High Cost Puts Metro Extension In Jeopardy

Virginia transportation officials are threatening to end talks with a private contractor seeking to build a Metro extension to Dulles International Airport if a deal is not struck by April 5, jeopardizing the future of the $4 billion project.

The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, which is overseeing construction, said in a letter to the contractor that the cost estimates are too high. If the price is not slashed by the April 5 deadline, the letter raises the possibility that the Metro extension -- the region's largest planned rail project -- could die.

"The authority considers time to be of the essence in completing the negotiations," Frank D. Holly Jr., the authority's vice president for engineering, wrote in the March 9 letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. "After that date, the authority team will be making our final recommendation . . . regarding the continuation of this process."

The letter presents a new wrinkle for a controversial project dominated in recent weeks by calls to bury underground the portion of the 23-mile line that would run through busy Tysons Corner. Tunnel advocates have been calling on state and regional officials to scrap current plans entirely or risk scuttling a chance to remake car-dominated Tysons, the commercial hub of Northern Virginia, into a thriving, pedestrian-friendly metropolis.

Beyond the tunnel debate, there is an even greater risk to the project if the current negotiations for an aboveground line fail.

"The project could get stalled," said Virginia Transportation Secretary Pierce R. Homer. The rail line, which would run from just east of the West Falls Church Metro station to the airport, is scheduled to reach Wiehle Avenue in Reston by 2012 and Dulles and Loudoun County by 2015.

The negotiators are led by the airports authority for the state and Bechtel Corp. for a private consortium called Dulles Transit Partners. The parties had set a goal of completing contract details by mid-February, but their struggles to bring the cost down made that impossible. The new April 5 deadline reflects the state's growing impatience.

Keeping the project within budget is critical. Strict federal criteria require mass transit projects to be "cost-effective" under a formula that calculates the travel time saved for each dollar spent. The rules, implemented by Congress over the past few decades, are meant to determine with fairness which projects deserve limited public transit funds.

If the Federal Transit Administration decided that Dulles rail was not cost-effective, the project could lose $900 million in promised federal funds, which would kill the extension. The rest of the project cost is being split among Dulles Toll Road revenue, a tax on landowners along the route and local governments.

Pushing the rail line's price up are the same factors causing public works projects to break banks everywhere in recent years, officials said: the rising cost of materials such as steel and the uncertainty of how much further those costs will rise in future years. Negotiators are hoping to iron out those complications by allowing the airports authority to negotiate specific pieces of the contract along the way, rather than upfront, when future costs are less certain.

That "may provide an opportunity to reduce overall project cost," the airports authority's Holly wrote in his letter.

Homer, who declined to comment on the negotiations, said the hope is that Holly's letter will push negotiators toward agreement. Representatives of Bechtel and the consortium did not return phone calls.

Gerald E. Connolly, chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, said he urged the airports authority to establish a firm deadline for negotiations to finish so that the bid from Dulles Transit Partners could be thrown out and the process begun all over again, which could put the tunnel plan back in play. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) rejected the below-ground approach in September, saying federal officials had warned him that the costs and delays from switching to a tunnel would jeopardize the project.

"You've got to put a period on this thing -- either wrap it up or look at other options," Connolly said.

Connolly acknowledged that, even if negotiations do fail, there is no guarantee that the authority would have time to start the process over to allow for consideration of tunnel proposals.

It also remains to be seen whether the negotiations would really end if no deal was in place by April 5. Matthew O. Tucker, director of the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation, said yesterday that at that juncture, "you can discontinue negotiations, or you can continue negotiations."

But Tucker added: "Negotiations need to come to an end at some point in time. It was never intended to be an open-ended discussion."

Staff writer Bill Turque contributed to this report.