Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: Okay. You're live.

[Sen. Richard Westman, Chair]: We are back live. We'll take his little break. Thank you. And we are paving roadway traffic safety, and you're on.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: Perfect.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: My name is Matthew Patrick. I'm the Highway Safety and Design Program Manager for the Agency of Transportation, and I'm here to take a little deeper dive into the paving program. So as a quick recap, the fiscal 'twenty seven paving program has an appropriation of approximately $148,000,000 which is an increase from last year of about $45,000,000 That's translating onto classifications of roads as about 8 and a half million dollars on our class one town highway system, roughly $45,000,000 on the state system, which includes NHS and non NHS routes, and about $70,000,000 onto the interstate for the share. Down the bottom is a pie chart showing percentages reflective of the same numbers in a different way. So bringing this up, just taking a look back at the last few appropriations, you can see from fiscal 'twenty four up to fiscal 'twenty seven are trends. Also, here's here's your last chart. I'm sorry. I'm in such a pain. It's hard to tell where we were. Where was the state system versus the interstate system last year? I have a slide that's going to get Perfect. To I think. I hope. Can tell me if I I can get time. So, this slide is showing the total appropriation for the paving program over the last few years, and then what I'm going to be using for some assumptions at least going forward. See the asterisk in in the next two years. Right now, it's our our starting point, but, of course, we'll be discussing that as we get into fiscal twenty eight and '29 budget development. Yeah. Where do you get the hundreds? The hundreds? Yeah. My book says 70. So the 70 to 74 that I think was shown in fiscal twenty eight is due to us pulling projects into fiscal twenty seven during the purchase and use work that we did. So at that time, we had not backfilled into '28, which is why you see that decrease. So what we're looking toward for the next year is we're going be starting at about $100,000,000 and then as we start the budget development process in 2018, we'll hone in on what that's. So why, I don't understand why your '27 versus the book is the same, but your '28, '29 jump up to 100. They don't know where the money and how that flows for you to get.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: Very good, Chair. So added work that the Richardson use allowed for up to, well, I think nine projects forward, and that was a last minute project discussion. And so we were not able to update the out years in the budget book. It is not our intention to have a $72,000,000 paving program next year, even though that's what it shows in the white book. And that was just strictly a time constraint as the budget development process unfolded.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: If you

[Unidentified Committee Member]: just did 10,000,000,

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: are you saying 20,000,000 in '28? That would come up

[Unidentified Committee Member]: with purchase use that raised it to a thousand people?

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: No, were under saying 100,000,000 in '28 and '29 is a starting point with uncertainty at both the state and federal level. That's kind of been the floor we've tried to maintain even in tight budget years. The 72,000,000 was artificially low just because we didn't have enough time to logistically backfill on the 80. I think in the '27 book, nine is back up to nearly $100,000,000 And so I think that's where we would start the conversation on any given budget development period.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So you're basically saying don't pay much yet? Correct.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: Now there's a lot of uncertainty in the out years with both state and federal funding, and the $72,000,000 is just a byproduct of us bringing projects from the twenty eighth fiscal year into the twenty seventh fiscal year. It's not an actual representation of what we anticipate happening. And again, that's just part of the last minute project development process that occurred this year.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: So, it's here that it was a last minute project to put all of these in, and I'm hoping that this presentation gets to the place where we put a lot of these projects into the interstate, and I'm only going to use my terminology somewhat at the expense of the statewide system. So I'm hoping that we can better understand the relationship between the statewide. That's why I asked the question of the chair in this. The question that will go beyond that, and you can, the House Committee on Transportation or the bill that's coming to the floor, this is based on the purchasing use tax from the administration's proposal going out five years. The House's proposal is for one year dropping the purchase and use. What does that charge look like?

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: So I think the House version has, in effect, a $10,000,000 perpetuity and that- But never increasing. Correct. So what I would say that does- Never increasing, it's just 10,000,000, it's not a- It's 27% cap, think, going to the Ed Fund instead of 33%. And so in fiscal year twenty seven, that's I

