The Governor's proposed budget makes clear his transportation priorities in the official MTA outline of the governor's budget, provided to me by the Office of Sen. Rich Madaleno (D-18). The Baltimore Red Line is listed under "construction program" and will receive $96 million in state funding over the next six fiscal years (FY08-13). In contrast, both Corridor Cities and the Purple Line are listed under "development and evaluation program". The Purple Line will receive a paltry $2.2 million and Corridor Cities is slated for only $7.6 million over the next six fiscal years.
If you don't take my word, you can take the word of Glen Orlin, the pro-Purple Deputy Council Staff Director of the pro-Purple Montgomery County Council:
If projects in Montgomery County were to garner (an optimistically high) 30% of the $750 million that the [governor's] proposal would make available for new construction projects, that would translate to an addition MDOT investment of $225 million in new projects here, enough perhaps to fund only the top three projects from the Council/Executive list. This would leave nothing for the remaining 11 projects on the list, not to mention the Purple Line, Corridor Cities Transitway, or the widenings [of] the western portion of the Beltway and upper I-270. Furthermore, of the new funds generated by the proposal, a higher proportion of it is not available until the back end of the FY 09-13 period.The lack of money to build the light rail makes one wonder why the Planning Board is in any hurry to write it into the County's functional Master plan. I'd be curious to know if writing it into the functional Master plan would allow denser development along the proposed light rail even though the State clearly is not proposing to even begin construction over the next six years (not to mention it doesn't even know if this is an viable project yet in terms of ridership or cost). One can easily see why the developers of Chevy Chase Lake are pressing so hard to write the Purple Line into the functional Master Plan if that is the case.
Despite the lack of funding, this remains a critical time in the fight over the proposed light rail. MTA will soon release ridership numbers followed by the draft EIS (that's Environmental Impact Survey in case you're not yet hip to the alphabet-soup development lingo yet). Both will play a key role in determining whether it is feasible to apply for federal funding and thus the overall viability of the project. And while the State may be short of cash now, that can change rather quickly, so don't expect activists to lose interest even though it looks like the light rail won't be built over either the short or medium term.
