Dulles Rail on the Brink

Federal funds are at risk, along with a critical regional project.

THE PROPOSED extension of Metrorail to Dulles International Airport and Loudoun County, four decades in the planning, is in trouble.

In the second flashing danger sign in a month, a report prepared for the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) warned this week that the first phase of the project, to build a rail line from Falls Church to Reston, looks too expensive to qualify for federal funding, without which it is dead. The report follows a similar warning in July from the federal Transportation Department's inspector general, who cautioned that the project's mounting cost projections may exceed the government's cost-efficiency standards.

State and local officials don't need lectures on the importance of the project, which they've wrestled with for years as it dodged near-death experiences with Harry Potter-like frequency. Still, it is under their watch that the estimated cost of the 11.6-mile first phase has nearly doubled to an FTA estimate of $2.825 billion in less than three years, thanks to repeated delays, soaring construction and commodity prices, and, not least, a contract award process that considered only a single bidder. Given projected ridership, the FTA says that the extension's price tag must be capped at $2.55 billion -- including a much larger cushion for contingencies than Virginia officials expected -- if it is to have a chance at securing $900 million in crucial federal funding.

Through gritted teeth, state and local officials say that the report has provided them with a useful road map; they have already identified pieces of the massive undertaking (a rail storage site here, a parking garage there) that can be trimmed or tweaked to the tune of $275 million so that the project can be pared down to meet the federal cap -- without sacrificing passengers' interests. Meanwhile, to avoid contractually mandated automatic price increases in the event of further delays, Virginia has already started paying the contractor, a consortium including Bechtel, for preliminary work, thereby incurring significant financial risk should the project collapse.

The extension's endless problems are a lesson proving that time is money and that further delays will make it only more difficult to get a handle on costs. The project has long skirted the limits of what the federal government considers a sensible cost-benefit equation. But it's worth remembering that it would serve one of the nation's fastest-growing counties, Loudoun, as well as one of its most rapidly expanding airports, Dulles. State, local and regional leaders must not allow it to fail.