Despite $1.5 Billion Incentive, Rivalries Hinder Metro Plan

"The region has enormous and rapidly growing transportation needs. . . . We still have a long way to go to get better," he said. "But when it has focused on transportation problems, it has done a magnificent job of solving them."

Maryland Secretary of Transportation Robert L. Flanagan, meanwhile, said he sees "no bandwagon for imposing a new tax." But, he noted, a proposal to devote part of an existing sales tax to transit passed Maryland's House of Delegates, so that idea "at least had some credibility."

Flanagan said it was too early to settle on, or speak about, state strategy.

Flanagan and Homer, who met for lunch last week to discuss the Davis bill and other matters, said the cooperation on the Wilson Bridge project shows that the region's leaders have gotten better at getting along.

"For years, the prior governors of Maryland and Virginia were at each other's throats, and the project was crawling along. . . . The good news is the current officeholders have really done a terrific job of working together," Flanagan said.

For Montgomery County Council member Howard A. Denis (R-Potomac-Bethesda), the idea of coming together over Metro is no fuzzy fantasy of campfire kumbayas. During his 18 years in the Maryland Senate, he said, one of the most constructive things he did was pack up for regional overnight retreats in the tiny Virginia community of Airlie -- in rural and Metro-free Fauquier County -- to buttress support for the subway and outline its future.

"It was like a camp setting," Denis said. It offered a legislator from Montgomery a less-formal chance to bond in meeting rooms and over dinner with counterparts from Prince George's County, Virginia and the District. Those gatherings, and the "miraculous" feeling of seeing Metro stations emerge in such places as Bethesda that once seemed impossibly distant, help him frame today's debate over the transit system's future.

"It was a lot more difficult to start this thing from the beginning," said Denis, who is a staff member on the Government Reform Committee but had no role in crafting the Davis bill. "Now what we're trying to do, of course, is save the system, to keep it from crumbling. . . . It's almost like a last clear chance for the stakeholders to get their act together."

Denis is pushing the idea of an Airlie-type conference "so you don't talk to people by throwing hand grenades over the wall."

For Davis, the din has emerged as he hoped it would when he worked with local and federal officials to design the plan. "This didn't come from just some brainstorm on a bill," he said. "It's supposed to work."

Davis said his goal is passage in the fall, giving momentum to the bill's supporters in the Senate. The bill won't touch issues of how Metro funding is proportioned among the District and the states, he said: "The last thing I want to start is a regional war. We want to keep the region together."

His $1.5 billion enticement is meant to be a political, not just a financial, incentive, he said, adding that local officials have a ready-made argument. " 'Guys, we're leaving a billion and a half dollars on the table if we don't do this,' " he imagines them saying. "This is a pretty strong incentive. . . . Voters understand that."

Suzanne Morse, president of the Pew Partnership for Civic Change, a Charlottesville consulting and research group that advises local officials, described the effort at cooperation as a test for the region: "As trite as it sounds, we're greater together than we are separate. . . . If you can come together around this issue, can you come together on a whole range of issues?"