How’s this for a Catch-22?
Starting tomorrow, the cost of the proposed Metrorail extension to Dulles International Airport, now estimated at $2.7 billion, will increase by some $3 million to $6 million a month. The cost escalation is built into the contract between the state of Virginia, the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority and the Bechtel-lead construction team.
But work can’t begin until the U.S. Department of Transportation finishes reviewing the project to determine if it qualified for $900 million in federal support. As part of that review, the feds are conducting a cost-benefit analysis. The Office of Inspector General has already warned that escalating costs threaten to undermine the economic viability of the project, which could result in the feds dropping out of the project.
How much longer will the federal review take, adding $3-6 million for each month that goes by? Writes Bill Turque with the Washington Post:
The timetable for approval of final design is unclear. The Federal Transit Administration said it needs at least an additional two weeks to complete its “risk assessment,” meaning its estimate of the project’s overall cost and completion time. If those numbers exceed Dulles Transit Partner’s, then the consortium, the state and the airports authority will have to revisit the project plans to prune costs. How long that would take is not clear. The project would then go back to the Federal Transit Administration for additional review.
This is just one more argument in favor of getting the federal government out of the business of funding state and local transportation projects. Let all projects — highways, heavy rail, mass transit buses, what have you — live or die on their own merits as determined by the people who benefit from them and pay for them directly.