Was it a coincidence that the day after Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker emerged victorious from a union-backed recall effort, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority threw in the towel on its mandatory project labor agreement, or PLA, for Phase 2 of Dulles Rail? The 11-1 vote June 6 reversed the MWAA Board’s official policy, which gave a 10 percent preference to unionized construction firms that bid on the transit project in right-to-work Virginia.
The sudden about-face was even more remarkable given MWAA’s defiant resistance as recently as last month, even after the Virginia General Assembly voted to withhold $150 million if the union-favored incentives remained. Although jettisoning the PLA removes one major obstacle, many other problems remain — including the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s unionized labor force. As Loudoun Supervisor Ken Reid pointed out, opting into Phase 2 will “forever expose our county’s taxpayers to … ever-rising wages and costly benefits Metro is unable to control.”
The other major hurdle is that 75 percent of the cost for this $2.8 million rail extension will be paid by a subset of Northern Virginia commuters who use the Dulles Toll Road. Nowhere else in America do local taxpayers pay such a high percentage for a mass transit project — especially one linking the nation’s capital to a major international airport. But the Federal Transit Administration decided the Silver Line did not meet federal cost effectiveness standards, and eliminating the PLA does not change that — or the fact that the economic and financial feasibility of the project has never been definitively determined.
Metro — which already has a $13.5 billion maintenance and capital replacement backlog — still refuses to provide even basic ridership, revenue and operating cost projections. According to an April 12 memo to Loudoun County officials from consulting firm Desman Associates obtained by The Washington Examiner, “detailed daily boardings projections — which are critical to forecasting parking demand — [were] not available” from either MWAA or WMATA. The only forecasts available were from 2004.
The lack of updated information should send shivers down the spines of Loudoun County supervisors, who must decide by July 4 whether to opt in or out of Phase 2. So should contingency plans to slash local payrolls currently being made by top federal contractors in the event that the federal sequestration goes into effect in January. Supervisors would likely find better odds in Vegas.
