The Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) has named the Town of Christiansburg its Locality of the Year.
This award recognizes the town’s engineering department for hard work, excellence in project management, and commitment to delivering transportation projects for Christiansburg residents. This marks the second year the town has received this award.
In 2018, the Salem District’s Locally Administered Projects Team created the award to encourage local governments who administer transportation projects to improve delivery of VDOT-funded projects. Successful delivery of locality-administered projects is critical because these projects comprise more than 50 percent of the statewide Six-Year Improvement Program, which is determined by SMART (System for the Management and Allocation of Resources for Transportation) Scale results.
SMART Scale is a method of scoring planned projects submitted by localities to the state that is based on an objective-outcome process. It scores localities’ proposed projects based on need in that specific area so that taxpayer money can be more fairly distributed across the state. If a SMART Scale project has been awarded to a locality, the chosen project is funded by VDOT and given to the locality to administer.
The Locality of the Year Award is scored on three factors: participation in quarterly conference calls, training opportunities, and local and statewide workshops; proficiency with project applications, agreements, plan submittals, and documentation; and performance related to the number of projects completed and project stages completed on schedule, a metric which is tracked in VDOT’s Dashboard 4.0 system, which monitors localities’ project progress.
Additional focus in these three areas not only improves a locality’s chance of winning but also improves its performance in managing the development and delivery of transportation projects.
Delivering locally-administered projects successfully gives localities’ credibility with taxpayers, legislators, and contractors. These performance metrics help ensure that projects will be completed efficiently.
During the award presentation, VDOT leadership thanked Christiansburg’s engineering department for continued efforts to serve the community with timely, efficient, and consistent planning and project implementation.
