Did Connaughton lie to the CTB and Albemarle about the Western Bypass price tag?

Sean Connaughton probably won’t sleep very well tonight. A FOIA request reveals that he low-balled the estimate for building Charlottesville’s proposed Western Bypass, which might help explain why he pushed through approval of the thing, getting a four-person majority on the Albemarle Board of Supervisors to hold an unadvertised midnight vote to sign off on …

Some of the questions raised by the approval to toll I-95.

I’m wondering what to do with the news that the Federal Highway Administration has provided preliminary approval for Virginia to toll I-95. There’s so much that I don’t know about transportation funding. Here’s some of what I’d like to know: The funding from this can only go to 95, right? How much of the cost …

Links for July 8th

Wikipedia: The National RoadOne of the first highways in the country was the aptly named "National Road," running from Cumberland, Maryland to south-central Illinois, the road was to continue clear to Missouri, but the project ran out of cash. Construction of the 620-mile road ran from 1811–1838, having been authorized five years prior by President …

Links for May 25th

Gratiot County Herald Letters To The EditorIthaca, Michigan school superintendent Nathan Bootz wrote an open letter to the governor to ask that his school system be converted to a prison, noting that Michigan spends $30,000–$40,000/year on each prisoner, but only $7,000/year on each student. WVEC: Taxpayers foot the bill when the governor flies on state …

Links for April 7th

Public Policy Polling: Barbour, Bryant lead in MississippiForget the point of this poll—the real news is that half of Mississippi Republicans think that interracial marriage should be illegal. Oh, and Sarah Palin is leading that bunch by a wide margin. Small government what now? New York Times: Rush to Use Crops as Fuel Raises Food …

Links for February 22nd

Washington Post: Hampton Roads lawyer David McCormick to seek 2012 GOP Senate nominationSome random guy is running for the Republican nomination for Webb's seat. In his announcement, he compared himself to George Washington. New York Times: The Threatening Scent of Fertile WomenMen in stable, long-term relationships rank women as less attractive when they're ovulating than …

What will McDonnell do to fund transportation (if anything)?

Bob Lewis has a story today about the state’s slide into a fiscal morass of transportation funding that provides a peek at the stories to come in the years ahead. This is the sort of article that we’ll all look back at in five to ten years and wonder how we didn’t see it coming. …

More on McDonnell’s invented $500M from ABC privatization.

Further to Bob McDonnell’s plan to fund transportation, given the Post’s discovery of some deeply misleading math, see if you can follow this logical jujitsu in McDonnell’s plan. Tracing back this bit of the plan to its origins, the Wilder Commission report concluded: We estimate that the dollar amount that could accrue from these streamlinings, …

The Post has highlighted McDonnell’s fuzzy transportation math.

The Washington Post editorial board, having read Bob McDonnell’s transportation plan, doesn’t like what they see: Much of the plan relies on wildly optimistic assumptions, brazen exaggerations, gauzy projections and far-off scenarios: budget surpluses and revenue growth that may not materialize; interstate tolls that the federal government may not approve; royalties from offshore oil and …