Washington Post editorializes about Purple Line cockups, fails to attribute them to Larry Hogan
The Purple Line is a great lesson for me in how long projects take to achieve from conceptualization to realization.
I first read about the idea--intended at the time to be heavy rail--in December 1987, shortly after I had moved to Washington, DC, as a cover story in the Washington City Paper. 40 years later!!!! a section of it, maybe about 25% will have been built, and zero planning for extension is underway.
.jpg)
.jpg)
Given that it will take this long for one section ...
The Washington Post has an editorial, "The Purple Line is in the news again — for the usual reasons," about continued failures with the Purple Line light rail project in Montgomery and Prince George's County Maryland, which means it won't open until 2027. From the article:
As The Post’s Katherine Shaver reported, the start date for the 16-mile light-rail link between Montgomery and Prince George’s counties could slide another seven months, into mid-2027 — or about five years after the completion target of March 2022. The culprit for this latest glitch is the relocation of utility lines. ...
... when its administrators blunder through years of bad contracting and project-management decisions. Those decisions have bloated what was to be a five-year project with almost $2 billion in construction costs into a nearly 10-year, $3.4 billion undertaking. The lowlights include a shortsighted effort by former governor Larry Hogan to pinch pennies on construction costs; timeline-extending litigation from NIMBY groups and others; and a rupture in 2020 of the Purple Line’s public-private partnership in which the original construction team abandoned the project, delaying it by more than a year and adding nearly $1.5 billion in costs.
While the Post does attribute some of the delay to former Governor Hogan, it's basically his fault, although there was a lawsuit simultaneous with part of it.
Hogan threatened to shut the program down as soon as he came into office--and he did cancel a similar effort in Baltimore (which the new Governor wants to revive, 8 years later). And came up with the design-finance-build program to get some of the money to build it. But this added great complexity. And a general unwillingness by both sides to act as partners ("A Purple Line update: the downside of Public Private Partnerships" -- they are contracts, not partnerships," 2017), ended up with the original contractor bailing out, leading to even more delays.
But the Post thinks Hogan would make a decent President ("Larry Hogan won over Democrats in Maryland. Could he do it nationwide?"). When, Hogan sucked on most of the issues that matter to urbanites, especially transit (+ spending $8 million on covid tests from South Korea that didn't work).
The Post is acting like the Takoma Park resident who wrote a letter to the editor stating he'd be voting against all the politicians in office because of the failures in building the Purple Line, even though all the failures are basically the fault of the former Governor, not local elected officials, not state legislators.
Labels: electoral politics and influence, political institutions, public private partnerships (3P), transit infrastructure, transportation planning
posted by Richard Layman @ 1:29 PM&Permanent Link
2 Comments:
https://www.ft.com/content/ae2a6f5a-68e9-43a1-b313-1664c91e0287
The Big Con — the case against consultancies
2/13/2023
Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington’s polemic on the need to draw a boundary between state and private activity — and rebuild public sector capability
Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour.
https://www.ft.com/content/ae2a6f5a-68e9-43a1-b313-1664c91e0287?desktop=true&segmentId=0e5502c2-a654-17b7-29eb-3bb1c22ff1ba#myft:notification:daily-empty-email:content
What do these many sorry tales tell us about the consultancy business? The economics of asymmetric information — whereby the hapless official can never know as much as the smarty-pants consultancy — and the principal-agent problem of conflicting interests (neither idea is cited in the book) would argue for outsourcing only activities that can be monitored.
Nobel laureate Oliver Hart and his co-authors argued in 1997, for instance, against privatising prisons, due to the perverse effects of the profit motive and the contracting authority’s inability to monitor the quality of the service provided. Apply this to NHS hospitals, and it would point to outsourcing routine procedures such as those cataract operations but not cleaning hospitals. After all, bugs suchs as MRSA are invisible unless you’re especially looking for them.
Similarly, IT systems should be kept in house because nobody can tell how effectively they operate until they are up and running, and even then problems might take years to come to light. What can’t be easily monitored needs to be done by those whose primary motivation is something other than cutting costs and maximising profits — public service, for example.
Sometimes the sensible boundary between public and private will shift because of technology. This was the case with payroll outsourcing for example: advances in computers and software made it genuinely more efficient to use external suppliers. And people generally will spot if they are getting the wrong amount of pay. A similar debate could be had about what else the NHS could sensibly outsource to specialist providers or pharmacies, given the many advances in medical procedures over the decades, although it is obviously too politically polarising to happen.
Where The Big Con is spot on is in noting how hard it is to wind the clock back: “Often the capabilities for managing the delivery of a service in-house would be completely lost after they had been outsourced, and so the costs of re-insourcing were very great.” Thus the same names keep winning new government contracts despite the various scandals. Among the book’s recommendations, those concerning rebuilding those capabilities in the public sector look rather forlorn as this would involve significant cost and time in hiring and rebuilding skills and knowhow.
The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington, Allen Lane £25, 368 pages
https://www.thebanner.com/community/transportation/purple-line-maryland-YU3R6HBEIFD4VA7XZVSD36ZELQ
Between boon and boondoggle, the Purple Line winds toward completion
When the Purple Line got greenlit more than a decade ago, plans called for the 16-mile, 21-station light rail traversing Montgomery and Prince George’s counties to open in 2022.
Then the tumult began: court cases, delays, construction firms walking away from the job, even a global pandemic.
“We are 80% complete with construction,” Doran Bosso, CEO of the consortium of private companies leading the project, said to a crowd in Prince George’s County last month. “It’s been a long time coming.”
There’s no single reason or scapegoat for the delays and cost overruns, though blame easily spreads around. It’s not all former Gov. Larry Hogan’s fault. There’s also the first contractor, the community activists, the amphipods and inflation.
Never mind the sheer complexity of building a new rail line through developed suburbs, the University of Maryland, and urban areas like Bethesda and Silver Spring. Twenty-six bridges; 32 miles of steel rail; 18 miles of gas, water and utility relocations; more than 300 active subcontracts; all while navigating multiple governments, regulatory agencies, and corporate and community interests.
The first is an age-old adage: Time is money.
Any delay — caused by a lawsuit, or poor planning, or a governor taking a second look at blueprints, or COVID-19 — drives up costs. Materials get more expensive. People stay on payrolls longer.
For example, the project initially budgeted about $6 million for permitting and legal fees. After two critical lawsuits and needing to renegotiate a major contract, roughly $800 million has been spent on such endeavors, according to a March report by the state comptroller’s office.
The National Environmental Policy Act requires big projects go through extensive assessments — impacts to air and water quality, and more — that can take years and cost millions of dollars. Projects can’t get approved unless federal officials decide the benefits outweigh the costs.
But the plaintiffs — as others have with past projects all over the country — turned it into a cudgel against the project.
NEPA “was a great idea at the time,” said Beth Osbourne, director of think tank Transportation For America. Before it was signed into law in 1970, the federal government supported projects, particularly highways, that bulldozed communities or went through vulnerable areas. The law was designed to prevent that.
In practice today, Osbourne said, NEPA often slows the development of and even kills transit projects that could be considered environmental wins for taking cars off the road or spurring more housing density.
The amphipod lawsuit resulted in 266 days of delay, adding more than $130 million in costs, and the MTA caused a further 79 days of delay by failing to get right-of-way permits in time, adding $90 million, according to the builder, Purple Line Transit Constructors.
Design elements imposed by freight railroad CSX where the Purple Line paralleled its tracks: 161 days and another $130 million. Issues with stormwater and culvert design that the Maryland Department of the Environment claimed violated code: 470 days and $168 million.
Post a Comment
<< Home