by James A. Bacon
In 2004, the Virginia Department of Transportation maintained a staff of 10,000 employees. Today the head count stands around 7,000. That sounds like a dramatic downsizing. But there’s less to those numbers — and more — than meets the eye.
Much of the staff reduction reflects an outsourcing of the design and drafting functions to outside engineering firms, which means that lower payroll costs are offset by higher contract fees. But the shift does advance an important VDOT management goal: to focus on project management as a core capability.
Chief Deputy Commissioner Charles Kilpatrick provided the numbers in a Wednesday presentation to the Commonwealth Transportation Board. VDOT has seen “lots of change” in staffing, in processes and in how it conducts business, says Kilpatrick, a career VDOT employee who worked briefly in the private sector before taking on the No. 2 position at the department under the McDonnell administration.
There has been a wholesale change of senior personnel at the highway department. Not only did Gov. Bob McDonnell appoint a new highway commissioner, Gregory A. Whirley, and chief deputy commissioner, Kilpatrick, but VDOT has a new chief financial officer, a new director to run public-private partnerships, new people to run research, administration and planning & programming, eight new division administrators and four new district managers.
A very real VDOT accomplishment has been the ability to handle a surge in the number of maintenance and construction projects in the past year without increasing head count. The McDonnell administration has emphasized putting idle funds to work, pushing projects out the door more quickly, and ramping up a series of mega-projects financed through borrowed funds and public-private partnerships.
In one major process change, VDOT is shifting from design-bid-build projects (designing projects in-house and putting them out to bid), to design-build projects (detailing the project specifications and letting contractors undertake the construction and design). In theory, the approach can lead to more creative, cost-saving designs, while the ability to conduct design work and construction simultaneously enables private contractors to complete projects more quickly and at lower cost. Transportation Secretary Sean Connaughton has frequently expressed his frustration with the unnecessarily high cost of many VDOT projects executed under the old design-bid-build model.
Once upon a time, VDOT would have handled all the design and drafting internally. It still maintains a core design-and-drafting capability, said Kilpatrick in an interview. But the main focus has shifted to managing projects and bringing them in on budget and on time. As a consequence, VDOT has to hire more project managers and construction inspectors.
The department is authorized to have 500 more employees than it has on staff but reaching the full complement isn’t easy. VDOT has lost a large number of employees through retirement, and it has to compete with the private sector for qualified employees. “As the economy improves,” Kilpatrick said, “more people will leave.”
What Kilpatrick did not say, but surely was on his mind, is that state employees generally get paid less than their private-sector counterparts. A big advantage of being a state employee is the chance to earn juicy retirement benefits. But the McDonnell administration wants to make state employees contribute more to their retirement benefits than in the past. Moreover, young people aren’t willing to commit themselves to 40-year careers like the old guard did.
Meanwhile, said Kilpatrick in an interview, it’s possible that VDOT has over-shot its restructuring. The department may have gone too far in cutting back the number of resident engineers, whose job is to stay in touch with local government officials and the public. That undermines another key goal, which is to maintain a strong “customer focus.”
A decade ago, VDOT had an abysmal record for completing projects on budget and on time. Despite challenges, says Kilpatrick, the department is delivering the goods. Since the enactment of the governor’s transportation funding package a year ago, he says, VDOT has advanced 363 projects to preliminary engineering, 106 to right-of-way acquisition and 156 to the construction phase, and has completed 111. Another 290 projects are expected to begin construction over the next three years.