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: think 9.8 or 9,900,000.0. But it's a test. Well, if the purchase and use tax goes up, it goes up a little, but it's only at that.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: So what we've done here, because again, the state's change is only a portion of this, the federal constraint is probably a bare driver. And so we're just making some very generalized assumptions in '28 and '29 that we will have at least somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000,000 paving program. That's the assumption because at the end of the day, if the federal funds aren't available, it's a, let's just say, 83% to 85% multiplier. And so just to some extent, the federal funds is the larger driver here. And so again, we're trying to commit to a $100,000,000 floor for the paving program. And so I think to the Chair's concern, what would a program in FY twenty eight, twenty nine looks like from a distribution of interstate to state? So we started with a $100,000,000 floor, and Matt will present kind of what that distribution looked like in the out years at that $100,000,000 floor.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: But you made assumptions in here that going forward by twenty eighth that would be 20,000,000 back in purchase and use, because the way the administration built their budget, it was each year over the four to five year period, you would bring back the purchase and use. So our budget does not reflect that $50,000,000 recapture over five years.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: Our '27 budget is based on the '27 governor's recommend. It does not anticipate or make any assumptions on the '28 and state or federal fund availability. So you didn't base it upon the governor's budget proposal? Correct. We don't know what the financial outlook will be at the state or federal side in 'twenty eight or 'twenty nine. So we took kind of an average baseline assumption, and that's where the 01/2001 and '99 and 'twenty eight or '9 and 'thirty came from. Okay. I wouldn't have expected that originally. I don't think that's a deviation from past practice either. Think every budget year, we make commitments for that budget year and we take a best guess at the next fiscal year. In '27, that best guess is more fraught with assumptions just because there's uncertainty on the federal side. Next year, when we have a better outlook on the federal side, then state funds limiting factor will be better understood. But if if if for whatever reason, the federal funds are

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: flat. And we don't expect that from a cost standpoint.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: We don't expect it, but we don't know. I I don't think anybody has a lot of faith in what law is going to come up with over the next fourteen months, let's say. But whatever that does will probably be a larger driver than what the state does just because, again, they're contributing over 80%, whereas the state system is is 20%.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: That makes it pretty tough to program to program projects.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: It it does, and that's why we feel awful for safe town highway bridges when we say we're coming to town in '28, and, the financial outlook is totally upended, whether it be through inflation or some change at the federal level, but at the end of the day, we only can predict what we know, and at the federal level that changes every five years. Nobody would have predicted in 2020 the magnitude of IIJA. Kaufman is very good at what he does, but he's still trying to be the kiwis. There's very little uncertainty as far as what the authorization would look like. It expires in October. I think Kaal has said in his entire career, it's never been done on time, so it's entirely possible we'll have a continuing resolution. Who knows what happens after the midterms? There's a million variables that play into that, and it would be a total guess of what that whole commitment will be FY 2829.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: All right, so we are going to step in and break down into a breakdown of the different classifications of roads, what we have done historically, and at this time, what we think we'll be doing in the next couple of years, as well as what's happening this year. So first up will be the interstate. So what you see in the table on the bottom is a comparison of project costs, you know, that cost column. That's everything that started in that year, total contract cost. And then percent program is a comparison, or it's the percent of that given fiscal year that we spent on the interstate. Very simply put, I'm sorry. Percent of what? Percent of the total appropriation for that fiscal year. So this total paving appropriation? Paving appropriation. Yes. Yep. Put differently, it's that roughly $24,000,000 over the appropriation in fiscal year 2024. This would be reporting out contracts in 2023, but fiscal year 2024. So it's 24,000,000 divided by the 141.71.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: Are going to federal, to the interstates?

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: Went to the interstate in calendar year paving 2023. So defining years gets a little bit complicated in this. Typically, we're saying in this particular in in the budget year, which is typically looking forward, we're still we're reporting out on the calendar year's paving. So in 2023, we reported out the fiscal year '24 budget, which was January. We're counting the paving that's taking place in 2023 as our as our number. So it's that similar to this year as well, where we're working on a 2027 budget, but we're reporting out on projects that are taking place in 2026 and impacted by the 2027 budget. So if I was going to look at this split, you made for an argument all the way through is that interstates, have a floor level that we need to at least maintain to a floor with where are we given the quality of where our interstates are. Are we close to the place where the feds would be concerned with us? I have a slide on that at the end as well. Thanks. So we are going to get there. I think we'll address that as well. So a little further explanation of this table because we are gonna see the similar thing going on to the next couple of classifications. So miles in this case is the number of miles paid with the projects in 2023, basically equating to the cost that's in 2023. These are the miles that we paid in 2023 on the interstate system. The percent miles is the percentage of the interstate that we paved in that given year. So one minor complication in this is that the interstate is, we have 320 miles of centerline of the interstate. When we do a project on the interstate, we actually, sorry, we measure the barrel mileage. So when you say we have a 10 mile interstate project, that can mean that we pave 10 miles in the northbound or southbound direction or five miles in either direction, but we count that as a 10 mile project. So in this case, when I'm saying percentage of miles, it would be the miles that we paved. So in in year '23, it would be 56.26 divided by six forty barrel miles, just to account for that difference between the two.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: A barrel could be two both, I guess.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: Both lanes? It would be both lanes in one direction. We basically look at each direction as its own road.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: But if one mile on the interstate is kind of

