their signal.

They had to remove that cable, order new, and that was after it had

And then that got their attention.

They quickly went back throughout the entire nation.

Can I just add, I think VPRA has done a great job mitigating the impacts of the utility challenges, but VRE is already experiencing problems on our contracts because of this.

This is a program, half of which is being done by VPRA and the other half being done by VRE.

We are already experiencing schedule delays on Alexandria.

Project due to the utility relocations as well as Franconia Springfield.

We haven't been we can't get our bids out until this utility work is is completed or we have a better schedule for that.

And then as as an if the fourth track project is impacted, that will end up impacting both one font and Crystal City.

So there's a lot of interrelationships here with all the projects and all of this work that we're keeping a very close eye on.

But it certainly is

We haven't skirted the problem at this point.

Different utility by utility.

Each one has a different agreement and part of it is that there are some utilities that are responsible for funding and quite frequently in those relationships they have to fund it but they don't have a time cut.

I know that we've had that issue yet.

It's a Buy America, isn't it, though?

Is that a Buy America issue if you touch federal funds?

The host railroads have been consistent.

It sounds like we've been pretty effective with the strongly awarded Michael Westermann letter, right?

I know this story as well.

We'll have the last captain put it out the way that we hope they do, and the utilities have woken up, and we're working well together.

and their skills and their ability to communicate with some of these utility companies that we may not have had the opportunity to have a relationship with, but now they're benefiting from the fact that we also have relationships with utilities and CSX is benefiting from both of those parties having those relationships because we're trying to force this to happen on a schedule rather than a schedule that maybe somebody else would say, well, we'll get to that sometime in the future.

And let me just add, you all have all heard me say, no surprises, no surprises.

And we brought plenty of bad news to this fourth past.

When we set this agenda, the third week of July, this conversation was a very different conversation than what you're hearing today.

We're going to talk about a couple of projects that

Good afternoon, Chair.

My name is Jeff Feltz here.

I'm the Senior Director of Engineering Construction for Virginia.

We have one project at NOVA that's going to be finalizing its budget in its fiscal year, so we wanted to get the board updated on what's happening there.

We might get a few details on it early this morning.

The Franconia-Lorton Third Track, as many of you know, this is the project that's going to add six miles of new through the mainline track to where it currently leaves off, just north of the Franconia-Springfield beer re-station to just south of the beer re-lorton station south of Lorton-Brevard.

This is going to fully replace the railroad bridge over public creek.

It's going to widen bridges over North Road, Atkinson Creek, and it's also going to replace the current railroad bridge over Newington.

Newington Road, while we show it as a separate project for all practical purposes, it is part of the third track project.

It is going to be delivered as part of Third Track.

However, we do show it separately because it does have some different funding sources.

We have some money from VDOT as well as a separate state of good repair grant from the FRA.

CSX is leading design and construction for Third Track.

It actually just completed some early works on the new control point.

We'll talk about that a little bit more later.

We're at 100% design as Mike just showed.

Railway acquisition is well underway and I would say a month from now that number will look better than it did that we just presented.

But the good news and the highlight is that CSX has put a construction invitation for bid out.

They did it on August 7th and we're expecting bids to come in in October and we're looking for CSX to award that contract in late November, early December.

I'm going ahead with a multi-step procedure with this project.

Unlike the tree clearing work that DJ and Mike at VPRA is taking on, this procurement does sync up with the tree clearing windows that we have for the federally protected endangered bass species.

So what we're going to do is CSX is going to award the contract.

They're going to do NTP1 for that contract to go out there and start tree clearing in November, December through the window that expires in March.

And then once that work is done and hopefully some more of the utilities are relocated as well, we'll issue NTP2 for the full construction by June of next year.

So good things happening.

Any questions for Jeff?

Over Creek, Third Track South, this is around the Leland Road Station.

You see Leland Road, there's a V-Ray Leland Station there.

We're starting to bring projects to your attention about a year or so before they go to construction, hence why this is in the slide.

We have already procured our

Contractor for the Leland Railroad overpass rebuild.

So this budget is separate from that.

As you can see, we do plan to go to bid advertisement next spring.

CSX will do that.

We're working with them now.

One thing we will plan to do though through our bench contract is clear trees before that.

So we're looking to clear trees for not just this project, but for other sidings.

Siding C, which the tailors won't hand over.

Citing D, which is just south of Woodbridge Station, Citing E and F further south.

Actually, E is just north of here at Brooks Station and F is down by the Spotsylvania Station.

So, again, we are looking at opportunities every chance we can to try to clear trees, as we discussed before.

