The Dulles rail project does not suffer from “no transparency and accountability,” does not face serious federal funding risks and will not thrust cost overruns onto Fairfax County and toll road users, according to the head of Virginia’s rail agency.
A May 4 letter from Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation Director Matt Tucker to the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, obtained by The Examiner on Monday, seeks to counter the growing heap of criticism that has fallen on Northern Virginia’s planned 23-mile Metrorail extension in recent months.
Many of the charges have come from advocates of the nixed plan to run a portion of the rail in a tunnel underneath Tysons Corner.
Gov. Tim Kaine selected an aerial rail through Tysons after the Federal Transit Administration warned greater costs and delays associated with the tunnel would put $900 million in federal funds at risk.
“We have a project that’s defined, that’s gone through all of the rigorous hurdles that the FTA process has put forth,” Tucker said Monday. “The time is now to move the project forward because any other alternative places this project in further jeopardy.”
Tucker’s assertions in the letter, however, are far from undisputed.
He asserts that the project does not still risk losing federal funding, despite the FTA’s move to double the level of scrutiny it will apply to the expensive new rail line.
Critics have attacked the state’s argument that the pending contract with engineering firms Bechtel Infrastructure and Washington Group International is a “fixed price,” because the agreement puts the total cost of the first half of the project between $2.4 billion and $2.7 billion. Tucker writes that 69 percent of the $1.6 billion contract is fixed.
“Therefore, if 31 percent of it is not fixed, [the contract] is not fixed,” Tysonstunnel.org President Scott Monett said.
Tucker also seeks to counter charges of government secrecy that surround the project. Many details of the negotiations between the two contractors will never be made available to the public under a 2004 agreement. But only internal pricing documents, he wrote, will be kept confidential.
Another popular criticism of the rail project is that the ballooning cost will fall on Fairfax County taxpayers and motorists on the Dulles Toll Road, with other funding sources capped at $1.3 billion. Tucker writes that assertion is “incorrect,” though he offers no other funding source that could pay for the rail.
