Virginia faces a funding gap of at least $1.7 billion for highway maintenance work, with roads falling into disrepair creating an economic and safety liability that could affect future construction projects across the commonwealth, state transportation department staff reported this week.
Over the past 20 years, Virginia’s bridge inventory has grown by 400, with a current total of 21,200 bridges. Pavement has increased by 2,000 miles, to 59,700 miles, while pavement lane miles have increased by 5,000 to 130,400 lane miles. All of them require millions annually for maintenance and repair.
Virginia’s Appropriation Act makes maintaining transportation assets the priority for budgeting, allocation, and spending. State law also requires the Commonwealth Transportation Board to set aside adequate maintenance money before funding construction.
However, the board learned from Virginia Department of Transportation staff during a work session on Tuesday that funding all the necessary projects will not be easy to address.
Solutions like reducing construction funding would be complicated by a prior 2025 action that reduced road maintenance funding for most of the years covered by the current fiscal year plan.
“There is no mitigation strategy that makes this not painful,” said Secretary of Transportation Nick Donohue on Tuesday. “This is going to be painful no matter what we do moving forward.”
Laura Schewel, deputy secretary of transportation, said that one method to address the deficit is to use crossover funds — money shifted from the construction program to maintenance — which would create a sizable shortfall in construction program dollars.
Beginning in fiscal year 2028, she proposed increasing maintenance to roughly $290 million per year, over the next six years. That would significantly reduce construction funding, including the state’s Smart Scale program, unless it adopts mitigations.
The agency is also watching whether the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Federal Surface Transportation Act will be reauthorized, which have infused bridge repair and maintenance funding. Virginia receives about $115 million per year from the IIJA to help cover its bridges, VDOT representatives reported.
Next month, the secretary will provide the board with mitigation options to reduce the construction-program hit while still meeting maintenance targets. The options include phasing, timing adjustments, or balancing strategies across funding rounds.
Funding for transportation projects through the Smart Scale program could drop temporarily by around 51%. Severe weather events and a decline in federal funding could also increase maintenance needs.
Increasing highway construction costs and prior budget assumptions are key factors driving the projected deficit.
Beginning in 2022, the agency learned that pavement investments had begun to exceed the increased costs. As a result, the CTB made a series of one-time infusions by moving money from the annual construction budget to crossover funding to cover the gap, but those infusions were not sustained.
The discrepancy stems from previous budgetary decisions made under Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration. The board instead allocated funds for pavement maintenance through 2031 to Round 6 of Smart Scale.
On Jan. 14, 2025, then-Secretary of Transportation Shep Miller, appointed by Youngkin, led a conversation with the board about the agency deliberately striking a balance between maintaining infrastructure at acceptable condition levels and preserving funding for construction and other transportation priorities, rather than maximizing maintenance spending at all costs.
Then, in June 2025, the previous administration introduced a Six-Year Improvement Program (SYIP) to the board that did not assume the continued level of crossover funding. Instead, it assumed about $200 million less in crossover funds and allocated those funds to construction programs.
In addition, the SYIP included an approximately $40 million reduction in crossover funds for local maintenance programs.
Last November, the board also approved a plan to use unallocated funds from the Priority Transportation Fund and Grant Anticipation Revenue Vehicle (GARVEE) Bonds, along with $103.5 million in revenue collections, to advance several priority projects worth $715 million. That money could have given the transportation program more flexibility.
The much larger current deficit is mainly due to a structural mismatch between maintenance costs and the funding planned for fiscal year 2027 and beyond.
At Tuesday’s meeting, board member Marianne Moffat Radcliff, appointed by Gov. Abigail Spanberger, questioned whether prior decisions included any analysis on what would happen to pavement conditions if higher funding levels weren’t maintained.
Donohue said he was not serving as secretary when the decisions were made.
However, he said this was the first year the agency could analyze what had been done and share it publicly, most recently during the board’s July meetings.
“There were discussions in January 2025 when the decision was made to go from about $300 million extra a year in funding down to $100 million, but this year’s work is the first clear, public analysis of the longer-term impacts,” he said.
The board members who voted to advance the reduced funding didn’t comment on their decision.
Source
