Value Eng Propaganda by FHWA

The VA-895 project in Richmond VA was reduced in cost by $33m through ‘value engineering’ adopted by VDOT, according to the FHWA’s PUBLIC ROADS (PR) magazine (Sept/Oct 99 p42). It presents this as some kind of triumph for a federal program urging economies on a state DOT. It leaves totally unreported the pertinent facts that VA-895 is (1) a toll road project and (2) that it is being funded with toll revenue bonds. Far from being anything to do with the FHWA ‘value engineering’ advocacy, the cost cutting initiatives for VA-895 came because the developers of the project, a partnership of Fluor Daniel and Morrison Knudsen, later taken over by Tidewater Construction, said the original VDOT designs for VA-895 were unfinancable with revenue bonds, and proposed the cost cutting changes. That set off a series of VDOT-developer discussions about how to rejig the project, and jointly they reshaped it. If it had been a standard FHWA TEA21 funded project there would have been no reason to find the ‘value engineering’ changes cited, say officials involved.