Saturday, March 31, 2007

Contract Set for Rail Line To Dulles

Prospects Look Dim For Plan to Tunnel Beneath Tysons Corner

By Bill Turque Saturday, March 31, 2007; Page B01; Washington Post Staff Writer

Virginia transportation officials announced an agreement yesterday with a private contractor to begin construction of Metro’s expansion to Dulles International Airport next spring, delivering a possibly fatal blow to a group of Northern Virginia residents and businesses who had sought to change the plan so that the elevated segment through Tysons Corner would run underground.

The deal, struck by the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation and Dulles Transit Partners, a construction consortium headed by Bechtel Inc., concluded weeks of contentious closed-door negotiations to contain the cost of the project so that it would qualify for federal money. Talks stalled so seriously at one point that state officials set an April 5 deadline.

The intensive bargaining still leaves the final price tag unclear. State officials had indicated that design and construction would be done for a “fixed price.” But yesterday’s accord offers only an estimate: between $2.4 billion and $2.7 billion for the first phase of the project, from a point just east of West Falls Church to Wiehle Avenue in Reston.

Only $1.1 billion of that is a fixed price payable to Dulles Transit Partners. The balance is far from settled. That includes $900 million in federal funding officials expect to secure after they submit their final application to the Federal Transit Administration in May. The rest will come from property owners along the rail line — pending approval by the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors — and Northern Virginia commuters who use the Dulles Toll Road every day. Any overruns would also be covered by toll payments from motorists.

Serious obstacles remain to be cleared before the first shovel of dirt is turned. The Federal Transit Administration, which sets what it calls “cost-effectiveness” criteria for funding of local transit projects, said in a statement late yesterday afternoon that the delay in reaching an agreement “significantly impacted” the schedule the state agreed to last fall.

The agency also said that given “the many uncertainties” that the project has faced, it will seek an independent review of the financial plan before it approves any funding. Officials offered no timetable for the review.

State officials expressed confidence that they will meet any federal concerns about the project’s cost.

“We welcome the review of the Dulles project’s budget by an independent entity that FTA will appoint, and we will work with FTA to help keep this project on schedule,” said Marcia McAllister, a spokeswoman for the Dulles project.

A coalition of Fairfax officials, business leaders and residents pressed hard during the past year to reopen the project’s design for inclusion of a tunnel under Tysons Corner. Advocates said that the current plan for an elevated track, with concrete pillars as high as six stories going down Route 7, will hinder the area’s evolution into a mature urban center. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) seriously entertained the tunnel idea last year until he was warned by federal transit officials and Northern Virginia congressmen that reopening the project placed federal funding at risk.

The pro-tunnel group, TysonsTunnel.org, lobbied state and local officials assiduously, even commissioning a $3.5 million engineering study showing that an underground rail line was economically and technically feasible.

But as a practical matter, the one remaining opening for the tunnel was the possibility that the state and the contractors would not be able to get the price under the federal threshold with an aboveground design. That would have sent the entire project back to square one and created an opening for a redesign that included a tunnel.

Yesterday’s announcement would seem to have shut the last remaining door on the tunnel plan.

“This is both good news and bad news,” Fairfax County Board Chairman Gerald E. Connolly (D) said of the agreement. “The good news is that it’s a milestone for moving the project forward. The bad news is that it makes the incline for the tunnel this much steeper.”

Still, Connolly and other tunnel advocates were not willing to concede defeat. Scott Monnett, president of TysonsTunnel.org, said in a statement yesterday that with only $1.1 billion of the project under a fixed price, the current $2.4 billion to $2.7 billion estimate “becomes a floor upon which the contractor can extract higher prices at a later date.”

“That is not the proper way to procure a multibillion-dollar public project,” Monnett said

The estimated total cost, which could reach $2.7 billion, is considerably higher than the $2.1 billion cited just a few months ago. It also exceeds estimates for building the extension with a tunnel under Tysons, which run from $2 billion to $2.5 billion.

State rail director Matthew Tucker dismissed the tunnel estimates as unrefined and uninformed and said that proposal has not gone through the “rigorous analysis” the current plan has faced. “No one knows what the price will be for the tunnel,” Tucker said.

Other Fairfax officials said they had many questions about the accord before they were prepared to sign off.

“Where’s the firm and fixed price?” asked Supervisor T. Dana Kauffman (D-Lee), an outspoken advocate for the tunnel. “Less than half of it is firm and fixed.”