[Unidentified Committee Member]: worth two miles on the State Island? Two miles on the interstate is worth a

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: Not a How many

[Unidentified Committee Member]: cubic or square footage being paved on interstate for miles that I don't state highway.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: No, and that's why we break it down this way. So instead of saying, you know, like the use of molecular water barrier is a project that's going on right now, That's a 10 excuse me. That's a 10 and a half mile paving project on the inner city. We are only doing one barrel. It still means that we're only doing 10 and a half miles. So to compare apples to apples, it would be the same 10 and a half mile project on on a state network because we only look in the barrel direction. Not we're not saying two lanes. Right. Yeah. Right. If we were to do both northbound southbound Montpelier Waterbury, it'd be 21 miles.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: We're You don't talk in lane miles. That's what I've heard in other places. It's lane miles.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: Not on the project level. There is a breakdown of lane miles in asset management. That's not typically on the design side when we're putting a project together. We're looking at lane or we're looking at miles paved based on the centerline of the roadway.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: And like a segment?

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: Yes. Yep. Yep. So, you know, on a on a typical two lane roadway, say Vermont 12 heading towards Elmore, it would be the center line of that roadway. We did a 10 mile paving project, both sides of the road, 10 miles, start to stop. On the interstate, it would be the direction, 10 miles, start to stop full width.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: Because you might be doing one and not the

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: other. Correct. Okay. Yep. So what we see on the interstate is we spend close to about a quarter of the program annually on interstate paving projects on average, and we pave somewhere in the 7% to 8% of the interstate annually with iProjects. And that's our goal, is to do seven to 8%? Our goal would be to keep our asset condition at the required state, which means less than 5% in very poor condition. I get that, but to accomplish that, what do we shoot for? It's dependent on the condition data. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the asset management You must benchmark over time to be able to say to us, Over time, historically, we have needed to pay this amount of road to be able to stay in that range of acceptability of fence. Sure. And so we do have historic data on the deterioration. We're also relying heavily on what the actual condition is. So on the interstate and on the NHS, we're doing annual data collection on the surface deterioration. That plays into the model. You know, there's there's a historic knowledge there, of course. However, because we are we're held at a condition standard, we're looking at what is the actual condition, how fast is it deteriorating, and then needing to stay above that threshold. Do we believe that your seven to 8% number that we're doing puts us on a target to meet your goals in the future? I haven't yet. You put it in the top of

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: the Yeah. So so generally Oh, that's what's So so so I think that's in the ballpark. Right? I think paving industry has been done in before and we haven't refuted the numbers. If we look at a ten year life cycle, ten percent would put us on that ten year life cycle. Obviously, there is going to be places where we don't pave every ten years, and so that drops at the lower 10%. So I should say 7%, 8% is basically in that life cycle for a less than 5% very poor condition. That's not how we program it, but, again, in broad assumptions, that is true.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: Thank you. Go ahead.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So if I was looking at this chart, and I'm looking at that word, much, how many miles, 14% mileage wise, dollars 69, dollars 70,000,000 of 26. Is that a result of underpaving in the previous years? I mean, you have five, what I'm getting at is, are we playing catch up here, right? To get us to 5% very poor condition, doing 14% of

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: the loans. Necessarily. Not necessarily. So as as we're discussing the the 47% of the budget and the 14% in the in the miles, that's a factor of some of the projects that were pulled back into fiscal twenty seven. So it's not necessarily a game of of catch up. It's a it's what we had ready at the time and we're able to pull back in. So maybe I'm

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Well, I hear what you're saying, but, I mean, if you look at that chart, you're gonna say we didn't do enough paving in '23, '24, '20, well, '24 maybe, but in '25, 5%. And then just looking ahead at '27 and '28 thinking, that going to be, are we going to be paying another, is it going to take us another 70,000,000 in '29 to get caught up for the two years we kind of, in my opinion, underpaid?

