Fairfax County hasn’t found enough money to help pay for one of the Metro stations on the second part of the new Silver Line — possibly leaving the county and other players to help pay for more of the project’s roughly $3 billion price tag. . . .
On the second phase of the Silver Line, Fairfax had promised that it would try to find private partners to help pay for the Route 28/Innovation Station. But Fairfax has been unable to find anyone to share the estimated $90 million cost of the station.
The Northern Virginia Transportation Authority has promised $41 million to help pay for the Route 28 station, and Fairfax has applied for a $20 million federal grant. That leaves the station about $29 million short of what it is expected to cost to build it. Fairfax has until July 1, county officials said, to find more money to pay for the station.
“We’ll continue to look for ways to fund that gap,” said Tom Biesiadny, director of the Fairfax Department of Transportation. “We said we would use our best efforts, and our best efforts means just about anything we can come up with.”
As part of a deal negotiated by former U.S. transportation secretary Ray LaHood, Fairfax had agreed that if it couldn’t find a partner to pay for the Route 28 station, it and the other funding partners would pay for the station as part of the project’s overall cost. . . .Three-quarters of the funding gap will be filled by increased tolls on the DTR if Fairfax County does not find other funding. The roughly $21 million more (plus interest) that DTR users will have to pay is small in comparison to the more that $3 billion (plus interest) they will have to pay for over the next 40 years or so. Right now, full one-way tolls are projected to go to $18 by 2050. With this addition and cost overruns, the tolls could reach $20 each way by then.
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