This is a project, again, to get closer to the bid,

And next May, when those bids are due and the bids come in, if we need a budget adjustment, we'll come to you accordingly.

Happy to answer any questions.

Are we ready?

Yeah.

We have a little video.

I think it started right away.

Give the video a couple of minutes before it brings people up to talk about them in a little more detail.

What's happening in two and a half minutes.

We are going to dive into these a little bit.

I'll tee it up for folks before they come on up.

Again, we do, especially with new board members, we do like to talk about prosecutor construction and you can see their estimated completion date and their product cost.

And with that, I think we're going to go to John to talk about the John overseas, the Long Bridge team, Mr. Lane and Ian who have been for us

So on the Long Bridge project, we've got on the bottom here showing you things that have been completed recently that we're pretty proud of that we've been able to move forward with that.

You've seen in the video there a lot of shots of the teams being out there night, day, weekends, whenever.

We've worked with the CSX and with Amtrak and BRE to get some work windows to be able to make better use of time

So ongoing work, the work that you'll see in these upcoming pictures is just going to show you how close and tight everything is as you get across the bridge into the north side of the Potomac River.

That means that you're in an area where very congested

So we also have to work with all of the other features in the area, including the adjacent properties, along with keeping the noise down because we can't work at night with a lot of pile driving or any other activities.

Even some equipment makes some very loud noise.

So that work is ongoing.

Upcoming work, as you can see on the right, we've got a lot of things that we've got our sights on because we're getting everything teed up.

This picture on the left shows that the new single bridge has been erected.

CSX was responsible to set this bridge.

Foundations were put in by our contractor, SFJV, Skanska Flatiron, and then the foundation system and then the bridge and the

The facility is suited, then all is complete.

lights up above.

The wall on the left, that's retaining wall L. It will be a track that will be built immediately adjacent to that.

You can see on between them and it stops off right there.

But that is going to be expanded and further with more posted panel work that is going to take place in the future.

I'll show you some film on that.

The wall on the right, and we're proud of that one, that one we were able to finish up and that one is in Pier 2, that's in Main Avenue.

This is where

This picture is taken of where we have changed the road surface, changed the line, finished our utility work beneath this and allowed now for this to be paved and we will be shifting traffic over here so that we are able to move over into an expansion of the wall that I just showed you.

In the median of this area, the bridge you see in the distance, that's the existing pedestrian going from the salamander hotel back to the marina parking lot.

Main Avenue.

The picture on the right, that's the retaining wall L. That's what I was referring to earlier.

These foundations have to go away.

That's the amount of load that those have to actually carry once we do set that in place.

And it'll have rail traffic immediately on top of it.

So it's about 20 feet of area that has to be retained in elevation.

And that is a lot of lateral force.

So we're trying to make this as

This is on the left, 14th Street off ramp.

If you're familiar with that, 14th Street is on your right.

The rail corridor is on your left.

And then 14th Street off ramp that's been closed.

We're hoping to keep that closed for the duration of the project.

Right now, we have an arrangement that will be keeping it about 18 months.

We're hoping to expand that.

We're making use of it not only for our equipment,

Up on top you can see where they're actually driving micro-piles to reinforce that soil up there and put in the retaining system that'll have to hold that because we have to peel that wall away and expand that out toward the ramp in the future.

So on the right, those are the conduits that are, back to utilities, those are the conduits for the utilities that have to be relocated that they will ultimately be placed in there

The utility conduits will then carry all of the signals through up to Virginia Tower, which is north.

This Wall G and Ohio Drive bridge, the Wall G is in the distance.

You can see that they're pouring concrete down on the distance there.

And then back toward us, this is where the abutment will be.

of Ohio Drive.

On the right, that's the one everybody likes looking at, which is that we built a bridge to build a bridge.

So we finished now, we've touched down onto the marina parking lot over here on the near side.

And you can see the finger piers, those are just, those are temporary.

They're out there just for support so that we can go out there and we will be putting in the finger piers that will support and the pilots that will support the future railroads going across the Washington Channel.

Long Bridge South.

So the rail of weapons on both north and south are underway.

That's making good headway.

The work on the water we're hoping is going to be able to really kick off and get running toward the next couple of weeks.

We're going to be working to take out some of the interface pieces for the fender system that's in the river from Obama.

So we'll be tying in our fender system with head bridge and the

Future Rail Bridge with the vendor system formal model.

So it's a continuous deflector, if you will, for any boat traffic.

So there's no direct impact to any of the piers.

