GWRC Is a Quiet Giant
Many know the acronym, few know the extent to which the George Washington Regional Commission affects their daily lives.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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Some organizations — be they for-profit, nonprofit, or governmental — play quiet roles in society. One such organization is the George Washington Regional Commission.
Locals in the city and surrounding counties have probably encountered its acronym, GWRC, but they likely know precious little about its function and funding.
That’s unfortunate, for GWRC is one of those organizations that daily touches our lives. So why don’t people know more about it? Simply put, GWRC exists to facilitate cooperation among the localities and counties that make up the organization.
It’s one of 21 “planning districts” in the commonwealth; GWRC is PD 16 and includes Caroline, Fredericksburg, King George, Spotsylvania, and Stafford.
Each PD shares the same cooperative mission. According to SECTION 15.2-4207 of the State Code of Virginia, PDs exist “to encourage and facilitate local government cooperation and state-local cooperation in addressing on a regional basis problems of greater than local significance.”
“Every PDC meets the needs of its local governments,” GWRC Executive Director Chip Boyles told the Advance. Consequently, each operates in very different ways. “Charlottesville has cigarette taxing authority for the region – they’re administering the tax, and they get a cut of that money, which they use to hire staff,” Boyles said. “Lynchburg has its own landfill – they administer and run the regional landfill authority.”
GWRC does not function this way. Its funding is almost exclusively from government sources: “Seven percent of our budget is local money,” Boyles said. “Everything else comes from the state and federal government. Our 7% is used almost exclusively to match the state and federal grants.”
For this reason, Boyles said, it critical that GWRC “spend our time on the issues [local jurisdictions] want us to spend time on.”
For GWRC, a big part of that work is transportation. Urban and Rural.
GWRC, FAMPO, and Traffic
Urban transportation makes up the biggest piece of GWRC’s transportation pie. While GWRC does not directly manage federal transportation dollars, it provides the administrative and financial management of the organization that does: Fredericksburg Area Metropolitan Planning Organization, or FAMPO.
“FAMPO is a federally mandated entity,” said Boyles, but it’s not a legal entity. Rather, “it’s a required group of people to spend federal money.” GWRC administers FAMPO, but FAMPO’s Board directs that organization.
Any transportation involves an inordinately large number of decision steps, and “GWRC works hand-in-hand with FAMPO to do that,” Boyles said.
Part of GWRC’s role in this process is to make sure that all localities are engaged. “If we’re looking at an exit improvement in Spotsylvania,” Boyles said, “we’re looking to make sure it doesn’t conflict with transportation needs for Stafford or other nearby areas down the road.”
Rural transportation, by contrast, is directly under GWRC. So transportation projects like the Dahlgren Bicycle and Pedestrian Safety Plan, and the Transportation Element of the Caroline County Comprehensive Plan are GWRC’s responsibility.
GWRC is also heavily involved in SMART SCALE, which is “a process that helps Virginia meet its most critical transportation needs using limited tax dollars,” according to the SMART SCALE website.
Any project submitted for SMART SCALE must be on the GWRC or FAMPO long-range plan in order to be funded.
“We can’t make people do things,” Boyles said, “but sometimes we can keep them from furthering lower priority projects by not putting the projects in the long-range plan.”
A transportation element of GWRC that people are more likely to be familiar with is GWRideConnect, which works to take cars off the road by helping coordinate van pools, car pools, and helping commuters understand the variety of ways available to get to and from work in the D.C. area.
Given GWRC’s focus on transportation, it is no surprise that more than half of its staff is dedicated to some form of transportation work.
Let’s Go
Economic Development is another major part of the work that GWRC is engaged in. This work is principally done through governing GO Virginia Region 6. The GO regions are made up of PDs. Go Virginia Region 6 includes PDs 16, 17, and 18.
“The Virginia Initiative for Growth and Opportunity, known as GO Virginia, is a statewide initiative to create more higher-paying jobs in Virginia through business-led regional collaboration,” according to information on the GWRC website.
Run entirely with state funds, GO Virginia Region 6 has funded more than 30 projects.
Big-dollar projects dedicated to creating high-paying jobs are not the only area GWRC is engaged in, however. It also is involved in helping to develop solutions to homelessness and affordable housing.
The Continuum of Care is a federally mandated local planning body that coordinates housing and services for homeless families and individuals, but it’s staffed and led by GWRC.
Among the tasks COC is engaged in are the annual Point-in-Time count of the homeless in our communities. The information gathered each year is used to not only count the homeless community in our region, but is also shared with HUD at the federal level to capture the situation nationwide.
Finally, over the past two years, GWRC has gotten increasingly involved in the issue of affordable housing. The highlight of this work has been the annual housing summits that bring together stakeholders across the region to begin to explore innovative solutions to providing housing that will meet the growing demands in the area.
Concerns Ahead
All this work dovetails with GWRC’s quiet mission to facilitate and coordinate the work among localities.
“We make sure our localities are aware of what the other local governments within our PDC are doing,” Boyles said.
Like every agency dependent on federal funds, however, GWRC is waiting to see what will become of its work and mission in the near future, as the Department of Government Efficiency is rapidly stripping agencies of employees and funding.
“Our biggest worry is next fiscal year,” Boyles said. For good or bad, we’ll know what’s happening with the grant cuts” probably by July.
For now, he continued, “We aren’t worrying about it until we know what’s happening. … We can’t get anything from any of the funding agencies, … [so we’re] playing it by ear and moving forward.”
If federal cuts significantly affect GWRC, however, it will also deeply affect the ability of local governments to connect. And, Boyles says, it will affect GWRC’s “regional partners, like Regional United Way, for example.”
As GWRC has learned all too well in its work, everything is tied together. “Income affects health,” said Boyles, “and health affects housing, and so on. If funding for GWRC goes away, that then the organization that helps facilitate all those connections will be lost.
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