February 24, 2026 Transportation Committee - Feb 24, 2026

meeting

Fairfax County Board Committees 1h 8m 6 speakers 7 agenda items transcribed 2 days ago official recording ↗

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What agenda items and opening remarks set the stage for the February 24, 2026 Transportation Committee meeting?

Unknown 0:09

Good morning everyone. Um welcome to today's uh transportation committee meeting. It's February twenty fourth, twenty twenty six. Um we will start as we always do by asking if anybody has any changes to the meeting minutes from December second, twenty twenty five. Shocker, no one does. Uh with that, uh we are going to get right to it with the first uh item on the agenda, which is a discussion of s recommendations relating to the smart scale uh pro uh the smart scale program. And with that the floor is yours, uh Director Greg Steverson. All right, good morning. Uh I'm Greg Steverson. I'm the director of Fairfax County Department of Transportation. Here with me today is Noel Dominguez. Uh she's chief of the coordination and and funding division within FC D OT.

Unknown 1:03

Let's see if we can bring up the presentation here on the screen.

Unknown 1:14

Ah, there we go. All right. So we're here today to talk a little bit more about uh the smart scale process. Um and this presentation is an extension of the presentation we did back in June of 2025. Um for those of you who who got your packets, there's a the presentation from 2025 is in there for context purposes, um, in case there needs to be some revisiting or background uh information to remind yourself. So smart scale is the Commonwealth's process for allocating transportation revenues. It's based on a number of different factors. You can see them here. We'll talk about them a little bit more um in later slides. But the reason we're bringing Smart Scale back is that um quite frankly, in the last cycle,

Unknown 1:57

Northern Virginia got very minimal funding and Fairfax County got no funding. Um so we did a staff did a cursory review of the smart state smart scale um factors uh and some of the projects that were funded, and denoted some concerns with how first and foremost cost was prioritized, um given, of course, the cost of things such as right of way and um other factors. In Northern Virginia. We had some concerns with how smart scale tackled project readiness. We'll talk about that in a little bit. And then we also had some cursory ideas and concepts that at the meeting, you all at the board asked us to go back and further review to better position ourselves for this upcoming smart scale process. And as you can see here on the on the timeline, we're getting close to that right now.

How did Director Greg Steverson and Noel Domínguez explain the SmartScale program and its past performance?

Unknown 2:45

The process to start processing. Pre-screening is coming up very soon. Applications due, the beginning of August. So we're uh we're in that season right now. So our strategy was uh we tasked one of our consultants to evaluate the smart scale process. RK and K basically took all of the previous rounds. We've had six rounds, one through six, of smart scale, looked at our requests, compared them to similarly awarded requests. We looked at the projects statewide, what what were similarities, why were those projects funded? Um, and we're looking for patterns, looking for things that can help us better strategize. for this upcoming uh round seven submittals. So I'm going to turn it over to Noelle to talk about what we found out during the analysis and to give us some recommendations.

Noel Dominguez 3:33

Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, Noel Dominguez with the Department of Transportation. So continuing on on the um Uh sorry, I got misplaced a second. Um We looked the our consultant looked at um what we'd submitted over the past several rounds. And we have submitted a total of 40 applications over um the rounds one through six of the process, and eight projects have been successfully funded. I do want to note that in the first couple of years they uh the process was annual and then they went to a biennial process a couple years ago. That's why you'll see on this chart it goes twenty seven, twenty eighteen and then jumps to twenty twenty. Um we can see these are the projects that we were successful in receiving funding for.

Noel Dominguez 4:18

In round one, there were the Route Seven Widening projects um as well as the Route 28 project. Um in round two we had uh Route twenty nine as well as the Pope's Head Road Interchange. Uh Richmond Highway BRT in round three, Braddock Road