What happened:
The three Republican board members and Dorrier managed to put the Bypass back on the table with a rushed series of votes shortly before midnight on June 8, 2011.
- The Board voted to throw out an existing rule preventing last-minute additions to the agenda.
- They re-introduced a resolution on how to instruct their representatives on the MPO board to vote when it came to funding the Western Bypass.
- They voted to instruct their MPO representatives to support funding the Bypass.
And like that, one of Virginia’s oldest and most contentious transportation projects, planned for by VDOT for 30 years but dormant for a decade, was yanked back to life in an astonishing act of political jiu jitsu.
Rooker and Mallek protested, stunned at the defection of their former fellow anti-Bypass Board member.
“I can’t believe I’m sitting on a board that will simply change the rules at the drop of the hat to satisfy—I don’t know what it is to satisfy,” Rooker sputtered.
Throughout, one voice remained measured and cool: the one belonging to the veteran supervisor who, more than anyone else on the dais, had set himself up as a champion of the roadway.
“There’s been a motion and a second, Mr. Rooker,” Ken Boyd said. “You can continue to argue or make a point, but it’s an important enough issue that it needs to be dealt with.”
And like that, one of Virginia’s oldest and most contentious transportation projects, planned for by VDOT for 30 years but dormant for a decade, was yanked back to life in an astonishing act of political jiu jitsu.
Werner, since 1999 a key staffer at PEC, which had previously sued to block the project, watched the whole thing. He had to laugh. He’d been saying a prayer every Sunday for God to send him a local issue to fight on besides the bitterly contested Ragged Mountain Dam.
“Immediately after that meeting, people were like, ‘Hey, you got your wish,’” he said. The joking didn’t last long.
“The next morning, it was clear the decks.”
Late on the night of Wednesday, June 8, 2011, a few prominent Albemarle County real estate developers and other vocal supporters of the long-stalled plan to build a Route 29 bypass around Charlottesville strolled into Lane Auditorium at the tail end of a marathon meeting of the Board of Supervisors.
Jeff Werner, land-use field officer for the Piedmont Environmental Council, had been in the audience all night, following a five-hour debate over sustainability planning and how to fund it. The new arrivals struck him as odd. It was after 11 p.m. “I thought, ‘Gee, what are they doing here?’” he said.
During a break a few minutes later, Jack Jouett District Representative Dennis Rooker walked to the back of the auditorium. “He came up to his wife and said, ‘Something’s going to happen,’” Werner remembered.
It didn’t take long to find out what. Board Chair Anne Mallek called for any last-minute matters from her colleagues as the meeting was breaking up. Over the bustle of the tired crowd shuffling out of the room, Lindsay Dorrier uttered a few barely audible words.
“I have another matter I wanted to bring up,” he said. “I wanted to bring up the Bypass issue and move to change my vote.”
Over the next 18 minutes, Republicans Duane Snow, Rodney Thomas, and Ken Boyd hustled Dorrier through a series of motions, seconds, and 4-2 majority votes, first disposing of a newly imposed Board rule blocking last-minute additions to the agenda, then re-introducing a measure that had ended in a 3-3 tie the week before, and finally calling for a re-vote: The Board would, in fact, instruct Snow and Thomas—its representatives on the Metropolitan Planning Organization board—to scrap language in the MPO’s Transportation Improvement Plan blocking the allocation of state funds for the construction of a Western Bypass around Charlottesville.