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: So I think it's actually the opposite. I think what you see is that that 15 percent and 70 million hold projects that were originally planned for '27 and '28 into calendar year '26. And so if you look at say the 64%, that's a byproduct of the 14% being in '26. So it's not that we're playing catch up, it's that we're actually getting ahead on the interstates because those projects were ready when the funding became available in FY '27.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: Yeah.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Okay, so you're saying that the six and the four percent in '27 and '28 will get it will keep us correct where we are, where

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: we should be. Right, because of that FY '27 budget builder calendar year '26 anticipated construction, we pulled projects that were originally anticipated to be done in '27 and '28. We pulled them forward into calendar year '26. So just as '26 is somewhat, I'll just say artificially high, '7 and '28 are somewhat artificially low.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Is there any chance that by catching up in '26 here, or that we can divert a little more money to state saving?

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: And I think we'll see that on the next slide that in '27 and '28, that distribution will tilt back towards the state system.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I'll wait.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: All right, will have questions when we get there. We'll move to the state system. So you see the table on the bottom, very similar breakdown of comparisons here. The difference in this particular chart is that, like we talked about with barrel mileage versus centerline mileage, on the state system, are measuring on the centerline of the given roadway. So, where the interstate, we had 320 miles of median miles or centerline miles, and we had 640 that that was the comparison for the projects. On the state system, we have 2,707 centerline miles. So, to get that percentage, we're using the number of miles paved in a project divided by 2,700 miles of centerline state system. This is inclusive of both the NHS and the non NHS routes, non interstate. So what you'll see here is that on the state system, we are in the neighborhood of about 40% of the given appropriation allocated to state system paving, and that runs at roughly 3% of the total network that we're paving each year on average.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: Okay, go ahead.

[Sen. Rebecca “Becca” White, Vice Chair]: So this is a little bit off of this specific topic, but yesterday on the floor we had a discussion around Section 11, which was a bill related to a study for the creation of a new, I think it was an interstate highway system where 21A is now. 22A's, my my apologies. My understanding is you testify to say no, in brief, but that would add a significant amount of miles to the system. I'm wondering if you could just speak to, do we have bandwidth right now to take on the creation of a new interstate or to expand between Virgins and Rutland? Do you see that even in the ballpark of a budget you could make in the next ten years?

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: So as you presented it, it's all unknown. We're not going to be able to build what is unquestionably multi billion dollar interstate along the Western Corridor in the current construct. Now that bill looked at it a little different, and that bill was to effectively establish a toll road that would be self funded and be autonomous of kind of the traditional normal program. So in theory, I think that bill, as presented by Senator Weeks said, let's just say this won't impact any key fund, any TIV, any federal formula, that this will be a true user pays interstate toll road and it will be fiscally self sustained.

[Sen. Rebecca “Becca” White, Vice Chair]: But can I ask, this is where I got confused and I may have been inaccurate when I shared with my seatmate to my right this information, but I thought if you had a toll road that connected to an interstate system without a toll road, you still could lose your Federal Highway 8 because it's a connection? Okay, now, so you can have a wholly separate toll. Yeah, I still am not in favor of that idea in general because what we've heard time and time again is that this cost, you're not gonna get it covered with the amount of drivers on a toll road anywhere in Vermont. Like the user is not there, like the face of people to pay the toll. I don't know. Are there any interstates now that we have found we would want to convert to toll roads because we could see more funding from the tolls than we would from our allocation of federal funding? Like, is that breaking out anywhere in the state?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I don't know if you can convert. Yes.

[Sen. Rebecca “Becca” White, Vice Chair]: You can convert. No.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: You can't convert. Yeah. You can add you can add lanes, but you can only pull that lane.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: That's annoying.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: Right. So

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: They want their money. Yeah.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: Yeah. So at at the end of the day, at this point, we don't view Polaroid as a viable option for interstates and provide.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: Okay. Well, thank you for letting me go down. Just remind me, we would have to pay back the money in interest?

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: So again, I don't know that you can do a wholesale conversion on a road. Yeah. You can do it on a bridge.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: Oh.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: But again, even on a bridge, you have to account for the peep the fact that people could potentially avoid the bridge. Yeah. And so I just you gotta look at areas where the the workaround, shall we say, or drive around isn't worth it. And so in Vermont, you know, that's like, Mel's Point, Crown Point, you know, where there aren't easy driver counts. I'll just take Laurelton because it's in your district. If we wanted to establish that as a toll road Yeah. People could get off here and drive up 14.

