The road was built by Middleburg zillionaire Maggie Bryant...
Hmmmmm... very interesting!!!
In Virginia former Democratic governor Douglas Wilder was key to securing the passage of legislation that allowed the first modern era private toll road (from Dulles Airport to Leesburg in Loudon County) to get under way. At the time of this writing, the Dulles Greenway toll road is about three-quarters built and is due to open on September 29, 1995. A $325 million project, it is 14 miles of four-lane divided freeway through largely undeveloped countryside on the western fringe of the Washington metropolitan area. It will end at a small beltway around the pretty, historic town of Leesburg (population 19,000).
The area is quite ritzy real estate, northern Virginia "hunt country," not far from the Blue Ridge Mountains. It is an attractively broken landscape of farms, many now boarding horses for riders from the Washington area, between small treed hills. Interestingly, environmentalists and local officials have supported the project as a central element of a growth strategy for the county, which provides for future development to be concentrated in the Dulles-Leesburg corridor on the theory that that strategy will take development pressure off the western part of the county, which the plan intends should be kept rural. The project was supported by the powerful Piedmont Environmental Council, the group that played a large role in running a planned Disney theme park out of northern Virginia in 1994. The developers spent several million dollars satisfying environmentalists' requests, building a specially long-spanned bridge over the Goose Creek reservoir to avoid piers in the water, developing a new wetlands larger than required by the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers, and committing themselves to a landscaping plan that will justify the name "Greenway."
Reagan administration transit chief Ralph Stanley was the project's first chief executive, and he is credited with lobbying successfully for enabling legislation in Richmond and successfully thwarting opposition from the Virginia Department of Transportation. But Stanley was unlucky with his timing. He was ready to go with the project just as the savings-and-loan crisis and a major real estate recession hit in 1991. Stanley and Goldman Sachs, his financial consultant, could not tie down financing, and there were two abortive attempts at closing in the summers of 1991 and 1992.
The major investor that Stanley had attracted to the Dulles tollway project was Magalen Bryant, a wealthy local woman whose money comes largely from the Dover Corporation, a tire and gas pump manufacturer. She saw millions of dollars of her money going for nothing, so she pushed Stanley out and put her son, Michael Crane, in as CEO of a new holding group, Toll Road Investors Partnership (TRIP) II. That partnership broke with Goldman Sachs and went to a local firm, C.C. Pace Resources, Inc., of Fairfax, Virginia, which has specialized in novel financing for cogeneration plants and gas pipelines.
Banks would not lend for longer than about 12 years, and the project needed much longer term debt. (Because the project has to create its own traffic, it will take some years to cover operating costs, let alone debt service.) The project got rated BBB--investment grade, but barely. After many disappointments, three insurance companies--CIGNA Investments, Inc., Prudential Power Funding Associates, and John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company--finally came to the closing party in September 1993 with $258 million in 32.5-year and 29-year fixed-rate loans. And a bank group consisting of Barclay's, Nation's, and Deutsche provided construction financing and a $40 million revolving credit facility, but only after the three equity partners--Shenandoah, Bryant's family company; Autostrade SpA, an Italian toll road company; and Brown & Root, road builders in Houston--added $40 million of "standby equity" to the similar- sized cash equity they had contributed up front. Bryant, one of the driving forces behind the project from the beginning, wound up putting several tens of millions of her family assets at risk. Though he says the family is keen to do other projects, Crane says there is no way they would ever do a private highway again on the Dulles road terms, because getting that road to construction was such a protracted and cripplingly expensive business. (The project was seven years in development, and preconstruction costs were $68 million.)
So Maggie Bryant is some kind of deluded, hypocritical blue-haired heiress who wants the rest of us to pay for her environmental good works and horse farms by paying higher tolls and gas pump prices. And her nitwit son wouldn't do it again because they actually had to RISK some of their own money???
Good grief... where do these aristoctratic parasites keep coming from???
LOL!!!
Willie, toll roads are voluntary. You don’t want to ride, you don’t pay.
Your solutions are all mandatory - makes no difference whether you ride or not, you pay.
A very clear difference. And it’s obvious which most of us would pick.
Sometimes the good things in live simply cost more.
Good grief... where do these aristoctratic parasites keep coming from???
They used to come from the ranks of communists. Now they come dressed in Libertarian clothing. According to the Libertarian religion, this unelected blue haired dictator wannbe can do anything she wants to anybody as long as she is rich enough to do it within her own empire.