Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell has appointed former Congressman Tom Davis to the board of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority just as newly revised estimates raise the total cost of the 23-mile Dulles Rail project to $6.85 billion — up from $4 billion just four years ago.A newly leaked 1998 memo that surfaced during the recent Massachusetts gubernatorial race indicated that state’s former chief fiscal officer knew that the costs of Boston’s infamous Big Dig project would skyrocket and crowd out other needed transportation projects. MWAA’s 2010 financing plan for Dulles Rail contains a similar smoking gun.
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The latest financing plan includes a 14-year extension of bond payments for extending Metrorail to Washington Dulles International Airport. Instead of the bonds being paid off by 2043, as indicated in the 2009 financing plan, payments will now continue to 2057, resulting in a tenfold increase in tolls on the Dulles Toll Road to pay for it. The public was originally told that the tolls would end once the highway bonds were paid off. But now tolls will eventually have to rise to $10 or more per one-way trip to cover more than $1 billion in annual debt service for Dulles Rail.
Toll road drivers will be forced to pay 57.2 percent of the construction and financing costs for a transit project they do not use (up from 52.6 percent in 2009). Meanwhile, the percentage used to operate and maintain the toll road they do use drops from the current 21.6 percent to 20.8 percent in 2012. Adding insult to injury, the MWAA Board of Directors has already approved the use of their toll money to link the free Dulles Access Road to HOT lanes currently under construction.
There are only five members from Virginia on MWAA’s 13-member board, even though both airports it operates are located within the commonwealth, so the board has little incentive to protect local residents from this kind of gouging. Davis, who supported Dulles Rail as a member of Congress, has an obligation to challenge the project’s still-spiraling costs, which have not been supported by adequate documentation. He also has an opportunity to insist that MWAA share some of the burden by charging passengers who take the Dulles Access Road an equal or higher toll for their congestion-free trip to the airport.
