Months of angry debate between Northern Virginia officials and the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority are slated to end this week as leaders decide on the fate and the cost of Metrorail to Washington Dulles International Airport and into Loudoun County. Observers who have long fought for rail to Dulles are optimistic that the project will move forward at a cost of about $2.8 billion, to be paid largely by Fairfax and Loudoun County taxpayers, and drivers along the Dulles Toll Road. That price tag is down nearly $1 billion from previous estimates, and includes an aboveground instead of an underground station at the airport.
But the lower-cost outcome relies on agreement among the two counties and the airports authority about a funding proposal that requires significant sacrifices from all three. Acceptance of that proposal, put forth earlier this month by U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, is far from guaranteed.
The LaHood plan would require the airports authority to reverse its decision to build an underground Metro station at Dulles and move ahead instead with a less expensive, and less traveler-friendly, aboveground station. It would require Loudoun and Fairfax to assume millions of dollars in costs they hadn’t originally anticipated.
The Loudoun County Board of Supervisors is voting Tuesday whether to move forward with the proposal. In Fairfax, a board meeting earlier this month revealed “enough support … to move forward using the proposal as the basis for negotiations,” said a spokesman for Chairwoman Sharon Bulova.
The airports authority board will vote on the proposal Wednesday morning. On Wednesday afternoon, the stakeholders will report back to LaHood with their decisions, and proponents of getting the project done at all will either sigh with relief or bury their heads in their hands.
“My guess is that [the airports authority] will ask [Chairman Charles Snelling] to go back to Secretary LaHood and accept his proposal, but to try at the same time to get some agreement that they’d be eligible for [low-interest federal loans] if not this year, then next year,” said Leo Schefer, president of the Washington Airports Task Force.
“But until everybody has signed off on the proposal, the decision clearly cannot be taken for granted,” he said.
