Powhite chief Perkins dies

Don Perkins, VDOT’s longtime toll expert and administrator, and general manager of the Powhite Extension toll road in Richmond VA is dead at 63. He died July 1 just hours after electronic tolling began on both his Powhite Parkway Extension and on the contiguous Richmond Metropolitan Authority’s Powhite Parkway and Downtown Expressway in the Virginia capital.

Perkins was an accountant and almost straight out of college at age 22 joined the new Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike (RPT) I-95, as its financial officer. Colleagues say he quickly became an expert in all aspects of toll operations and management. He was the RPT’s general-manager in its last years. When the RPT was de-tolled in 1992 he moved to work on the Powhite Parkway Extension (PPE), which was his design from conception through construction and into operations.

Colleagues said Perkins great strengths were his enthusiasm for the whole toll operation, his interest in all its people and his detailed knowledge of everyone and how they worked. He was a weekend builder and cabinetmaker.

Perkins greatest regret about the PPE was that he couldn’t get the department to spend the money needed to build tunnels at the toll plazas (A high water table was cited as another issue.) But the PPE toll plazas are notable for the huge spread of their roofs, which the staff say make them immune to damage from lightning and among the best sheltered from the weather. And the toll lane gores are like concrete embattlements off the Siegfried Line, so the toll booths must be among the safest in the country from any out-of-control patron’s vehicle.

Perkins had a couple of operations for heart problems. July 1 he was in the hospital and had a single heart bypass surgery, which apparently went well. In the hospital recovery room however he suffered a sudden and quite unexpected cardiac arrest and couldn’t be revived. Departmental spokesman Lynda South Webster called Perkins VDOT’s “toll road icon.”