WOODBRIDGE — Virginia is one of the states that has yet to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, but a group in Prince William County is trying to change that.
It kicked off their effort on Women’s Equality Day, Sunda, Aug. 26, at the Ferlazzo Building in Woodbridge where they watched Iron Jawed Angels and shared the microphone with ERA champ and television star Alyssa Milano.
“I think it’s important to realize how far we’ve come,” Milano said, referring back to the movie which featured the plight of the original Suffragists led by Alice Paul. “I promise you I am on your side,” she said.
Milano is an advocate for equal rights, has watched the growth of the “MeToo” movement in recent months to highlight and fight against sexual harassment. The incidents with mega-producer Harvey Weinstein surfaced, and she spoke with members on her film crew on the harassment issue and got some shocking feedback.
“It was overwhelming to me,” she said, and then started the MeToo tweets. “Seven hours later, there were 35,000 replies,” she said, and it just grew from there. “I knew that something spectacular was happening,” Milano said.
Delegate Jennifer Carroll Foy (Woodbridge, Stafford) put in House Joint Resolution 567 with fellow Delegate Hala S. Ayala (D-Prince William County) to ratify the equal rights amendment in Virginia, and the two put together the event to bring this to the attention of women in Woodbridge and beyond.
“This is a longtime coming,” said Ayala, “we can’t continue down this path by being silent,” she said.
Foy looks at the 2017 election as a sign for better things to come for women.
“We saw the impact women are having from the 2017 election, the ERA will be the exclamation point on everything that’s happened,” she said.
Through her contacts, Milano showed interest in the event and Foy was inspired.
“It felt amazing that someone 3,000 miles away is paying attention to our efforts,” she said.
Milano was suddenly on the guest list to the event.
The Equal Rights Amendment was passed by Congress on March 22, 1972, and sent to the states for ratification. In order to be added to the Constitution, it needed approval by legislatures in three-fourths (38) of the 50 states, according to the ERA website.
If passed, House Joint Resolution 567 will mean Virginia will be the 38th state, and the amendment will pass. The ERA bill states “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” Equal pay, maternity leave and domestic violence were just a few of the elements that would be addressed by the ERA.
The night at the Ferlazzo building was kicked off by “Iron-Jawed Angels,” the 2004 movie starring Hillary Swank as Alice Paul, the lead suffragist who led a campaign in 1914 to give women the right to vote. The plot contained Washington Post reporters, fasting, prison, a gnarly female prison guard, protests, force feeding, and a parade in Washington that ended badly.
Good stuff for movie fans, but not entirely accurate, especially about the presence of African-American women, Ayala said.
“The night of terror was much worse than depicted in the movie,” said Ayala. After the two-hour movie, there was a clarification film narrated by one of the original suffragists great grand daughter to clear things up, but in the end, the point was made.
Recent college graduate Hannah Majchrowitz was there after her friend told her about it, but it has opened her eyes.
“As a young person, I know that I need to be a little more active in politics,” she said.
Pamela Sheehan was impacted by Milano, who posed for pictures with everyone after the event, and was really personable. If the name isn’t familiar, Milano was one of the stars on the 1980’s television hit show “Who’s the Boss.”
“It was great to have her here,” Sheehan said. “She seemed really friendly,” added Sheehan’s friend Sarah Crisman.
Other local figures were in attendance including Sen. Jeremy McPike (D-29), Del. Charniele Herring (D-46), Prince William County Neabsco District Supervisor John Jenkins, and Lilly Jesse, of the Prince William School Board.
A film crew making a documentary showed up as well, led by independent film producer Leslie Macla.
Milano had a visit to Virginia on her schedule for a while, stopping in Alexandria Sunday afternoon before Woodbridge. After the event, she was headed back to the airport for a flight back to California, where she has seven districts to visit.
“Ever since that ‘MeToo’ tweet, it’s been growing,” she said.
WOODBRIDGE — Beginning this month, motorists in the Woodbridge area may start to see the dreaded orange traffic cones slowing things down as construction crews begin to relocate utilities for the widening of Route 1 from Mary’s Way to Featherstone Road.
This 1.3-mile section of Route 1 will go from being a four-lane undivided highway to a six-lane divided highway. Work will include the construction of a 1 0-foot-wide multi-modal trail and a 5-foot-wide sidewalk along the sides of the route.
At the Prince William County Board of Supervisors meeting on August 7, the county awarded a $14.5 million construction contract to Sagres Construction Corporation for Phase I of this project.
The Prince William County Department of Transportation is doing the work here, looking at the current and projected needs.
“It needs to be widened for capacity, to carry existing and future traffic,” said county engineer Javier Ibe.