[Sen. Rebecca “Becca” White, Vice Chair]: Yeah. Exactly.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: Right? And and be

[Sen. Rebecca “Becca” White, Vice Chair]: And that would be annoying to all the people on that.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: Exactly. There's Federal Highway actually calls it leakage, It's a pretty technical term where people will avoid a toll road if possible, and then you've got the collateral damage of putting people on secondary roads. Yeah.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: Wow. Okay. Okay.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: You provide us with a little cheat on what because we get asked that all

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: the time. Why don't you toll the roads?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yep. I always thought it was just if you did toll them, you would lose federal funding for that road. I didn't know you couldn't do it if you had to pay it back.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: If you did, you said it was

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: You have to pay back. I'm not sure about how what the payback is. Right. So is it is it

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: Maybe dollars from it. Yeah. I'm not sure how it works as far as actually converting it. I know you can add lane miles, but, again, you would only be able to pull that lane miles. If we wanted to say, take I 89 from Lebanon to Montpelier and and turn it forward, I don't know if there's a process to do that. But I can work with consulates to give you

[Unidentified Committee Member]: white gate on the Usually the fact that you're losing federal funds on that road and the fact that your poles aren't going to make, we don't have enough traffic to make that out is enough to end the discussion, but I mean more to it than that would be good to add.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: Yeah, think where you start is true, and it only goes downhill from there. Exactly. Yeah,

[Sen. Rebecca “Becca” White, Vice Chair]: maybe we don't do. Well, I would

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: like to know more details. Too. Yeah. Especially had

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: somebody I had somebody send me an email this weekend and said, we should just toll the out of stagers.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: Right. Well, okay. Know that are talking

[Unidentified Committee Member]: about having the tolls be higher for out of staters on their toll.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: But that's where the m buff comes in because if if everybody is paying the m buff, then we could compensate for monitors for tolls.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: Matt's not gonna get

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: the But having the detail on why we or or what would be the impact. I mean, we could do it, but it probably wouldn't be a good idea. Yeah. It's what I'm hearing. So, That's better than Maybe

[Sen. Rebecca “Becca” White, Vice Chair]: you approach the answer.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: Okay. So does the 1% at the bottom mean we're paving once every hundred years? No. The 1% at the bottom solely means that at this point in time we anticipate touching 1% of the network in 2028. Well, what track does that put us on based upon our goal? I think the goal in the past has been that in the state system we should pave roughly 300 miles a year. And I don't see anywhere from 23 to 28 anywhere in this we're even close. Sorry, you're the one in the chair. I'm sorry. I heard you say 300 more So than

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: you're not wrong. And this, I think, correlates with some of the projection shown going out to 2035, 2040, where the network condition does deteriorate, and that is reflective of a $100,000,000 paving program in perpetuity does yield a deteriorated network condition.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: Yeah. So okay. I don't see how we do 1% of the roads going forward in this thing. The devil losing ground.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: I do think '28 again is artificially low for the same reasons we discussed earlier that we just haven't back built that program, but it's not going to be

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: a side thing. But the question is on the state system. If we wanna get back to, if 300 is the, how far have we fallen behind before we get back? Right. Yeah.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I gotta ask. Maybe I'm missing something, but if the cost the cost in '27 is 41,000,000, '24 and '28, then the miles we're doing is only a mile more in '28. Now you're anticipating serious cost increases or something? How does that work?

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: So again, not all treatments are pretty full. Preventative maintenance treatment is 300 to $400,000 a reclaim is about 1,000,000. Right. And so it looks like without digging into the weeds at twenty seven, we've got a couple of week claims there, where in '28, it it isn't. And so when you've got essentially, some treatments cost three times more than other treatment.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So you're gonna have reconstructions in '28.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: So more reconstructions in '28? Yeah, it'll be fiscal year '28, but then calendar year '27. Okay, sorry. Yeah.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: No, that's a good question, can I follow-up on that? So this is based on specific projects? Correct. And this is based on projects in what book?

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: It's based to some extent on the white book, but we've tried to bring it in to level set that $100,000,000 target that Matt presented earlier. So we've added projects that aren't necessarily in the white book for various fiscal years.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: So the STIP, this is not the STIP? Correct. So things like, I know about my bridges, right? That hopefully we'll have a conversation about them. I mean, a dedicated conversation. So there are things that are in the STIP, projects that are in the STIP that are not in the white book,

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: right? Generally,

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: it would be the other way around, that they would be in the white book but not necessarily in the SNP.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: Okay, so that's just bad luck for Bellis Falls to have our condition. Okay, so, but the STIP is the one that you have on your website that the public can see. So when are, how do you coordinate the STIP? And this might not be a good time to talk about it, just coordinating the STIP with the white book. Is it public?