Kauffman expressed concern that as the plan is currently constituted, escalating costs would force Dulles Transit Partners to drop key pedestrian-friendly features from the project, such as walkways. As it stands, Kauffman said, he will vote against approval.

“I can go along with a budget, I can hold my nose on a land use-case, but I can’t ignore the multiple-decade impact of not doing the right or cost-conscious thing on the biggest capital project our county is likely to ever see,” he said.

Escalating costs remain a major concern. Over the past three years, the price of construction materials and components has increased 22 percent. By the end of this year, material costs could rise again at a rate between 6 and 8 percent, said Kenneth Simonson, chief economist for the Associated General Contractors of America.

Staff writers Amy Gardner and Alec MacGillis contributed to this report.

Posted by M at 18:10:33 | Permalink | No Comments »

Fast-growing Phoenix, beset by dirty air, targets construction in cleanup plan

Maricopa County has proposed 41 air-clearing measures – from banning leaf blowers to requiring ‘dust managers’ on job sites.
By Faye Bowers| Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor; March 30, 2007
PHOENIX

A new plan to clear the skies in the Phoenix area, which has some of the dirtiest air in the nation, calls for major shifts in the way people here live and do business.

Cozy wood-burning fires? Not a good idea, because of the soot.

Leaf blowers? Verboten, at least on “bad air” days. They kick up dust.

 

And on construction sites where more than 50 acres of land will be disturbed, someone there must be the designated “dust manager.”

Those are three on a list of 41 measures that may soon be required of businesses and residents in Phoenix, Scottsdale, Mesa, and other communities within America’s fastest-growing county. More measures may be added in the months ahead, but that’s the blueprint as of Wednesday evening, when the regional Maricopa Association of Governments (MAG) approved the cleanup plan.

Maricopa County is only the second locale in the US to have the dubious distinction of being listed on the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Five Percent Plan – a move that triggered the need for a cleanup plan. The EPA tagged the county at the end of 2006, after pollution from particulates – known to experts as “fugitive dust” – exceeded the emissions standard for two years running. In 2005, the area had 19 days over the federal limit; in 2006, it broke that record with 27 days over the limit.

Under the Five Percent Plan, Maricopa County must cut its particulate emissions by 5 percent a year, until it reaches the federal standard of 150 micrograms of fugitive dust per cubic meter of air, as measured within a 24-hour period. That means 4,594 fewer tons of airborne dust each year until at least 2009.

The plan MAG has put forward concentrates on construction-related activities – for good reason, experts say.

“Construction sites contribute most of the particles into the atmosphere,” says Joe Fernando, a professor at Arizona State University in Tempe who works on particle dispersion problems. “It is realistic [and] possible to reduce those.”

The good news is that California’s San Joaquin Valley, the other region to fall under the Five Percent Plan because of particulate matter, has shown that dust-reduction measures can work. Moreover, the topography there resembles that of metropolitan Phoenix – a valley surrounded by mountains that trap the dirty air within.

In 2002, the San Joaquin Valley was required to submit to the EPA a plan to reduce airborne particulates by 5 percent a year, says Jaime Holt, public information administrator in Fresno for the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District. After finding that the San Joaquin Valley reached its goals in 2003, 2004, and 2005, the EPA in October 2006 said the valley attained standards for particulates.

The district’s cleanup program included an intensive public-education campaign through the media, says Ms. Holt. “One of our initial strategies was to regulate fugitive dust – dust kicked up during agricultural or construction operations – like, 30 various things,” she says. “On the individual level … on certain days in winter when the air-quality index is over 150, we prohibit residential wood-burning.”

MAG’s measures appear to be similar. The top two involve public education and training programs. Some address unpaved roads, unpaved parking lots, and vacant lots where, when the earth is disturbed, dust particles can be carried aloft by the wind. Others address equipment used to move sand and gravel, and how they should operate. Still others deal with the use of all terrain vehicles, leaf blowers, and wood-burning stoves. Moreover, Maricopa County has hired an official involved in San Joaquin Valley’s pollution-abatement effort.

A key, though, will be enforcement of any new measures, says Joe Anderson of Arizona State University, an expert on air-quality issues. “One of the biggest problems in [Maricopa] county has been a complete lack of enforcement. It’s mostly about the political will to do what’s needed.”