The biggest challenge in the project, according to Ibe, will be the Maintenance of Traffic, known around transportation circles as the MOT.
This project was originally approved by the Board of Supervisors in May 2014 and the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority funded the $3 million design work. The Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) is currently widening the stretch of Route 1 between Annapolis Way and Mary’s Way, and has a price tag of $167.8 million. The PWDOT project extends the widening south to Featherstone road, which is just north of Opitz Boulevard which links to I-95.
Several properties along this stretch were impacted, and PWDOT worked with homeowners earlier in the year to mitigate these situations. Among those impacted were the landowners where the Kentucky Fried Chicken once stood, a beauty supply business, and individual landowners.
In March 2018, there was demolition work conducted on several spaces throughout this stretch of Route 1. The project is scheduled to be completed in November 2021 and when done, coupled with the effort underway by VDOT to widen Route 1 from Mary’s Way to the Occoquan River, a five-mile stretch of Route 1 in Woodbridge will be six lanes from the Occoquan River to the Neabsco Creek.
WOODBRIDGE — For commuters in Woodbridge heading to the Pentagon and beyond, there’s carpooling, rail and single-occupancy vehicles going up congested Interstate 95.
But to Woodbridge District Supervisor Frank Principi there’s another choice, and that’s the high-speed ferry up the Potomac River.
It seems feasible to Principi and others in Woodbridge, but it didn’t seem to get closer to reality in the July 10 Prince William County Board of Supervisors meeting, where county Transportation Department Director Rick Canizales kept the project it in the holding pattern, where it’s been in for several years now.
“If you’re looking to fund this project through a grant, it has to have a match,” he said during an hours-long special work session on Transporation.
Principi did bring up some figures and funding sources, like at least $4 million from the Federal Transit Administration. To get the cash, however, the county would have to provide matching funds. The problem is, the ferry is not in the county budget, and that may be because a ferry nowhere to be found in the county’s comprehensive plan.
The more Principi pressed Canizales for an explanation as to why the ferry isn’t funded during the July meeting; the response took a meandering path.
“Many of these boxes are checked,” he said. “Congestion relief’ is one element of justification for transit projects, which the ferry might go under,” explained Canizales.
Canizales referred back to the way other projects are approved.
“We have a county model, a travel demand model,” Canizales said.
The ferry boats that Principi is looking at would travel up the river at 48 knots and hold 400 passengers at a time, which could mean the equivalent of up to 400 cars off the area roads. At least one operator has told Principi he would be interested in operating his ferry — Entertainment Cruises, Inc.
A white paper on Principi’s website called the “Commuter Fast Ferry Service High-Level Project Screening Report,” states some advantages of the ferry include the potential development around the ports/stations, promoting tourism for points north and improving emergency preparedness aspects for the river.
In a report from 2009, the ferry was priced at $3.8 million compared to Virginia Railway Express at $48 million and OmniRide at $12 million.
And, for all that the ferry could be, there’s also a lot of things it’s not. For starters, it would spend most of its time operating not in Virginia but Maryland.
The Free State to north owns the river, and Virginia transportation funding agencies like the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority don’t make it a habit to fund out-of-state projects.
“Once it’s out in the water, NVTA can’t touch that project,” Canizales told Principi.
He also points out the ferry project isn’t even included in NVTA’s 2040 master plan, a document the state funding authority usees to prioritize which transportation project to fund.
Canizales, however, isn’t anti-ferry.
“I am impartial to the idea of a ferry, but feel that it is a high-cost item, with continual operations and maintenance (local subsidy) funds that the county currently does not have and will have to establish before a true project can be advanced,” he stated, responding to Potomac Local by email.
A ferry needs both capital and operational funding to build the infrastructure (docks and parking), buy boats, and have funds to pay for running the boats and ongoing maintenance. Occoquan has been identified as a possible place for a new dock for which a ferry would use.
Canizales says it is a possible answer to removing vehicles from the I-95 corridor but exactly how much of a relief needs to be determined.
The number of vehicles taken off the roads would depend on the size of the boats ultimately chosen to operate the ferry service and how many people they could transport, and the frequency and reliability of the service.
MANASSAS — In Manassas, officials are looking for more efficient ways to move more people through one of the city’s busiest intersections.
They’ve assigned a team of engineers to fix the intersection at Route 234 and Route 28 at the center of the city. It’s a place where a roundabout would possibly work.
When a car hit a traffic light in the summer of 2016, and a new light had to be put up. That’s when city transportation planners put the wheels in motion for the intersection.
“That was the opportunity to look at it,” said Bryan Foster, deputy city manager.
