U.S.
Senators John Warner and James Webb, U.S. Reps.
Frank Wolf, Tom Davis and Jim Moran, and Gov.
Timothy M. Kaine were ambushed last week by U.S.
Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters and
Federal Transit Administrator James Simpson. There
is no other way to describe what happened at a
January 24th meeting on Capitol Hill.
Billed
as an opportunity to clarify outstanding problems
while continuing to move toward a final
engineering decision on the Rail to Dulles
Project, the Peters-Simpson meeting turned into
the largest federal assault on Virginia rail since
Union Gen. Benjamin Butler ripped into the
Richmond & Petersburg line in 1864.
Secretary
Peters and Administrator Simpson, who arrived from
New York to take the FTA job 17 months ago, not
only were critical of project specifics in the
application for $900 million in federal grants to
fund a 20 percent share of the project to extend
Metrorail through Tysons Corner, Dulles Airport
and into Loudoun County, they talked trash about
the abilities of the Metropolitan Washington
Airports Authority (MWAA) to manage the project,
the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit
Administration (WMATA) to operate it and the
revenues dedicated from the Dulles Toll Road and a
special taxing district in Tysons Corner to
finance it. Their comments suggest a “Fed X-out”
of the project soon.
Virginia
officials, who entered the meeting confident that
they were nearing the end of an approval process
that began in earnest more than 15 years ago,
instead were shocked to be read the riot act as
the FTA doubled back on its positive decisions of
recent years -- approving the preliminary
engineering (2004), recommending Dulles Rail to
Congress (2005), approving the final alignment
(2006), finding MWAA capable of project
supervision and construction management and
agreeing with budget reductions to keep the
project within cost-benefit guidelines (2007). One
participant later disgustedly told colleagues, “They’ve
negotiated in bad faith, they played us.”
Perhaps
Virginia officials shouldn’t have been shocked.
A standing joke in Washington is that the key to
success is sincerity -- and if you can fake that,
you’ve got it made. So the federal trash talking
about regional transportation bodies and local and
state financing, not just Dulles Rail alignment
and construction details, reveals that FTA may be
its own biggest problem.
FTA
appears to be unable to see a world other than one
that meets its backward-looking evaluation
criteria originally drawn up for mature urban
areas. It has had trouble adjusting from an 80
percent grant maker to transit projects it
controlled to a new role as a minority investor.
Consulting firm Deloitte provided all the
descriptive phrases a critic could want in a 2007
final report to the FTA on what’s wrong with the
New Starts Program.
Deloitte
reported that that FTA faces key issues of “transparency
and consistency.” The FTA New Starts project
development process was described as “lengthy
and burdensome.” Enforcement of policies across
the program, Deloitte reported, is “inconsistent.”
Roles, responsibilities, authority and
accountability at FTA “are not clearly defined”
and use of technology is “ineffective” and “inadequate.”
The
Deloitte report, which is available on the FTA web
site, illustrated its findings with quotes from
key stake holders.
“We
are guilty of moving the goal posts, but not just
in overall policy changes; it’s day-to-day
decisions on individual projects.”
“The
project rating process seems to be done in total
secrecy.”
“We
do not manage risk. We try to eliminate it. We are
completely risk adverse.”
Deloitte
recommended greater consistency and clarity in FTA
guidance, increased focus on improved
communications and greater use of technology
enablers. Advances in each of these areas almost
certainly would have avoided the FTA
misinformation, meltdown and abrupt U-turn on
Dulles Rail decisions this month. Regrettably, FTA
has avoided for a year any substantive responses
on the key issues of reducing delays due to
federal reviews, improving communications and
accommodating unique project needs, all critical
requirements for the Dulles Rail project.
And
it would help if the FTA had its facts straight.
The FTA argued that MWAA could not be trusted to
oversee such large and complex projects, for
example, apparently oblivious that Dulles Airport
served over 25 million passengers in 2007 and that
MWAA will invest nearly $7 billion over 15 years
in Dulles infrastructure and facilities to prepare
for 35 million passenger in 2016. That includes
concourse expansions, new runways, new parking
garages, new highway interchanges and five miles
of an underground Aerotrain subway system to
replace the mobile lounge units now in place.
Since 1964 the Federal Aviation Administration's
master plan for Dulles International Airport has
recommended a transit line along the airport
access road.
Northern
Virginia commuters have been paying tolls since
2005 to get congestion relief and an alternative
in Dulles Rail and Tysons landowners, who banded
together in a special taxing district, have been
paying higher commercial property taxes since 2004
to support the project. These local and regional
revenue sources fund 80 percent of the project
costs.
it
also might help if the FTA stepped back to
consider the Deloitte recommendations on its own
New Starts program before finalizing a decision
against Dulles Rail that will hamstring the future
mobility of the Greater Washington region and two
of its critical economic and business centers,
Dulles International Airport and Tysons Corner.
That
means stop moving the goal posts, start looking
ahead at opportunities in rapidly urbanizing areas
and start delivering what Virginians, like all
Americans, expect -- a process that reduces the
time and cost of delivering transit projects, that
helps allocate risks and responsibilities, that
contributes predictability and transparency to the
process and that accommodates innovative project
delivery methods, such as the partnerships and
financing mechanisms proposed by Virginia for
Dulles Rail. Vision and competence qualify as
sincere responses.
--
January 28, 2008
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