From the outside looking in, it appeared that some of the participants in the recent panel discussion sponsored by the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance were talking past one another.
Particularly when it came to the never-ending, seemingly intractable saga of funding for the Metro system.
The state government’s No. 2 transportation official was blunt: Despite incessant braying for ever more cash, the rail portion of Metro was losing riders before COVID, and one has to wonder if, given the new realities of work, whether it’s ever going to come back to past totals.
“There is no more money for business as usual,” Deputy Secretary of Transportation Michael Sargent said. “We’ve got to have tough conversations, and that starts with looking at costs” – costs that seem excessively high when compared to other similar transit agencies nationally.
Sargent hardly offered a specific blueprint for moving ahead, but at least he acknowledged that the status quo isn’t cutting it.
Local leaders seemed disinclined to hear the message, offering up passive-aggressive responses. To note just two:
• #1: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors Chairman Jeff McKay said the transit system should be deemed “an investment” – often government code for (in our words) “shovel as much money as possible at a problem and let somebody down the road deal with the ramifications of failure.”
• Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority CEO Jack Potter said that “it’s everybody’s problem – it has to be everybody’s challenge to fix it,” which (again in our words) translates to “since it’s everybody’s problem, nobody has to be held fully accountable for ongoing failures.”
We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: Local leaders of the 2020s are not to blame for a Byzantine funding/management system designed in the 1960s. Given Metro’s importance to moving the federal workforce, it should have been the responsibility of the feds to fund and operate the system. Regional, multi-jurisdictional oversight and funding has never worked, is not working now, and probably never will work. That was known as early as the 1970s.
Are we expecting the federal government – as broken financially and from a leadership standpoint as it is – to swoop in and say “we’ll take it over and set things right”? We are not. And given the time-honored political dictum of “[poo] rolls downhill,” the can will be kicked from the federal level down to the states and ultimately land, again, at the doorstep of local leaders.
We feel for their plight, because the current situation isn’t of their making. But nibbling around the edges isn’t going to fix Metro’s problems, and local leaders don’t seem to have the big-picture vision or leadership skills to address them.
We’ll probably be hearing the same refrain next year, and the next, and the next. Lather, rinse, repeat . . .
