Perhaps it’s a sign of Congressman Cline’s eagerness to prove he’s doing something for the people of the Sixth District that he’s bragging about obtaining $17 million in federal funds to expand a portion Interstate 81 that runs through the district.
For some purposes, $17 million is a lot of money. Not for highway expansion.
In 2018 the Virginia Department of Transportation estimated the cost of adding an additional lane to I-81 would be between $10 million and $15 million per mile.
So the $17 million that Cline is so proud of obtaining will provide for less than two miles of an additional lane for I-81– a highway that stretches 650 miles in both directions in Virginia alone.
In the comments to one of Cline’s Facebook posts, Abby Schweber wrote:
The I-81 expansion is a massive, multi-year effort composed of 65 separate capital projects and numerous operational improvements throughout the interstate’s 325-mile corridor in Virginia, costing hundreds of millions of dollars. The work started in 2023, when substantial funding was granted by Biden’s Infrastructure Act, which Ben Cline voted against. A lot of the work is already done.
Ben Cline’s tiny little $17 million add-on is his bid to claim credit for work done by others. We are not fooled.
To Cline’s credit, in 2024 he inserted a $42 million earmark in a government funding bill for improvements in the I-81 corridor. The catch: he then voted against the full package.
As Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi noted at the time, Cline was one of dozens of Republicans who chose to “vote no and take the dough.”
Cline Watch 