The area’s air-quality plan is still a work in progress. Maricopa County needs to submit to the EPA a comprehensive plan to reduce fugitive dust by the end of the year, and the EPA would have to sign off on it before measures would go into effect.

The stakes are significant. If the county doesn’t meet these requirements, it faces sanctions – potentially losing some $1.1 billion in federal highway grants.

The measures MAG approved on Wednesday will now be distributed to local governments within the regional council, such as the cities of Phoenix, Scottsdale, Mesa, and others. Those governments have until June 15 to agree to the measures or offer changes.

“Once they approve it, it becomes legally binding,” says Kelly Taft, MAG spokeswoman.

If the cities or other local governments offer changes, those will be incorporated by MAG’s air-quality technical advisory team, which runs computer models to determine if the measures will decrease airborne particulates to the required level, says Ms. Taft. The bottom line is that the plan MAG offers the EPA in December 2007 must guarantee a 5 percent reduction in particles per year, beginning in 2008.

Posted by M at 05:00:49 | Permalink | No Comments »

Moves to save the not-so-blue Danube

An environmental group has listed the opaque, brown river as one of the world’s 10 most threatened.

By Colin Woodard | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor; World > Europe; from the March 30, 2007 edition

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BUDAPEST, HUNGARY - When Johann Strauss gazed upon Europe’s grandest waterway 140 years ago, it inspired him to compose the Blue Danube Waltz, went on to become an unofficial anthem of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Today, the river that flows beneath the bridges of the Hungarian capital is anything but blue. Befouled with sewage, fertilizers, and industrial waste, the opaque, brown Danube has become a drainage canal for half a continent, so poisonous that it has devastated life in the Black Sea, which lies at the end of the 1,800-mile long river.

Last week, the Switzerland-based environmental group WWF-International (a branch of the World Wildlife Fund) named the Danube one of the world’s 10 most threatened rivers, along withthe Yangtze, Nile, Ganges, and Rio Grande.

“Some of the rivers on the list are so damaged that they may really be lost, but others are in a better state and could still be saved if correct action is taken,” says Christine Bratrich of WWF’s Vienna-based Danube-Carpathian Programme. “The Danube still has the potential to be preserved.”

More than 80 percent of the Danube’s floodplains and wetlands have been lost to development and navigational projects, exterminatingthe river’s sturgeon stocks and lowering water quality in the main channel. Extensive sewage and agricultural pollution – particularly in the former Communist nations of the middle and lower basin – triggered algae blooms that snuffed out much of the life in the Black Sea in the early 1990s.

Solving these problems is complicated by the fact that the Danube basin is shared by 19 countries. Cooperation on environmental issues was all but impossible during the cold war, which divided the basin in two, and little better in the 1990s, when the Yugsolav wars turned swaths of it into a battleground.

The past five years have seen considerable progress, however, as the European Union – with its strict environmental regulations – has expanded to include Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and other nations located in the middle and lower basin.

“When these countries joined the EU, they also had to adopt new environmental policies and regulations, which has had the benefit of improving the overall water quality situation in the Danube basin,” says Ivan Zavadsky, director of the Danube/Black Sea Regional Program in Vienna, a joint project of the United Nations and World Bank that has pumped $70 million into cleanup projects in the region.

New sewage treatment plants have been built in recent years, while many of the most polluting factories and agricultural enterprises collapsed in the early 1990s. As a result, Mr. Zavadsky notes, concentrations of phosphorus and nitrogen – the nutrients that ravaged the Black Sea – have gone down 50 percent and 20 percent respectively since 1989.

“We’re witnessing the first signs of a recovery of the Black Sea ecosystem,” Zavadsky says. “But the situation remains on a knife’s edge.”

János Zlinszky of the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe is concerned that the gains could be lost if the region’s economic recovery outpaces its environmental investments. “Romania and Bulgaria have just joined the EU,” he says – which means they no longer face the EU’s tough agricultural trade barriers. “If they decide to focus on intensive agriculture rather than the organic market, we could see great increases in fertilizer and pesticide use.”

WWF’s primary concern is an EU plan to improve navigation on the middle and lower Danube, an effort they say will destroy some of the last ecologically sound portions of the river. “They want to make the Danube into a ‘highway to the sea’ but they are not taking into account how it will affect the ecological status of the river,” Ms. Bratrich says. “We shouldn’t make the same mistakes in the lower Danube that we [Western European nations] made in the upper stretch.”

 

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