Because Virginia keeps rural road funding locked up in a safe, it is crucial to think outside that box to most effectively use the small appropriations we do receive.

Buckingham County Board of Supervisors member, Cassandra Stish, has done that to great effect.

If the state listens.

Let's support her idea, on one front, without giving up the crusade to increase rural road funding.

During Buckingham's March Board of Supervisors meeting, Stish suggested developing a new rural rustic road improvement program that allows for a variety of projects rather than simply one.

Address multiple roads and road locations that present the most risk to motorists, she suggested during a discussion spotlighting the school bus accident on Route 698, rather than one longer stretch of a single road.

Working with transportation directors for rural school systems would help target and prioritize the 10 or 12 most pressing needs. Stish proposes a thoughtful idea that could produce profoundly effective results.

If the state listens.

So far, so good.

“I think that's a great idea,” responded Kevin Wright, VDOT's Resident Administrator.

His response is a start, and an important one because it can help send the idea further up VDOT's chain of command. Wright added that he is frequently in contact with Ronnie Palmore, transportation director for Buckingham's school system. Wright noted that two groups of people know more about roads than anyone else-school bus drivers and mail carriers.

Absolutely true.

“We actually rely on both of them and get calls frequently from them,” Wright added, before pledging, “We'll work with Mr. Palmore and we can take that list and see what we can do with our maintenance funds, like you said, on those critical spots.”

This proposal could revolutionize the administration of the rural rustic road program and the use of rural road maintenance funds. Of the 42 buses that take Buckingham children to and from county schools, there is only one, just a single bus, that doesn't travel down at least a portion of unpaved road twice a day. The needs, like the potential risks of traveling those roads, are great and Stish's idea would allow many more of those risks to be diminished, rather than simply one.

The hope and belief here is that citizens in rural localities across Virginia would support such a use of rural road funding because it would focus safety-targeting fixes on perhaps a dozen risky locations rather than fixing one single road in its entirety.

Mind you, rural Virginia would still need to maintain the pressure on state highway officials, the General Assembly, and the Governor to increase rural road funds so that more roads in their entirety could be made safe. But the plan offered by Stish makes so much sense on so many levels as Plan B while we pursue a better-funded Plan A.

VDOT's Wright correctly described Stish's proposal as “out-of-the-box-thinking” and promised to “get into the bureaucracy” and do everything he can “to make it happen.”

Buckingham County can be an effective catalyst for mobilizing rural legislators, the Virginia Association of Counties, and other rural advocacy and service agencies and organizations to create a huge grassroots PAC effect to win through creation of a statewide program based on the proposal.

As fellow Board of Supervisors member Bill Talbert noted, agreeing with Stish's idea, “the Six-Year Plan is not working. Do away with it.”

The Six-Year Plan is so ineffective it's not really a six-year plan. It's a sixteen or 60-year plan, a Bermuda Triangle where road projects are added to the list after waiting for years, only to seemingly disappear off the face of the earth.

You have a better chance of meeting Big Foot on your rural road than you do a state-paid paving crew.

Stish said she plans to “spearhead this personally” and all of us need to make sure that she is never, ever alone in this fight.

Every rural locality has far too much at stake and at risk not to stand together. We should not have to do this but the money-changers in Richmond leave us no choice. We can take what happened to that school bus on Route 698 lying down, or we can become an irresistible force of change for the benefit of rural communities at every point of Virginia's compass.

Right. There is no choice.

Irresistible force, it is.

There were no serious injuries when the rear wheels of the school bus started sliding on the slick, mud-covered, gravel road, running off the right side of Rt. 698, striking an embankment and two trees before overturning.

That is a miracle we embrace with thanks.

But it is best to pray for the safety of our children, for all who travel these roads, while working indefatigably to assist the needed answer to those prayers.

-JKW-