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: So generally speaking, we take a snapshot in January. We get it approved, the SNP, I mean, by the Federal Highway Administration. But then over the course of the next eleven, twelve months as projects change, we've got adapt. There'll be various STIP amendments and modifications that would be reflected in the white book that wouldn't necessarily be on that year's STIP.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: So you annually update the SIFT?

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: Yes. Okay. Looks like you. Thank you. Alright, we're gonna move on to the last of the breakdowns here, which is the Class one Town Highway portion of the paving program. So exactly the same type of measurement that we did with the state system. This is measured based on centerline of the roadway. In the state, we have a 140 miles that are class one town highways. So that is where we get the percentage mileage percent miles in this case. What you'll see is an average of about 12 to 14% of the program is going to class one town highways annually, and we're doing approximately six percent on average. There are years that that fluctuates depending on what the class one is and how long it is, how expensive it is. So that's where we land. So we'll get into a quick discussion on ready projects, just to talk about which projects can be moved around or what it means when we're actually ready to get them out the door. So all of these projects that we've been talking about, as you're aware, use a portion of federal funding. That means we have certain requirements that we have to run through, certain clearances, right of way clearances. We have environmental reviews and clearances and utility clearances. All of these things take place during the design phase, and design takes place. So design can be anywhere from a year to three years depending on what the project scope is and how how in-depth of a design there is, along with those clearance and review processes, along with selecting the right treatment and dialing in when that year may be. So projects are ready and therefore eligible to be moved around on the advertisement date when we have all of those clearances or we're near nearly have all of those clearances. We have a full and we also have a full plan specification and estimate package that we can get out the door to advertise. So that's what we be looking to if we were moving projects around or if we're in the case where we were to pull some closer in time, we would need to make sure that they check all of those boxes and that they're ready so that we can meet that advertisement period. And So if we wanted a project to move up a project from next year to pave the year after. If we don't have it if we don't have project development in the book this next year, yet limits what we do the year after. It could, depending on the project. I'm going the twelve months we yeah. If we don't put money into building the pipeline, the pipeline's never going to be there. Yes. And we're always gonna be in this position of chasing. Okay. So that ties in with the payment management strategies. So in order for us to have that pipeline built or know what we need to get out in that one to three year range, we're looking ahead at the two to five year range to understand what the needs are on the on the network. We do this through, as as I mentioned a little bit earlier, we do at least every two years data collection on the surface conditions that are out there. So we're measuring like cracking, rutting, ride quality, that plays into that picture, and then we're evaluating different treatments that we can use to keep the network condition in in good shape. In that two to five year range, we we have a good spread of what the projects may be, then they move into the design phase. And in design, we can get a better understanding of how how difficult is this design, how how many clearances do we need to go through, and then we can paint a better picture as to when that project can actually be advertised and be constructed by checking those boxes and saying that this project's ready to go. We do try to have a good spread between the low cost preventative maintenance type projects, so keeping good roads in good shape, and then bringing roads that have fallen off up into good shape so that they can be treated with that lower cost type treatment. Where that leads us in strategy, and I believe this talks about how we've been doing with what we've had, we have a breakdown of both the interstate conditions and the state network conditions. So the dark purple here is the very four. That's the one that the you know, thou shalt stay above. In this case, it's a a 5% or less. So you can see on the chart where where we're at on the interstate. And then on the state system, same color breakdowns here, very poor is the dark purple. We have an internal measure to say above 25% in very poor, say less than 25% in very poor. We want to be above that line, but that means that line needs to stay where it is. So can you back up to the interstate system? Sure. So the 5% is, worth above the 5% all the way through. In this chart, we are keeping very poor in less than 5%, yes.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: Okay. So Senator, this is our scoring. Federal Highway only has three criteria. And I believe if we score to Federal Highway's criteria in the last reporting year, I believe we're at 4.1%, and that number is stable at five. So this was presented just because this is historically what we present to the legislature. But to your earlier question, how close do we get into the 5%? I believe we're at 4.1% right now.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: Yeah, 4.1% right now.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: Do you get to our rating? You don't just add a four and very far? No. Or it's a different Yep.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: Or 4.1. And is that up from last year? Yes. I believe it is. And you've got nine interstate projects on tap? I don't know. I don't know that. We it's not that's not the nine that have been discussed. That it it wasn't all interstate projects that were pulled in, if that's what you were thinking. I don't know what the number is. What number of projects do we have going on the interstate right now? Where are they in the work that we're

