Despite $1.5 Billion Incentive, Rivalries Hinder Metro Plan
U.S. Transit Aid Requires Area Unity on New Funding Source
The $1.5 billion federal infusion called for in a House bill would go toward train, track and station maintenance and to relieve crowding.
(By Sarah L. Voisin -- The Washington Post)
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Saturday, August 13, 2005
From an office two blocks past the Capitol South Metro station, the chairman of the House Government Reform Committee has nudged back to life a conversation that has as much to do with the future of local government as it does with buying rail cars.
The bill that Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) introduced last month offers a $1.5 billion icebreaker to a region of winding jurisdictional lines and often clashing interests. But to win the money to finance a decade of improvements to the aging Metro transit system, political leaders in the Washington area's patchwork of cities, counties and states must do something they are not always good at: cooperate.
So far, the conversation has been civil, even upbeat. There seems to be an authentic hope among both Democratic and Republican officials that Davis's plan might goad the region's leaders to action on guaranteeing a dedicated source of revenue to operate Metro, which is what the bill demands of them in exchange for the $1.5 billion in federal aid.
"It's a real step forward that he dropped the bill and has basically called the question," said Gregory M. McCarthy, legislative affairs chief for D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D). "This is a wake-up call that we need to do something, and be bold, and it needs to be done on a regional basis."
State transportation secretaries in Maryland and Virginia, appointed by a Republican and a Democrat, said their successes in some instances of cross-Potomac cooperation bode well for the region's chances to preserve its heavily used transit system.
But some who have followed such efforts are skeptical.
In reality, said Dorn C. McGrath, a professor emeritus of regional planning and geography at George Washington University, "it pretty much is each jurisdiction for itself."
"The record is not one to be proud of," he said, citing traffic tie-ups, scattered construction patterns and damaging algae blooms in the Chesapeake Bay fed by pollution.
"It takes real political leadership to get something like this going," McGrath said. "No technician will tell you how to do that. Political leadership that favors -- or believes in -- planning is not popular."
Several proposals for Potomac River crossings and bistate highways around Washington have foundered in part because the leaders of the jurisdictions involved did not agree on their value.
In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court had to settle a dispute over whether Maryland could prevent Virginia from extending a water pipe into the Potomac.
Even planning for the new Woodrow Wilson Bridge, a project considered vital by the governments involved, was caught up in several disputes between Maryland and Virginia over the division of responsibilities and costs.