And then the Haringeyes Bridge, as mentioned on the bottom, that's about 53 miles down the river.

And that's where the material, the large material, steel, structured steel and big equipment material would be delivered down there instead of bringing it through city streets.

from down there, and then main use of as it reaches this area.

Okay, Mount Vernon Trail, that detour, it was finished in better shape now.

It actually is all trimmed out.

So it's been well received, very happy, all the folks are.

On the right, it's showing some of the work that's been done just to prove out the test

This isn't a constant blink of flame that you're going to see.

This was just the benefit of somebody to grab this.

So that was an instant impact and the test proved out well, so our design was proven.

This is down on the left.

This is actually a gravelly point.

If you look in the distance, see the existing Long Bridge up there running across the Potomac River.

This is down at gravelly points so that we can get a lot of material and equipment out onto the water.

So you'll hear people say, we're walking the crane out on the water.

They're doing it on the barge.

It's not like it's walking on the water.

So that's where we take it out there.

And that's what it means.

We have to get it there.

With all of the equipment and material, the large material, you look on the right, that's Harry Nice Bridge, which is all the way down at 301.

It's not far from Fredericksburg, actually, and it actually is 53 miles.

With my tug, it'll push the barge all the way up the river to where we'll be able to make use of the material and put it in at the Long Bridge Project.

These are the abutments for both the north and south side of the river, where the bridges will come down and touch down.

On the left is the Virginia side, the south side.

So this is a sheet wall that has been driven along the length of the CSX tracks, which you can see the signal towers, and then tracks are just immediately behind them.

All of this area now is the work area to begin putting in the foundation for the abutment A.

And then on Abutment B, which is all the way on the north side of the Potomac River, you can see that the team has put together all of this framework and has driven all of these piles.

Now, each one of those that you see that are stubbed up out of the water, there will be about a 40 or 50 foot extension added to that and the hammer will drive.

On the right side is what I mentioned earlier when DJ and I were out there.

That's not in the Potomac River.

It just happens to be next to when you're off next to the river.

As soon as you dig down, you hit that water table.

So that's when they're doing welding, wearing the boots, wearing the safety equipment, but doing welding while they're standing in water.

Okay, and then more of the economic river bridge abutment work.

So the log files that are being put in, this is the area where we're working with MLOP and the FAA relative to the length of crane booms in the air.

So we're making sure that we coordinate all of that when we build up.

So all that is very tight coordination with everyone for the FAA.

But this is work that's underway, and it's been going very well.

Okay, so Alexandria 4th track has been underway since January with CSX in the lead.

This is the project that picks up where Long Bridge leads off and continues the 4 track arch down six more miles through Arlington County and down to the AF interlocking where tracks split between those that go west, Toronto, the ones that go south into Richmond and beyond.

Like I mentioned, we've been under construction since January.

We have been calculating utilities, like John mentioned.

We've been doing as much as we can

in the interim.

Been doing a lot of civil work over the last several months to get ready for the track work that's coming.

A lot of retaining walls, a lot of screening, all those sorts of things.

I'll go through some of the photos.

Much less glamorous than the ones that Kahn just showed, but no less important.

Working through a lot of different retaining walls to build up the space that we need to support the fourth track.

There's a very utilitarian retaining wall sheet pile that just really, you know,

Support the balance that we need for the track.

We've also been doing a lot of clearing and scrubbing in the area.

Again, creating the space that we need to build fourth track.

Getting all the drainage in place.

There is a lot of drainage that has to get done.

New drainage structures, pipes, ditches, whatnot.

Getting put in as much as we can until all the utilities are removed.

I'm going to do some more retaining walls.

We've been really focused in the last several months on the northern half of the project, so from the Arland or Long Canadian and Arlington through Crystal City to about the midpoint of the project, which is Control Point Slaters Lane in Alexandria.

But this is some of the work that's been going on outside Crystal City using a vibratory impact hammer to get those sheet piles to figure out.

These photos show a little bit more of the scale that's going on.

I think it was DJ or Mike that mentioned that this isn't a project where you can see a whole lot of what's going on.

But if you're on a train, you will definitely notice that we've done a lot of clearing, a lot of grading on the right.

The submarine that's going in for the future of Wartrack on the left, we're starting to spread out sub-ballots.

We've not put any track in yet, but the big focus of the big drive the next months through the end of the year and into next year is going to be getting that fourth track in.

from Arlington through Alexandria so that we can flip train traffic once the Canadian Commonwealth bridges, the east bridges are put in place.

And then this is just from the Long Bridge Aquatic Center.