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: So go back to your table on the interstate. And I just got corrected by my staff. We're at 4.9%, not 4.1.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: Oh, they're fast. It's close.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: So so I don't know what the number is of projects, but in in calendar year '26, so 70 miles or excuse me, 92 miles. That's probably in four the neighborhood of

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: to five projects. Depending on the breakdown.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: So does a very poor on the interstate look worse or like I'm just thinking when you're driving at a higher speed very poor could be something that would be poor on a lower speed highway right? There are a fair amount of bumps in it.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: Yeah, we don't report this differently based We on look at that deposit and be happy to go in and re present kind of how we did that. But in general terms, what we did is we scored a little bit, had people drive it and have them tell us if they thought it was because they are poor, very poor, and that's how we established the verbiage to a numerical number. So I think over that opportunity again, right, to your point, at 25 miles an hour on a class one is very different than 65 miles an hour on And an so we just tried to capture kind of a distribution of that.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: So, if there's because the segments are really different from each other, I mean you can tell where you guys paved and where you haven't, and so if there's a segment that's really bad, a segment that's good, do they get averaged?

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: Yes. Okay. So, well, they

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: get aggregated, they don't

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: get averaged. Okay. Alright, and then these folks that are giving you comments, is it your own staff?

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: No, those are non maintenance people.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: Oh.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: So, and this happened before my time. Basically, we went through, scored it using our quantum five volt measures, have them drive a section and say, what do you think that was, good care for? And then we correlated that perception to our number.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: I would say you calibrated for

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: Based those on the perception of the average driver.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: They used the other ones. Yes.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: Now they have cameras, you know, like Google and stuff. So can you do it that way?

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: We're gonna do that as well. So I get into exactly how we score, but it's wet depth, it's smoothness, there's a number of factors, the amount of tracking, and then we aggregate all of that and then we get a number. And then back in the day, we had people drive that and calibrated their perception to the number. So for instance, it's four categories. It's not a 100 to 75, 75 to fifty, fifty to 25, 25 from that range. We did exactly a different distribution and I'll pop my head again. I don't have it, but it isn't just a linear sort of field.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: Okay, one last question for Nat. So you must have a map that has all of these segments.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: Yes.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: Okay.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: Yes, you can go in through vTransparency and pull up a condition map of the entire network that I think is it's like a heat map. It's all color coded so you can see within your district what's what's good, what's bad.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: Or within any district.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: Yeah. You can click on any

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: because I know where those are. If you don't

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: I'm gonna

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: I'm gonna help you calibrate. Those

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: color codings are are matching what the chart showed at the end of this presentation too, and to the point of of averaging or aggregating. We're taking data on the tenth mile segment. So when you're seeing that on the map, it's it dialed down to a tenth mile segment and the condition of that tenth mile, that's why you would see changes as you drive drive along or scroll along on the on the virtual map. Cool.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: And you do the actual road condition every two years for all roads? Minimum of two years. I believe in the states we do annually.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: In the state of NHS, our annual.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So back to your bar chart, is that why you only have up to twenty twenty four? I thought it was only 24 because you haven't done 26, but

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: you do it every year on

[Unidentified Committee Member]: the, two years on the state, we only have 24 data?

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: Yes. That was the closest data that we had to be able to prepare.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: But you would have it for 45 on the interstate because you do it every year. You just have to put it into it, right? Right. You have to it There's a bit of data, you know, or, you know, distillation I have to occur. Yep.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: That was that's good.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: That was a lot of we we packed a lot in.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: Well, here's the issue, and I'm still not convinced. And I totally understand that in the construction of this, you had to move really quickly you figured out you had $10,000,000 that you didn't know, and you had literally hours to put this together. And I totally understand that, and this is not an exercise that we want to cut or anything. Trying to figure out the balance between the state highway system and and the interstates. And and I'll use someone that has interstates going both ways. All direct. But are the interstates that much more important for Windsor County than group four or group five? That's who you ask. It depends on who you ask. Mhmm. So the question is how do we be fair to both and make sure that we're doing that? And I'm not sure of your pipeline, how you've got projects coming along. I'm not sure if I've got some interstate projects that are not gonna be done towards the end of the year. I'm still unsure about how we balance between our state system and the interstate, and how we do that. When I see the 1% a year in the state highway system, it causes really, really great concern for me. Because I think a lot of people the interstates are important for the commerce and everything, but a lot of our constituents, the first road they jump on in the morning is their town road and then their state highway system.

