By Stephen C. Fehr
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 14, 1998; Page A10

RICHMOND, Oct. 13—Virginia's Department of Transportation has increased its use of private consultants by 700 percent since 1987 but has not adequately checked their work or determined whether the state could design roads itself for less money, a legislative report released today says.

Lawmakers receiving the report by the General Assembly's auditing arm also grilled VDOT officials about the wisdom of allowing more than 1,000 employees, many of them senior managers, to leave the agency in 1995 during a state buyout program.

VDOT now faces severe personnel shortages in some areas that have led to the expanded use of consultants, who design and locate roads, inspect bridges, prepare environmental impact studies and develop traffic management systems. The shortages have raised questions among local officials about whether VDOT will be able to handle an unprecedented federal building program over the next six years that will include construction of a new Springfield interchange and a replacement for the Woodrow Wilson Bridge.

The report said that VDOT managers who supervise consultants' work have too many projects assigned to them, resulting in design errors and project delays. The auditors also found that VDOT sometimes ordered consultants to start work on projects before a contract was approved.

"VDOT's current level of consultant use may not be appropriate and needs to be addressed," said the report by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission.

The value of VDOT consultant contracts increased from about $100 million in 1987 – the first year of a $12 billion statewide transportation program approved by the General Assembly – to $841 million as of August this year, the report said.

In part, the increased reliance on consultants is the result of additional funds Virginia has received from the state program and federal transportation legislation during the 1990s. But consultants also have been hired more often in the last five years because of VDOT job cuts, including then-Gov. George Allen's buyout program aimed at trimming what he called a bloated state bureaucracy.

VDOT now is having difficulty filling many of its 500 existing vacancies, and the department will have to add an undetermined number of workers in the next few years to handle the new federal building program, under which Congress will send the state $671 million a year – 62 percent more than it gives now.

Besides scrambling for workers, the report said, VDOT also could have to deal with the retirements of about 30 percent of its most experienced engineers over the next five years. The personnel shortage led some lawmakers today to question whether VDOT's buyout program went too far.

"Did VDOT let too many people go?" Sen. Richard J. Holland (D-Isle of Wight), the legislative panel's chairman, asked VDOT chief David R. Gehr. "I believe you let everyone go who requested it."

Gehr replied, "The morale in this agency, if I had turned some down and let others go, would have been abysmal."

Holland noted that other state agencies faced the same problem and granted early retirements to some employees but not to others.

At the time VDOT allowed the employees to leave, Gehr said, the state did not know it would be getting such a huge increase in federal aid. Had it known then, he said, VDOT probably wouldn't have approved so many buyouts, which gave as much as a year's salary to those who retired early.

Many of the employees who left VDOT found work in private firms and are now employed as consultants at higher salaries – and collecting state pensions. This "double-dipping" practice troubled another panel member, Del. Vincent F. Callahan Jr. (R-Fairfax).

Callahan said the "drastic" personnel cuts under Allen, which initially saved the state $53 million, "apparently haven't saved the state any money and may have created additional problems."

The lack of savings was documented by auditors in two project areas. They said the state paid consultants nearly $11 million over three years to inspect many of Virginia's 19,000 bridges, when the same inspections could have been done by state workers for $6.3 million. The state lost 14 of 77 inspectors after buyouts began.

Gehr said VDOT has been shuffling workers to try to beef up its bridge inspection division.

The report also said VDOT is spending more money on consultants to design its secondary roads than it would if its own engineers did the work. No analysis similar to the bridge inspections was conducted by auditors to prove this point, but several VDOT engineers told them that it is more expensive to pay consultants for secondary road design because those usually are small, easy-to-design projects.

One VDOT supervisor told auditors he estimated that in-house secondary road design cost about half as much as the same work by private consultants.

The report also said VDOT does not track consultants' work effectively. Errors and missed deadlines are not noted so that the state can tell whether consultants are fulfilling their contracts.

Auditors cited cases in which consultants began work before contracts were approved, including a Hampton Roads project that was completed before a contract was signed. "This [is] a poor business practice which should be stopped immediately," the report said. VDOT's Gehr concurred.

Consultants and state engineers agreed that VDOT project managers overseeing consultants' work generally are able to complete jobs but can't check the quality of the work to prevent errors or delays.