The Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors reviewed during its Tuesday meeting the county’s Secondary Six-Year Plan for fiscal years 2019-24 voted unanimously to adopt them as presented.

This decision followed a public hearing regarding the six-year plan and the Secondary System Construction Budget for fiscal year 2019. One person spoke at the hearing.

Presenting the Secondary Six-Year Plan was Scot Shippee, resident engineer for the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT).

Shippee opened his presentation by noting that he and the board had addressed the six-year plan in a March work session.

“We basically went through the six-year plan that we had last year and identified those priorities that were pre-existing,” he said. “We made a decision, at that time, to leave those existing priorities, to basically bump those up. I think we had three kind of roll off the plan, and we moved everything up in order. We were able to add four routes to the six-year plan this year.”

This brings to the total number of routes in the new six-year plan to 11.

“I kind of made a cheat sheet for everybody on the front to kind of show you when we would anticipate, based on current funding levels, these particular roads would get constructed,” he said.

“We’ll start off with priority No. 1 this year, that would be (Route) 661, Nursery Road,” Shippee continued. “It’s 1.8 miles. And then we were also able to accelerate Route 613, Millers Lake (Road). I believe on last year’s plan, we were only able to do one, but there were some additional monies identified that would allow us to accelerate this one. So, we’ve got roughly 3.2 miles that are scheduled for construction beginning next fiscal year if the board decides to adopt the plan as is.”

He noted that priority No. 3 is Route 721 Dempsey Road, priority No. 4 is Route 751, Hidden Lake Road, priority No. 5 is Route 740, Copper Hill Road, priority No. 6 is Route 628, Mill Creek Road and priority No. 7 is Route 702, Bolden Flournoy Road.

For priority No. 7, Shippee said, “(We) should have the funding identified for that in July of 2021, so somewhere in that 2021, 2022 time frame is when we would anticipate that being constructed.”

Of the four routes added, “the first one is Route 744, Whispering Woods Road,” he said. “In our work session, that was one that the board identified as a priority because that was one that we had submitted for consideration the previous year, and we didn’t have enough funding to add it to a list, so we did that. And then also based on the funding that was available, I was able to take some of your other requests and prioritize them based on traffic count, based on number of houses per mile, just kind of come up with an arbitrary ranking.

“And what we ended up with was priority No. 9 would be (Route) 730, Schoolhouse Road, priority No. 10 would be (Route) 780, Old Oak Road, and priority No. 11 would be a section of Route 632, Falkland Road,” Shippee said.

He expanded briefly on priority No. 11.

“If you’ll remember during the work session, we talked about instead of doing the entire length of Falkland Road, do the populated ends,” he said. “(We) broke that into two sections. Ironically, the section closest to (Route) 630 came in at No. 11. No. 12 was the other section of Falkland Road. So, even though it’s not showing up on this plan, I would anticipate sometime within the next three to four years, if all the priorities stay as they are, that we would probably end up doing those about the same time, but I can’t officially add it to the plan because I can’t fully fund it at this time.”

He concluded his presentation by noting that he is carrying “about $48,000 kind of in a balance entry account for the fiscal year 2023-24, and the reason for that is in order to add a road to the plan, I have to be able to fully fund it.”

During board comments, Buffalo District Supervisor C.R. “Bob” Timmons Jr. brought up the subject of Back Hampden Sydney Road to Shippee.

“The new section that they did to straighten out some of the curves but they stopped short of that last curve, (we) really need you to take a look at that,” he said. “If we need to spend some safety money or if we have some safety money left over, take a hard look at that curve because it’s not a good curve.”

Shippee said, “If we’re looking to do a geometric realignment, I don’t know that I have enough money in that safety operational fund to do that. What we could do is — and I don’t even know if it would qualify for it or not — but we could look at it as a potential SMART SCALE project if it falls within that corridor. I don’t know that it would meet the criteria.”

Timmons said he did not think it would but asked Shippee to take a look at it.

“We can look, but just being blunt, right now, I don’t know a funding source to get that accomplished,” Shippee said. “Not saying we won’t look for one, but I don’t know of a source to get that accomplished other than maybe something like a revenue sharing to where the plan would be developed. You’d get your prices, you’d submit to VDOT for the revenue sharing. You’d have to be a 50 percent match in order to get that constructed, but right now that’s probably the most realistic funding stream for getting something done on that road, and it’s just kind of the nature of the way construction funding is right now.”

During the public hearing, Major Owens, of  Hampden District, asked for maintenance along Route 744 to contain bushes that help create blind spots.

Shippee said he would check it out.