[Sen. Rebecca “Becca” White, Vice Chair]: Is there are there any other states that have like a feeder road prioritization within their category or, a, you know, a main connector off network? Is there any other way to capture, like, those roads in a prioritization?

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: So we do. Okay. We have two performance measures. One is the 20 less than 25% very poor. We also have what's called the travel weighted average, and we probably have that at 70. And right now, I think we're in the high sixties, but that does take into account the traffic volume. Right? Because I'll just Route 12 in North Prairie Road is very different than Route 4 in Woodstock. True. And and we acknowledge that. So it is it is a in our prioritization methodology, it's it's to keep the number of roads that are very poor to a to a fragment of the or a small fraction of the the total system, but also recognizing that traffic volume is what the user experience is. We try to balance both of those, right? Because if we just looked at double weighted average, we would spend the majority of our dollars in very specific locales. If we just worried about very poor, we could be spending a lot of money in Essex County, right? And that's not a critique of them, that's just you know, different needs. So we try to balance both, within the pavement management system, we have those two competing interests that we try to balance.

[Sen. Rebecca “Becca” White, Vice Chair]: Well, it's almost like you need an equalized pupil formula for roads in a way. Like, it's need a complex.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: Well, the other question is, and what I can't judge from this is, we have a pipeline here. And the question of the pipeline, am I funding enough in the pipeline to get enough statewide in the statewide system projects put forward so we're going to be able to have a smooth transition there. Well, I think

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: it's irrefutable that 1% as an annual investment is not enough. That being said, I think one of the tools that we have that wasn't highlighted here was our DLEV system, which is 10,000,000, and that goes to the state system almost exclusively. And so the the the program projects are band aided with the the d lab system.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: Well, it may need a bigger band aid if we aren't doing enough projects.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: What was that word that you used? D block?

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: D block? District leveling.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: Oh, that being compared to the different districts? Is that

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: Basically, it's to take the worst of the worst where we don't have a capital project coming, and we we kinda put Band Aid on it.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: We've had a real winter, and they got more cracks than we thought we're gonna get, and people are yelling at them.

[Sen. Rebecca “Becca” White, Vice Chair]: Okay. And we've got this one project statewide district level and not your budget. It's in It

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: it is in the paving

[Sen. Rebecca “Becca” White, Vice Chair]: It is in

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: the program. Yeah. There's a there's a line item in there to basically identify later which which projects we're gonna have in the delev program, but it is in the paving It's our D

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: and D.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yeah, and they're always just like a

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: skimmed treatment. Yes, yeah, an inch to an inch and a half. Sometimes there's milling depending on where you're at, number is not going up when you're not doing any of the real road work, you've got no place to go when the road is really crappy. Historically,

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: so when Iker became chief engineer, I think that was sort of programmed at somewhere in the neighborhood of the $3,000,000 range, and it would be frequently up to million dollars. Just last year or two, I think we've gotten closer to 8,000,000, and in the '27 budget, I think we're almost at 10,000,000. So we are seeing The an increase in other thing I would say is that that is it's in one fiscal year, but it's generally split between two construction years. So what we try to do is spend, let's just say, 60% of that in the first part of the fiscal year, so from July to say October, and then hold 40% in reserve to the chair's point, if something falls apart through the winter, we can get out there in the spring before the new fiscal year and hit that section of road.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: Or if that bridge falls down or something.

[Senior VTrans official (unidentified)]: Well, this is The US shift for paving. We have a whole separate emergency for bridge.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: You know those roads,

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: the potholes just show up.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They change daily here on Oh, yeah. East Main Street. Oh thank

[Unidentified Committee Member]: you.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: That's another

[Sen. Wendy Harrison, Clerk]: They're mobile. I call them mobile.

[Sen. Rebecca “Becca” White, Vice Chair]: No, you're off roading at that point.

[Matthew Patrick, Highway Safety and Design Program Manager, Vermont Agency of Transportation]: Yeah. Well, we will be back visiting this. It would be nice to know where all those projects fit in in the pipeline in the interstate and what projects I'm worried about that pipeline that stays. Understood. And is and maybe that's some conversations offline to you know, before you get back to the table, but, you know, I can just tell you, you can hear it.

[Sen. Richard Westman, Chair]: I, for myself, have not comforted me with the balance. Okay. Scott? I'm sorry if you have any Thank you. We've got a little bit of time, and I know it's late, but we are on the floor for one. So you wanna take ten minutes? Yeah.