A number of Fairfax County officials and residents have reacted with dismay to Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s decision to run the Metro heavy rail extension through Tysons Corner on elevated tracks rather than underground.
Quotes Alec MacGillis with the Washington Post: “It’s sad. The last thing Tysons needs is another silly barrier, and that’s what it’s getting,” said Clark Tyler of McLean, chairman of a county task force drafting a new master plan for Tysons. “We’ve got the Beltway and Route 123 and Route 7, and now we’ll get this thing sticking up that you can see from Pittsburgh.”
Del. Thomas Rust, R-Fairfax, raised the possibility that Kaine might have gotten a different result if he’d delved into the tunnel issue earlier. “Some of us from months ago knew the federal funding issue was a huge unknown, and I am surprised [the governor’s office] did not get those answers much earlier. He may have gotten caught up in the moment. A lot of people were pushing it, and he may have just gotten caught up in it and thought, ‘We can work around this.’ “
That’s a dead end. Kaine has pursued the Rail-to-Dulles diligently. (I don’t agree with his decision to hand over the project to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, but his diligence cannot be faulted.) Arbitrary rules and restrictions are inherent when your financing scheme hinges upon support from the federal government.
Perhaps it is time to re-think the financing of the Rail-to-Dulles extension from scratch, this time paying for the project by increasing density around the planned Metro stops and extracting, through taxes, the resulting increase in property values. Cutting the federal government out of the picture also might eliminate various requirements — such as Davis-Bacon Act (no relation!) requiring the use of union construction labor — that drive up the project costs. Can any readers shed light on how federal regs might drive up the project costs?
Update: More negative reaction from Steve Eldridge with the Examiner.