This is looking at the RO interlocking.

This is the first control point that comes off of Long Bridge.

This is going to be really important for the trains that come off of Long Bridge in the future, the four tracks that go into it.

So we've been doing a lot of modifications to the RO interlocking last month.

You see at the bottom in the middle there, we've had to do some demolition of all track and we'll be coming in here and building support track and putting a lot of the special track work, crossovers, and pin signals in this area.

So staying within this footprint, we have the Alexandria Station improvements, Commonwealth Bridges, and we've mentioned it a few times already, but this is the project that we partnered with VRE to deliver together with one contractor, VRE in the lead, their contractor is Cocosin, and we've had a very busy spring and summer.

A lot of great things happening.

So if you mentioned, remember from the last board meeting mentioned that we were focusing on the jump spans.

These were nine temporary bridges that had to get built across the three existing tracks at three of the bridge abutments.

Those create the space to build the new bridges while keeping the existing bridges in service.

And you saw some video of that as well in the video that we just played from one of the jump span outage weekends.

We did a series of three weekends.

They took about four to five days to complete.

They were probably the biggest muscle movement for this project and got them done and really have been in operation now successfully for over a month now.

This was the last weekend at Track 1, started on June 19th, continued through the June 24th.

Just walking through the sequence here.

CSX would come out, cut out the segments, subtract them.

We were doing three jump spans at a time.

They would pull out of the segment, the panel and track, come in and start putting in the piles that support the new

Jump Spanner Bridge.

You see the void that's been built up, putting in sheet piles to create, again, creating space for the excavations that we need to do for the future bridge.

And then you see on the right here with the beams that have been put in place, then CSX would come into the track panel and install the new track or install the existing track panel back into place, weld the rails together.

I do want to pause here, too, just to highlight and really give a shout out to BRD for the work they've done for the temporary platform at Alexandria Station.

This is an effort that Dallas spearheaded, coached and built, did a great job on.

This temporary platform that was installed ahead of this work has really transformed Alexandria Station.

We now have an operational boarding edge at Track One, which means that we now have three boarding edges at Alexandria Station.

Many of you know, before this, Track One was only used in really like emergency situations.

There was one gate, passengers had to walk in the palace to board trains.

It was really never used.

But now it's being used every day.

Jeff, before you move on, Dallas, I think you were in the video earlier, the time lapse video.

This is very complicated.

We've been working with Amtrak as well because they had to make sure that when they're moving people in luggage that they could, they also access track one, two.

Try to put them on track two and three.

So it's been very much coordinated effort.

I think we've done a lot of late nights by some people in the room.

as well to put this all into place.

But it was quite an effort in I think the May timeframe.

And then moving on forward since then.

But just thank you to Amtrak and VRE.

VRE is doing the bulk of the work with CSX also.

CSX people are out there every day.

And as Jeff mentioned, they have to do the tie back in.

CSX and some of their leadership folks from the construction crews have been out there as well.

So it's definitely been a group effort to make sure things are going smoothly at Alexandria Station.

Keep in mind, this is all happening.

At the same time, what we call the Alexandria Shuffle is happening because a lot of trains have to end at Alexandria Station because we don't want them to run through the Long Bridge work window.

So again, another layer of complexity to all of this.

Jeff, can you go back one slide just really quickly?

I just want to say that this temporary platform has been incredibly successful, as you've noted, and we've added it to our toolkit for projects and stations because it is such good quality.

Most people would not realize that it was temporary and it's significantly cheaper.

It is fully ADA compliant.

So we're really excited to have this in our toolkit for

Now that the jump spans are in place, as you're mentioning, this creates the space to actually build the foundations for the new bridges while keeping the existing bridges in service.

So we're digging out underneath those spans.

We'll start putting in the deep foundations and the abutments for those bridges.

Obviously, there's a lot more structural support that has to go in there to make sure that it stays in place and that it's safe for those that are working under there.

But that's actually what it would look like for you plugged over there today.

There's a lot of good things happening there.

This is also impacted by utilities at the far end, but I think we have some workarounds.

We have some mitigation strategies that we'll have in place to be able to continue to execute all the way up.

And then just a few more.

There's some helical anchors that go into the sheet miles to support them further.

And I know John showed this earlier.

It's kind of a mess of utilities that we're still trying to get de-conflicted.

But before I move on, Katie, were there any other comments you want to add?

Okay, Franconia Springfield Bypass and moving into the Franconia corridor.

The bypass has been underway now too.

We've got a lot of good things happening, particularly in the west side of the corridor.

