Barbara Hollingsworth: More than a year late and $15 billion short
By: Barbara Hollingsworth
Local Opinion Editor
November 3, 2009
Now he tells us.
Walter Alcorn, vice chairman of Fairfax County's Planning Commission, finally conceded last week that turning suburban car-centric Tysons Corner into the Virginia version of downtown Manhattan is going to take some serious cash -- at least $15 billion for roads, sidewalks, overpasses and feeder buses necessary to make Phase 1 of the Dulles Rail project a success.
That's in addition to the $18 billion collected from drivers on the Dulles Toll Road for construction and interest for Phase 2 over the next 40 years, according to the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority's August 2009 bond prospectus, and $4 billion ($100 million annually) in operating subsidies.
We're already up to $37 billion, and "Big Dig" Bechtel hasn't even had a chance to tack on its customary cost overruns, so let's round it up to an even $40 billion for a project that taxpayers were told in 2002 was supposed to cost no more than $4.1 billion ($1.5 billion for Phase 1 and $2.4 billion for Phase 2).
The price tag for Dulles Rail is now ten times what it was just seven years ago. No amount of inflation or increase in material and labor costs can possibly account for this tenfold disparity. The only explanation is that state and county officials deliberately concealed the true costs of this gigantic boondoggle, and the Federal Transit Administration let them get away with it.
Who's going to pay this stupendous sum? If you live in Fairfax County or take the toll road to work, you are.
It won't be the handful of wealthy Tysons Corner landowners who will reap up to $10 billion in increased land value for their contribution, capped at a paltry $400 million. It won't be former Board of Supervisors Chairman Gerry Connolly, who has already been rewarded for selling out his constituents with a coveted seat in Congress.
Fairfax County taxpayers were never told the gory details about Dulles Rail's true financing and operating costs, or the fact that middle-class toll road users would wind up paying more to build the 23-mile rail project than Tysons billionaires.
For years, residents in adjacent neighborhoods begged the hand-picked members of the Tysons Task Force to do a traffic study before signing off on the project. Task Force Chairman Clark Tyler, a consultant for Science Applications International, refused. After all, Connolly got SAIC its own Metro stop when he worked there, and Tyler wasn't about to bite the hand that feeds him, either.
There wasn't even a public hearing when Democratic Gov. Tim Kaine unilaterally decided to hand over the revenue-producing Dulles Toll Road to unelected MWAA board members. Then, after literally giving away a ready source of highway funds, Kaine's transportation secretary had the chutzpah to tell Northern Virginians that there was nothing left in the till for them.
Alcorn's latest admission is not the only unpleasant surprise. Project spokeswoman Marcia McAllister recently told a Loudoun reporter that several eastbound left-hand turns on Route 7 would be eliminated in addition to three proposed interchanges on Route 123. "The more cars we'll take off the roads in Tysons, the better," McAllister said. To make way for the rail line, they're tearing up existing infrastructure that's already paid for.
Last year, before hundreds of foreclosures, plunging home values and half-vacant office buildings signaled an increasingly uncertain economic future in Fairfax County, Dulles Rail may have seemed like a good idea to uninformed county residents. Now this unaffordable extravagance has become a financial millstone around their necks.
Barbara F. Hollingsworth is The Examiner's local opinion editor.
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