Clouds Over Tysons, Connection Newspapers, May 1, 2012

The hopes of glorious vision face reality of a post recession Northern Virginia.

By Nicholas Horrock

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Back when Clark Tyler was running meetings of the citizens group planning the redevelopment of Tysons Corner, the transformation of this traffic strangled cross roads seemed a glorious vision.

The ambitious plan grew during one of the hottest housing booms of Fairfax’s history. Housing prices soared and equities grew. The boom in turn was fed by millions of dollars of federal and defense expenditures in Northern Virginia. Typical family real estate taxes grew as well from $2,400 a year to $4,800.

But now in 2012, the hopes of that glorious vision have run into the reality of a post recession Northern Virginia and the tightening of federal expenditures that could spell limitations in the future. . . .

. . .  But the unexpected costs of Dulles Rail are not the only clouds hovering over the "glorious vision" of a new Tysons Corner:

• Housing values have fallen due to recession, but the high taxes of the mid-2000s have remained high.

• Federal government spending is growing tighter and the Department of Defense anticipates sharp cuts.

• The office market, the very center of the notion of historic expansion for Tysons Corner, is down 17 percent and the federal workforce is contracting.  An analysis by Jones Lang LaSalle, an international real estate broker doesn’t see federal employment expanding sharply in the near term.

• Large projects in nearby jurisdictions mean competitors for Tysons Corner.  In Alexandria construction is under way on a 20-year, 300 acre project which will include high rise office buildings, perhaps an additional Metro stop and could attract a work force of 60,000.  In Arlington, the county is working hard to repopulate the Crystal City development which until recently had a work force of some 60,000.

• When the military’s Base Realignment and Closure program (BRAC) moved 20,000 employees from Arlington to Alexandria, South Fairfax and Prince William County in 2010, it created an office building boom around Ft. Belvoir and increased development in Prince William County. . . .

Click here for the rest of this thoughtful article.  

Virginia Tolls Are Biggest Silver Line Issue, Not Unions, Residents Say, WAMU 88.5 radio, May 4, 2012

By: Martin Di Caro

Rates on the Dulles Toll Road could go from their current $1.50 to higher than $6.

A Virginia citizens group says the most critical issue surrounding the construction of Phase 2 of Metro's Silver Line to Dulles Airport is tolls, which are projected to rise to $6 or more on the Dulles Toll Road.

A pro-union provision proposed by the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority got most of the attention this week, when federal Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood held a closed door meeting with the Silver Line stakeholders to try to resolve disputes over the $2.7 billion project. The Reston Citizens Association, which represents 58,000 residents in Fairfax County, says the controversy over whether bidding contractors should receive a preference for choosing union labor is not as important as toll projections on the Dulles Toll Road. Those tolls are supposed to pay off the project’s debt over the next 40 years under the current funding structure.

In a letter sent Friday to Secretary LaHood, Terry Maynard, who sits on the association’s board of directors, said this week’s efforts to resolve the dispute over union labor "barely touch on the most critical issue of the construction of Phase 2 of the Silver Line: three-quarters of the cost of Phase 2 of the rail line’s construction will be borne by the 100,000 or so users of the Dulles Toll Road, many of them Reston residents. The result will be that toll road users will end up paying more than half of the nearly $6 billion total cost of the Silver Line." . . . .

The same article appears in Transportation Nation as "Tolls Still a Sticking Point in Dulles Rail Project."

New toll system for Dulles Toll Road - first steps, TollroadsNews, May 4, 2012

By Peter Samuel

Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA), operator of the Dulles Toll Road in Northern Virginia is makes preparatory steps to lay out requirements in a new toll system. They say they are looking at distance based tolls and peak/off-peak toll rates.

Rob Yingling a spokesman says: "We are preparing a new toll rate proposal which will be reviewed by our Board before beginning a public process or considering toll equipment requirements. We are looking at concepts such as distance-based tolling and peak period pricing possibly in the future." . . .

Read the rest of this article here.  

Reston 2020 Letter to US Secretary of Transportation LaHood re Rail to Dulles, May 4, 2012

Ltr to Secy LaHood Re DTR & Silver Line

Some Forecast Impacts of Toll Increases:  The Dulles Toll Road

Planning the Rest of Reston, Colin Mills, RCA President, Reston Patch, May 3, 2012

Colin Mills

Phase 2 of the Silver Line has been in the news quite a bit lately.  Loudoun County has been wavering on its commitment to Phase 2.  There's been considerable debate over MWAA's plan to give a preference to Phase 2 bidders who will use a Project Labor Agreement.  There's been debate over how much money Virginia will contribute to the project.

