Charlottesville leaders have decided to scrap plans for West Main streetscape improvements, citing money issues stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The pandemic hit and we were confronted as a city with funding a lot of big capital projects, and the council issued just made a very difficult decision to that we were going to focus on the school reconfiguration,” Vice Mayor Juandiego Wade said, according to reporting from NBC-29.
The city had been developing plans for the project for the past decade, with millions spent on planning and engineering studies, some of which may need to be repaid.
“Some of it may may well have come from VDOT, in which case we may have to repay some money to VDOT. I don’t know that the final bills haven’t been sorted out,” Mayor Lloyd Snook told the TV station.
The project was likely to cost in the neighborhood of $50 million. That’s a lot of money post-pandemic.
“We were always hoping that sort of something would happen. If for example, if we had been able to get approval for a sales tax increase to fund the schools, that might have been something that might have allowed us to take the money that was coming out of the capital program for the schools, and instead put it into this program,” Snook told NBC-29.
Story by Chris Graham
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