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DULLES RAIL
Line Won't Be Finished Till 2016
The second part of Metrorail's much-anticipated 23-mile extension to Dulles, the Silver Line, will not be completed until at least December 2016, a year after its original end date, transit officials said yesterday.
James E. Bennett, president of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, told members of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors that the second phase of the $5.2 billion project would take an extra year to complete.
The project would extend Metro nearly 12 miles from a future stop at Reston Parkway to Dulles International Airport and Loudoun County.
Preliminary engineering will take about 18 months, Bennett said, ending in early to mid-2011.
Bennett also said a final decision on the location of the Route 606 rail stop, which is being debated by Loudoun County officials, needs to be made by the end of summer 2010.
The delay in the Silver Line's completion date stems from a protracted political fight on Capitol Hill over $900 million in federal funding for the first part of the project. Congress signed off on the rail plan in December.
-- Derek Kravitz
FAIRFAX COUNTY
Heroin Ring Supplier Admits Guilt
One of the main suppliers to a group of Fairfax County heroin users pleaded guilty in federal court in Alexandria yesterday to distributing 10 to 30 kilograms of the drug over a two-year period, and he now faces at least 15 years in prison.
Antonio L. Harper, 33, of Waldorf was arrested in November at the same time as nine Centreville area men and women, all 19 or 20 years old, who had been buying heroin from Harper in the District since 2006, court records show.
The young buyers would then sell some of the heroin to their friends and ingest or shoot the rest, and four people within the group died of overdoses.
Federal and local authorities eventually arrested 16 people, of whom only Harper is not from the Centreville area.
Only one of the 16, Skylar Schnippel, has pleaded not guilty; Schnippel faces trial next month on a charge of providing the heroin that killed his 19-year-old girlfriend, Alicia Lannes. Harper pleaded guilty yesterday to conspiracy to distribute more than a kilogram of heroin, which carries a mandatory minimum 10-year sentence, and use of a firearm in the conspiracy, which adds five consecutive years to the term.
-- Tom Jackman
