When Federal Transit Administration officials declined to fund Phase 2 of the $6 billion Dulles Rail project, they cited two main reasons. First, the mass transit project’s overall cost-benefit rating was “medium-low,” making it ineligible for the FTA’s New Starts program. Second, federal officials had little confidence that the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Board could successfully manage a transportation project as large and complex as Dulles Rail. The fact that MWAA paid an outside management consultant the equivalent of $7,000 an hour to help board members deal with “important organizational change issues” is proof that their concerns were well-founded.
As The Examiner’s Liz Essley reported, MWAA signed three no-bid contracts for a total of $173,000 with Pennsylvania-based “change” guru Gregory Shea to lead group discussions at the board’s annual retreats. The news surfaced just weeks after a federal inspector general’s audit found that two-thirds of all MWAA contracts more than $200,000 were not competitively bid between 2009 and 2011.
