Communications and interactions among Alexandria and Virginia officials on important topics, for example, transportation funding, can generate questions.
Pursuant to a City Council resolution, Alexandria applied for a $6.6 million SMART SCALE grant administered by Virginia’s Commonwealth Transportation Board to improve the intersections of Duke Street with Route 1 (South Henry and South Patrick Streets).
The City’s website describes the Duke Street and Route 1 intersections this way:
Collectively, there have been over 70 crashes at these two intersections since 2014. Of those, 4 resulted in severe injury and more than 20 resulted in non-life-threatening injuries. Both intersections are ranked among the City’s high-crash intersections and are on city’s high-injury network.
The high-injury network is a collection of street corridors where high numbers of people have been killed or severely injured in traffic crashes.
SMART is an acronym for System Management Allocation of Resources for Transportation and SCALE is an acronym for Safety, Congestion Mitigation, Accessibility, Land Use, Environmental and Economic Development.
SMART SCALE applications by localities are competitively scored by Virginia Department of Transportation officials based on calculations of future traffic congestion with adjustments for safety, accessibility, and other factors.
In January 2025, the City’s grant application for Route 1 and Duke Street appeared on a VDOT FY 2026 Staff Recommended Scenario with a SMART SCALE score of 18.90, the highest of four proposed Northern Virginia transportation improvement projects.
However, by May 2025 a VDOT staff presentation showed that the City’s application for the SMART SCALE grant had moved to “unfund” status. A project summary stated that, as to Alexandria’s grant application, “Applicant’s performance has not improved.”
At the May 21 CTB meeting, D.J. Gribbin, the board member representing Northern Virginia, said that he had heard the night before from Alexandria Mayor Alyia Gaskins who said that the “City was not fully aware” of the impending grant application denial.
Virginia Secretary of Transportation W. Sheppard Miller III said at the meeting that “the fact that we took it off [the approval list] was not fully communicated timely” to Alexandria officials. The CTB agreed to suspend Alexandria’s application and to revisit it at the CTB’s June meeting.
The May 21 meeting, and Secretary Miller’s comments about Alexandria’s grant application at 2:00, can be seen
I asked VDOT’s Director of Communications what “Applicant’s performance has not improved” meant. She replied in an email, “The City of Alexandria entered VDOT’s Locality Sustained Performance Program (LSPP) in November 2023. CTB policy establishes the LSPP program and the performance measures used to evaluate the transportation project portfolio of individual localities.”
On June 24, Alexandria withdrew its SMART SCALE grant application to fund improvements at Duke Street and Route 1.
At the CTB’s June 24 meeting, Hillary Orr, Deputy Director of Alexandria’s Department of Transportation and Environmental Services, described the reasons for the withdrawal of the grant application.
“While the project did receive [a] strong technical score, the City made the strategic decision to withdraw this application, this round, to reinforce the progress that we are making on performance improvement and to maintain the momentum and collaboration with the state,” Orr said at the meeting.
The June 24 meeting, and Ms. Orr’s comments at 2:40, can be seen
In summary, Alexandria’s application for $6.6 million in state funding for an important transportation improvement project went from recommended by the VDOT staff in January, to a VDOT staff “unfund” recommendation in May, to suspended at the CTB’s May 21 meeting, to withdrawn at the CTB’s June 24 meeting.
If I could explain this trajectory more completely, I would. In the meantime, I have three questions:
● Why, exactly, did the VDOT staff determine that Alexandria’s performance in VDOT’s Locality Sustained Performance Program had “not improved”?
● How did it become necessary for Mayor Gaskins to intercede with a CTB member or members the night before the May CTB meeting at which Alexandria’s application was to be denied?
● How does the withdrawal of Alexandria’s application to fund improvements at Duke Street and Route 1, in Ms. Orr’s words, “reinforce the progress that we are making on performance improvement” and “maintain the momentum and collaboration with the state”?
The writer is a former lawyer, member of the Alexandria School Board from 1997 to 2006, and English teacher from 2007 to 2021 at T.C. Williams High School, now Alexandria City High School. He can be reached at aboutalexandria@gmail.com and free subscriptions to his newsletter are available at https://aboutalexandria.substack.com.
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Good morning, Mark. I heard a great interview on NPR Morning Addition with the mayor of Alexandria this morning. The topic was homelessness. If you hadn’t heard it I highly recommend you take a listen.
Talk about Orwellian Newspeak! It's impossible to discern what the state officials are actually trying to say. Unfortunately, their use of so much corporate mumbo-jumbo raises the concern that we really got defunded for political reasons.
And what "performance" were we supposed to improve? Surely not the accident rate that the project is supposed to fix.