The $4.5 billion Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project, Virginia’s largest-ever public works project, is a mass transit management disaster unfolding before our eyes. It’s a case study in high-level political influence being employed to raise real estate values. It’s never been competitively bid. One of the private contractors picked to build it has a long history of cost overruns and shoddy work. The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA), which recently took over the project, is unaccountable to the public and arrogantly refuses to answer Freedom of Information requests.
As if all this were not bad enough, Examiner reporter William Flook recently discovered another conflict of interest in a project replete with them. MWAA paid Carter & Burgess, a supposedly independent Texas consulting firm, $200,000 to review a tunnel study done by three engineering firms for TysonsTunnel.org. The study claimed digging under Tysons Corner is both feasible and cost-effective. C&B dismissed the TysonsTunnel.org study, saying it left out critical information.
Turns out MWAA left out a critical bit of information, too. Even as it slammed the TysonsTunnel.org study, Carter & Burgess was courting MWAA for a big management consulting contract on the Dulles Corridor project. That means the Texas firm was hardly the objective outsider the public was led to believe it was. Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise, however, since MWAA is also considering allowing Dulles Transit Partners (DTP) — a consortium that includes the Bechtel Corp., late of Boston “Big Dig” infamy — to negotiate costs along the way instead of submitting a fixed price upfront. That’s like trusting an active alcoholic to keep his own bar tab.
Without competitive bidding, there’s no way to compare the cost of tunneling with running tracks on concrete pillars overhead. The TysonsTunnel.org study is the closest the Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project has ever come to competitive bidding. Dulles Transit Partners did all the preliminary engineering and has been in the loop from Day 1; if it can’t come up with a firm cost, nobody can. Yet state transportation officials ignored several deadlines and have not made public a final price tag for Phase I. The only plausible reason for the repeated delays is that DTP’s numbers are grossly inflated and make the high cost of tunneling look reasonable.
MWAA obliquely confirmed this possibility by reportedly telling DTP two weeks ago that, if it didn’t bring down cost estimates by April 5, negotiations with the state would end, effectively dooming a project that must meet federal cost-effectiveness standards to qualify for $900 million in federal funds. That would force state and local officials to start over from scratch. Considering all the questionable twists and turns that have marked the project to date, starting over might not be such a bad idea.