All this uncertainty has led to doubt about whether Phase 2 will be built at all.  (For the record, RCA continues to support the completion of Phase 2 to Dulles and beyond, provided that funding plans are adopted to reduce the burden on the users of the Toll Road.  Terry Maynard explains this eloquently on the Reston 20/20 blog.)

But I've got my mind on another Phase 2 today.  Specifically, Phase 2 of the Reston Master Plan Special Study.  It's time that we get started on it.  We owe it to the citizens and the commounity to look at the future of all of Reston, not just the areas around the Silver Line.

As I've mentioned before, I am serving on the Master Plan Task Force as Bob Simon's alternate.  It has been exciting and enjoyable to look at the development that may be coming around the Metro stations (when and if they're built), and how it could change the face of Reston.

But what the Task Force has looked at - areas in the Toll Road corridor that are largely within a half-mile of the planned stations - is only Phase 1 of the process.  Phase 2 is scheduled to look at the rest of Reston - the village centers, the existing neighorhoods, the Master Plan as a whole.  It's time to get started on Phase 2.  We should take this opportunity to look at Reston as a whole, and decide what we want the future of our community to look like. . . .

Click here for the rest of Colin's blog post.  

Dulles rail meeting between Ray LaHood and Va., local officials fails to yield deal, Washington Post, May 2, 2012

By Dana Hedgpeth

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said Wednesday that a meeting on Metro’s planned Silver Line to Dulles Airport yielded progress but not a final deal to move forward with the second and final phase of the $3 billion expansion.

LaHood, who mediated an earlier dispute over the fate of the project, called for the closed-door meeting of key officials in an effort to resolve a stalemate over a swirl of issues.

Virginia Transportation Secretary Sean T. Connaughton, chairmen of Loudoun and Fairfax counties’ boards of supervisors, and officials from Metro and the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority joined LaHood for the meeting at his office in the District. . . .

Click here for the rest of the article.  

The focus of the meeting appears to have been on MWAA's intransigence on the PLA issue, offering preferential treatment to contractors who include a PLA as part of their bid package.  Loudoun's continued participation in the agreement also appears to have been a topic.

What was apparently not a topic is the 75% burden for Phase 2 construction costs that will be absorbed by Dulles Toll Road users in the current "funding partners" agreement, the most inequitable and unfair aspect of the current spending plan.  That puts $17 billion in rail financing and toll road O&M costs over four decades (& probably longer) on the 100K-200K users of the toll road, and especially those who use the toll road to commute.  That multi-billion dollar estimate apparently does not include needed capital investments (such as electronic tolling). 

With tolls set to double next year and triple within six years according to MWAA's estimates (others put the numbers higher), the agreement among MWAA, Loudoun, & Fairfax is not only unfair and inequitable, it is likely to stifle the very economic growth that Metrorail is suppose to stimulate. 

LaHood Hosts Meeting to Help Save Dulles Airport Rail Extension, The Bond Buyer, May 1, 2012

By Kyle Glazier

WASHINGTON — Stakeholders in the mostly bond-financed extension of the Washington Metrorail via the new Silver Line will meet with U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood Wednesday, as the nation’s transit chief seeks to smooth the troubled path of a project beset by funding woes.

The approval of funding for the $2.7 billion second phase of the Silver Line — a 23-mile extension of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s Orange Line to Dulles International Airport — is in doubt because two of the project’s funding partners are showing hesitation to commit.

The Loudoun County, Va., Board of Supervisors has yet to approve phase two, which stretches into Loudoun from neighboring Fairfax County, and a labor dispute is holding up Virginia’s commitment to issue $150 million of debt to finance part of the second phase. Loudoun has until July 4 to approve phase two.

Fairfax County has already given the next phase the go ahead, but the majority of funding will come from over $2 billion of bonds issued by the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority and backed by toll revenue from the Dulles Toll Road.
Citizen advocacy groups have raised questions about the fairness of those tolls, which are slated to rise to $6.75 per trip by 2020, according to projections commissioned by the MWAA. . . .

. . . Now LaHood, who served as a mediator during Silver Line negotiations last year, will reprise his role and seek to broker a peace between representatives of Gov. Robert McDonnell, Loudoun and Fairfax counties, MWAA and WMATA.

 "The secretary has called the meeting because he knows that the Silver Line is critical to the economic future of the region, and he wants to get all of the stakeholders in the same room so that we can make sure the project continues to move forward,” a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Transportation said.

Terry Maynard of the Reston Citizens Association, of Reston, Va., said the situation is “deteriorating rapidly.” Though the RCA expresses support for the overall concept of a rail extension to the airport, it has consistently criticized the current Dulles Rail funding structure. . . .

 Click here for the rest of this article.