ne expects me portion irom wasnington to tne Covington

ne expects me portion irom wasnington to tne Covington River bridge to be advertised in July with construction to start by late summer. The other portion will have to wait until July 1992 because of budgetary cutbacks, said Mr. Moore.

We’re sure that VDOT can provide a perfectly legitimate engineering reason for the long, drawn-out surveying that has tied up traffic. But if they want to know why the public’s image of the ^ransporation department is one of a slow-moving, cost-intensive bureaucracy, they need look no further. ;Every time you think they’re done up springs a new “survey crew” sign.

Some in Rappahannock never wanted the four-laning, and ithere was even a petition drive to try and stop it. There’s considerable anti-road work sentiment in the county. The only person who attended the supervisors’ meeting on the secondary road plan last month was there to make sure VDOT wasn’t planning to pave her dirt road in Flint Hill. A consortium of neighbors had sent her to the meeting to express their concerns, refreshing in this day of more-is-better.

Unfortunately things aren’t so simple that we could simply take the millions of dollars earmarked for U.S. 211 and spend them somewhere else of our choosing, so common sense dictates that we take the money and run.

Given the laborious and unwieldy funding process that VDOT goes through every year, it’s more than a little unbelievable that they might postpone a project of this magnitude for a year (or more, who can tell at this point?).

We want to know if doing the project in two segments is going to add to the cost of the project — it seems that it would.

Once committed, VDOT should not be in the position of putting off or backing down from a project of this magnitude. Our fear is that if the state government’s money crunch continues next year the Covington-to-Sperryville portion may be held up further.

"k. r