Derailing Economic Growth

Although Peters is officially "reconsidering" her decision, it is highly unlikely she will change it. So it's time to think about Plan B.

We could wait until a new administration takes office and hope to get a different decision. But that's hardly a sure thing, and in any case would delay the project another two years, adding hundreds of millions of dollars to the already swollen project cost.

A better alternative, it seems to me, is to ask Warner and Davis to negotiate a political settlement directly with the White House and their congressional colleagues.

Such a deal would almost surely involve a reduction in the federal share of the project cost from $900 million to, say, $500 million, which just happens to be what the FTA seems prepared to contribute to the "low cost" solution of expanding bus service along the Dulles corridor.

The $400 million financing gap, along with inevitable cost overruns, would have to be made up by the Commonwealth of Virginia, which for all its rhetorical support of Dulles rail, was not slated to invest any state money in a project that, by its own reckoning, would energize the economy of Northern Virginia and boost state tax revenue by millions of dollars every year.

There is, of course, a name for such a political settlement: It's called an earmark. And it is a reminder to the fiscally sanctimonious among us that, for all the bad experience with bridges to nowhere and teapot museums, earmarks are not always a bad thing.

Steven Pearlstein will host a Web discussion today at 11 a.m. athttp://washingtonpost.com. He can be reached atpearlsteins@washpost.com.