County Council Gets the News on Transportation Cuts

The County Council’s Transportation & Environment Committee, comprised of Chairwoman Nancy Floreen and Council Members George Leventhal and Roger Berliner, was informed about the state’s transportation cuts this morning. Their reaction was not pretty.

Deputy Council Staff Director Glenn Orlin analyzed the cut list, which is included in the committee packet. There was broad agreement that the O’Malley administration had spread the pain around on the road projects. In general, the most recently added projects were the most likely to be cut. But the real sticking point was on the administration’s treatment of the state’s three major transit projects, which I chronicled this morning.

All three Council Members zeroed in on the Governor’s ranking of Baltimore’s Red Line over the Montgomery-Prince George’s Purple Line and Montgomery’s Corridor Cities Transitway (CCT). That prioritization can be easily seen by the fact that the Red Line’s programmed funding (now $221 million) is greater than the combined funding for the Purple Line ($106 million) and the CCT ($48 million). But it goes further than that. The Ehrlich administration programmed Red Line funding of $80 million for right-of-way acquisition and $55 million for construction – decisions upheld by the current administration – while the two Montgomery projects are only funded for planning and engineering. According to the Director of Montgomery’s Department of Transportation (MCDOT), that sends a clear signal to the federal government: the state is more serious about funding the Red Line than the other two projects.

And there is more. MCDOT reports that the Purple Line’s per-passenger cost varies from $14.30 (for the cheapest bus-rapid transit option) to $23.70 (for high-investment light rail). The CCT’s per-passenger cost varies from $18.25 to $32. The Red Line’s per-passenger cost varies from $18.10 to $62(!) The cost effectiveness threshold used as a rule of thumb by the U.S. Department of Transportation is $23.99, making many Red Line alignments ineligible for federal funding. Nevertheless, the O’Malley administration is advancing the Red Line over the other two projects.

That provoked quite a reaction from the Council Members. Mr. Berliner deplored the budgeting of right-of-way and construction money for the Red Line even before federal approval, saying the funding should be deployed to BRAC improvements on Wisconsin Avenue instead. (BRAC funding in Bethesda was cut by $15.9 million, but BRAC funding in Fort Meade and Aberdeen was cut by similar amounts.) Mr. Leventhal questioned “a policy of advantaging one project over two others.” And Ms. Floreen declared the entire situation to be “intolerable.”

The evaporation of state funding is causing the Council to consider financing more state projects from county bonds backed by liquor profits, a practice that began in 2006. The movement of state projects in Montgomery County is so glacial that the county’s number one state construction request, a grade separation of the Georgia Avenue-Randolph Road interchange, is not scheduled for completion until fiscal year 2019. If that is the case for the county’s top-ranked project, how long do the trembling residents crossing the Intersection of Death have to wait for relief?

The County Council and the County Executive will probably write to the Governor asking for him to explain the disparate treatment of the state’s three transit lines. And they will have to consider which state projects should be accelerated by county funding – a practice that, in a perfect world, they would never have to do. But all the county government can do is mitigate the damage of state cuts, an exercise it will probably have to repeat when the General Assembly reconvenes to discuss next year’s state operating budget.

The real holders of leverage over the state are the members of Montgomery’s statehouse delegation. They are the largest geographic bloc in the legislature and it is time for them to work together to ensure that Montgomery’s transportation needs are not downgraded below other jurisdictions. As a transportation activist myself, I cannot describe how profoundly discouraging it is to be told that meaningful action on state projects is more than a decade away even on relatively small projects. How much longer must we wait?

Update: The Examiner's Kathleen Miller has more.