In an era where the ties between government and business draw sharp scrutiny and the term “no bid” carries with it severe implications, one of Virginia’s most massive transit ventures has become bogged in contention.
The dispute stems from deep disagreements over the competitiveness of the planned 23-mile Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project, all rooted in more than a decade’s worth of complex bureaucratic and legal wrangling.
The controversy is linked to the Public-Private Transportation Act, signed into law in 1995. The act, which is the vehicle for the Metrorail expansion, provides a means for the state to negotiate directly with a firm to design and build projects. It also allows the state to operate — to a certain extent — outside the boundaries of typical procurement regulations.
Critics deride the PPTA as a convoluted document that has allowed Virginia officials to evade real competition for the $4 billion-plus project. Proponents say the law has ensured the same safeguards written into the Virginia Public Procurement Act, which sets up the standard sealed bidding process.
Virginia Transportation Secretary Pierce Homer said the PPTA’s “design-build” process used in rail-to-Dulles is “intended to have a single point of accountability and to get a firm fixed price in order to avoid cost overruns.” As a negotiating tool, the state uses a closely guarded independent cost estimate for the project.
“If it is aproject where you are concerned about cost overruns, or have a very tight deadline, or there is a lot of complexity in terms of technology, you are better using a ‘design-build’ process” over sealed bidding, Homer said.
But still the rail extension has invited charges of “no bid” and “sole-source,” two epithets often hurled at the federal government’s sans-competition contracts in Iraq and most recently in the post-Hurricane Katrina recovery. In September, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution urging the governor to seek new proposals on what they essentially called a no-bid contract. An alliance of local business groups called Tysonstunnel.org has issued similar complaints.
In question is the state’s agreement with Dulles Transit Partners, a partnership between Bechtel Infrastructure and Washington Group International. The group already has completed preliminary engineering for the first half of the rail. If ongoing negotiations don’t fall through, state officials say the firms will be awarded a contract to construct that first phase, which will split a new track from past the East Falls Church station and run to Wiehle Avenue.
At its scheduled completion in 2015, the rail will end at Route 772.
Dulles Transit Partners have not yet delivered a price tag. In a typical bidding process, competing groups would offer the bill initially.
“The Public Private Transportation Act allows for competitive proposals on the front end, but for most of us, competition is price competition,” said Fairfax County Supervisor Dana Kauffman, who also sits on Metro’s board of directors. “The has been no price competition for this project, which will be the largest project the Northern Virginia region is likely to see for decades.”
The entire proposal began much more modestly, as a bus route in the Dulles Corridor. In December 1998, after years of study by the commonwealth on mass transit inthe corridor, Raytheon Engineers delivered an unsolicited proposal to create bus rapid transit and design a rail extension.
Soon after, the state published a request for other proposals in five Virginia newspapers, but only one — the Washington Post — with a national scope, according to state records.
A single competing proposal came back, by a partnership that included Bechtel. In 2000, Raytheon Engineers was sold and renamed Washington Group International, and the two proposals were later folded into each other to create Dulles Transit Partners.
