North route is dealt setback
Federal transit analysts raised serious questions about Miami-Dade's plan for a Metrorail expansion to the Broward County line.
By LARRY LEBOWITZ
llebowitz@MiamiHerald.com
Miami-Dade Transit's proposed Metrorail North Corridor extension up Northwest 27th Avenue to the Broward County border is about to suffer a massive setback.
Federal regulators will announce next week that the North Corridor will no longer qualify for up to $700 million in matching construction funds.
''As it stands now, they would not recommend it to Congress for funding,'' said Assistant County Manager Ysela Llort. ``We have to turn it around.''
After giving the project a ''medium'' rating last year, the Federal Transit Administration will downgrade it to ''medium-low'' -- branding it unworthy of federal funds. Llort described the downgrade as ''a setback, but not a fatal blow'' to a rail plan that has become a rallying point in Miami-Dade's black community for a quarter-century.
Federal analysts say the county hasn't set aside enough money to maintain and modernize the existing Metrorail and bus system -- especially after the new rail corridors come on-line after 2014.
They also believe the county's long-range financial forecasting is unrealistic. One of the tricks that they rejected: Transit boosted its revenues on paper by promising to raise systemwide fares nine times in the next 18 years.
While they ripped the Transit agency as a whole, the federal analysts did not slam technical merits, ridership forecasts or cost-effectiveness of the North Corridor.
It is unclear, at this point, how much the downgrade will delay the aggressive schedule that leaders have been promising to would-be Metrorail riders in North-Central Dade and southwest Broward.
`TERRIBLE NEWS'
The county had been aiming to win matching federal funds by 2009, start construction in 2010 and open the 9.5-mile extension, with seven new stations, by late 2014.
Several county sources said the downgrade could push the timetable back six months to a year -- and maybe longer if they can't persuade the analysts to restore last year's higher rating.
''It's terrible news,'' said Marc Buoniconti, a leader of the citizens watchdog group that oversees county spending of the half-cent sales tax for transit approved by voters in 2002. ``It sets us back how many years on the North? It puts our proposal on the bottom of the stack.''
Buoniconti, however, wasn't surprised by the news out of Washington. He called the county's financial projections ``flawed and inconsistent.''
``It's always been a house of cards ready to fall down.''
Like Buoniconti, federal regulators called Transit to task for balancing the long-range financial plans with unrealistic revenue assumptions -- including 50-cent fare increases in 2009, 2011 and 2013 and then 25-cent hikes every two years through 2025.
The regulators' skepticism is well founded: Reluctant county commissioners have raised fares only once since 1991. And the three 50-cent fare increases through 2013 would mean a 100 percent increase over today's fare.
CRITICAL TIME
This is not new bookkeeping trickery. For several years, Transit has boosted its supposed revenues in long-range planning documents with multiyear fare hikes that never went before commissioners -- and were never approved.
The downgrade comes at a critical time for the North Corridor.
Mistrust is already high in a community that was promised the original Metrorail line in the late 1970s, only to discover that county leaders secretly shifted it west to Hialeah at the eleventh hour.
Last fall, commissioners who represent communities along the corridor, repeatedly pressed new Transit Director Harpal Kapoor to publicly reaffirm that the North Corridor was the agency's No. 1 priority. He did.
Salvage business owner Terence Waldron, who has co-chaired a North Corridor advisory panel since 1996, said the conspiracy theories are already raging.
''It's going to be chaos in the streets,'' said Waldron, who owns a family salvage business on the corridor. ''There are certain elements on the outside [of Transit] who say that certain elements on the inside are trying to kill'' the North Corridor.
MAYOR'S REACTION
Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez insists the county ``remains committed to the North Corridor project.''
''We will continue to work with the FTA to find a way to fund, design and build this much-needed project which is so important to our community,'' Alvarez said in a statement.
A formal announcement is set for Tuesday in Washington when the Federal Transit Administration releases its annual rating of hundreds of subway, train and commuter rail proposals that are vying for a limited pool of matching federal money.
Below is the alignment of the North Corridor with the top of the map being the Broward County boundary & the Dolphins stadium and the bottom merging with the current Metrorail system in the dotted blue line:
This is a serious setback for the county even though there were questions about ridership numbers. The route would have served Miami Dade Community College which has tens of thousands of students as well as the Dolphins Stadium and commuters from south Broward county. The county already owns the right of way too... I swear I don't understand the logic of the Feds sometimes!
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