Our contractor, Flatiron Dragados, Herzog Joint Venture.

This project's probably been impacted the most by the utilities that John mentioned, but we have mitigations that are in place and we're executing them and we're getting as much done as we can.

We have, as Michael showed, we have all the property acquisitions we need.

We have five active access points in place and two long-term railroad crossings going on.

So we actually have really good movement of materials and equipment within the job site.

I think I mentioned before that this is probably the only place in Northern Virginia where you could build a bridge of this size, but it's really hard to get to.

And we've now kind of solved that problem and now we're in there and working these locations, which is great.

I mentioned the west side.

The other thing, given its remoteness, is we have to create the space for the bridge.

On the west side, there's some pretty steep topography, so we've been building walls to make that space for the bridge.

These walls are called soil nail walls.

You saw some in the video as well.

They're unique in the sense that we actually work from the top down.

So you excavate about five to six feet, sheer face down.

You put these soil nails, which are about 30 to 40 feet, steel tendons that go into the ground.

You anchor them and then you lock it off with a special kind of sprayable concrete called shotcrete that ends up being the permanent face of the wall and we just keep going down.

So some of these walls are going to be as much as 35 feet tall.

They went down in many segments, but this, like I said, gives us the space to actually build the bridge that we need.

We showed it also in the video that we're getting ready to start building the permanent foundations for the bypass.

These were the test shafts, were kind of the proof of concept shafts that we've done.

We've done three of these that proved out.

We now have a planned fork and we're going to start actually installing our first full shafts next week and we have 150 to go.

So no time like now to get started.

Also doing drainage whenever we can.

And the other good thing is we've had the steel for the bridge has actually been fabricated for the last few months.

It's going to continue into next spring.

I think it's more than 600 pieces of steel for the bridge.

So there's a there's a lot that's happening off site as well.

I mentioned the third track earlier.

Well, it's not fully under construction yet.

We have been doing some early work as well as utility relocations in the area.

You mentioned that we're taking on some of the Fairfax County sanitary sewer work.

So that's going on.

I mentioned before, too, that we had an early works package to relocate the control point.

It used to be called the Ravensworth interlocking or CP Ravensworth.

There were some crossovers and signals that directly conflicted with the bypass structure.

So we moved those north of the Frank County Springfield Station just south of the Beltway or 495 which is why we call it our CSX standard CP Beltway.

It's been in operation since late June and then we went and retired CP Ravensworth by what we call straight railing which is taking out all the crossovers

and Special Trackwork, and now C.P.

Ribbonsworth is a thing of history.

So with that, we also have some of the tricklery that we've been doing for the sewer.

And one of our wins, actually, I know John mentioned Moomin a lot, was getting Moomin to actually abandon the multi-story underground structure near Newington Road that had been in place.

So it's been good to see some progress on that front as well.

Ralph Dinkney couldn't be here with us today.

He's helped brief us on New River Valley.

But we'll tell you I haven't been down in New River Valley with Colin.

I think they're trying to get him to move down there.

They like him so much.

Colin's on our planning team, but he's been involved in New River Valley for what, four plus years now?

Madam Chair, members of the board, thank you very much.

My name is Colin Burch.

As Mike said, I'm working on the NRB project.

I'm the sixth standing passenger of Brown Oak to the Cambria Air, Christiansburg, about 30 miles away.

I also constructed a layer facility in Brantford, which is another nine miles west of Christiansburg.

I won't spend a ton of time on this slide because there's a lot of work going on that's been completed and upcoming, but two things I want to point out is that good news, we're on pace to have the completion and extension of service in 2027 and with the passenger platform, the concrete flooring is just over 70% of the total.

For reference, the last board meeting is around 30%.

In these next few pictures I can kind of cover what was discussed in that busier slide before, but the picture on the left shows the concrete port for the platform, and you need a good idea of how tight the platform is to the building.

You can kind of see the building there off in the background.

And then also I should say that both of these images are looking west, sorry east, so Roanoke is that way.

And then the picture on the right, you can see the overhanging station building and the molding for the concrete there.

It's very tight next to the station building so it's going to be a complex site.

Another good picture.

This one has, you can kind of see it in the background, it's an Norfolk Southern truck actually driving by.

So let's just remind you that this is an active 24-hour rail mainline and an active, nearly 24-hour construction site.

This was taken at about four o'clock in the morning.

In the summer months of the heat, the crews are starting earlier and earlier, but we are making sure that the lighting that they're used is not shining into people's backyards or windows because they are houses that are about 200 feet away.

That's the concrete truck that's pouring for the platform.