They hired a consultant and received a conceptual plan in early July, and there are some pros and cons to this remedy for this intersection. The total price tag of a roundabout is $3 million, but using the Virginia Department of Transportation’s revenue sharing funds would cut that in half. Add in an additional $900,000 from the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority, that would leave $600,000 for the city to fund.
City leaders are currently applying for additional funds from VDOT for the project.
According to Foster, the intersection at Routes 28 and 234 gets a D rating on the A-F scale, similar to the scholastic grading system. That is “rated by how much delay at that intersection,” Foster said.
According to the latest data, a roundabout would move its rating to an A.
“The data shows a roundabout would work at that intersection,” Foster said.
To council member Marc Aveni, the $3 million price tag didn’t sit well. “That’s too much… that’s taxpayers money,” he said.
To Aveni, the intersection at Liberia Avenue and Route 28 is more congested, and the city’s efforts should be dedicated to that interchange first.
“The roundabout may or may not be a bad project, but let’s focus on this first,” he said.
City council member Ian Lovejoy has similar thoughts that he shared on his Facebook page, questioning if it’s the “biggest bang for our buck or the biggest traffic issue facing residents,” he wrote.
A transportation study for the city is about to begin, according to Lovejoy, and the results will be a factor to him.
“I do not support this project unless it can be clearly demonstrated that this particular intersection is a top-tier traffic mitigation concern for the city,” he wrote.
Council member Mark Wolfe realizes the trouble with the intersection at Routes 234 and 28, but it’s part of a more significant problem in the whole corridor. He’s looking for more information on the roundabout and is also questioning the cost value. “That interchange is part of the chain,” he said. “I expect we’ll have something back in September,” he said.
Foster did mention that there were other intersections that needed attention, and officials are embarking on the city’s transportation master plan soon. That would give the other intersections standings on the grading system, and then figure out what would work at each. The intersection at Liberia and Route 28 is not a place where a roundabout would work, Foster said.
The city is minimizing the land acquisition connected with this proposed project, and according to Foster, the roundabout plan would trim “a little bit at each corner,” he said. The folks at Shannon Auto Sales, located close to the intersection, do remember hearing about it a while ago, while at Iron Horse Antiques, the current intersection “is fine the way it is.”
According to VDOT, “roundabouts are one of the safest types of intersection designs,” their website reads, and it will help reduce crashes, traffic delays, fuel consumption, air pollution and construction and maintenance costs.
LAKE RIDGE — A transportation hotspot in Prince William County getting some new attention is an area off Minnieville Road marked by Telegraph Road to the south, and Summit School Road to the north.
On the recently released six-year plan adopted by the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority, the authority allotted $11 million widen Telegraph and extend Summit School Road, enhancing this area as a commuter destination.
The nearby Horner Road commuter lot has 2,300 spaces, and on a typical weekday, the lot is overflowing with cars. The lot is edged by the busy Prince William Parkway and Interstate 95.
Another commuter lot is located on Telegraph Road where commuters pack slug lines to get to destinations in Arlington and Washington. The lines enable a single driver to pick up two or more people to ride in their vehicle and qualify for free travel on the I-95 Express Lanes in the mornings and afternoons.
Although the $11 million has been allocated to the Telegraph widening and Summit School extension projects, they are a ways from moving forward. There has been no timeline determined for the projects, according to Paolo J. Belita, a Regional Transportation Planner with the Prince William County Department of Transportation.
Summit School Road is a four-lane roadway that abruptly ends in a wooded area. The plans include extending it to Telegraph Road, providing another way to access the Horner Road lot. This project would widen Telegraph Road from Caton Hill Road to Prince William Parkway.
Both roads and commuter lots are in the Occoquan District, where Supervisor Ruth Anderson is well aware of the transportation needs. Her office is pursuing funding from a state-wide program called “Smart Scale,” in addition to the $11 million from NVTA.
Smart Scale is a program run by the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation (DRPT), the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) and the Office of Intermodal Planning and Investment. According to their website, “SMART SCALE is about investing limited tax dollars in the right projects that meet the most critical transportation needs in Virginia,” so they will have to compete with a wide variety of programs across the state.
As the area grows, the needs for this commuting hub grow. Belita did note that “recent studies have shown that this section of Telegraph Road currently experiences delay and queuing during peak hours,” he said in an email. “Analyses have shown that the proposed extension of Summit School Road and widening of Telegraph Road will improve overall corridor operations.”
County spokesperson Jason Grant did say they were working with the VDOT to determine the best way to approach these transportation improvements, and an analysis is currently underway. Officials expect to know more when the analysis is completed later in the summer.
