RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe says he’s asked former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood to conduct a “top-to-bottom” review of the Washington-area’s struggling public transit system, which on Thursday approved fare hikes and service cuts.
McAuliffe said there needs to be an independent assessment of what’s troubling Metro and how much it will cost to fix those problems before substantive improvements can be made.
Virginia is planning to spend $500,000 to $1 million on the study, though McAuliffe said he would welcome assistance from Maryland and the District of Columbia.
“I’m just tired of nothing getting done,” McAuliffe said during an appearance on WTOP-FM radio.
His announcement came a few hours before Metro’s board approved a package of rate increases, service reductions and layoffs that General Manager Paul Wiedefeld said were necessary to balance the budget.
Metro, the nation’s second-busiest transit system, is the only large transit network in the U.S. without a dedicated revenue stream. The District, Maryland and Virginia subsidize the system’s operating budget, but for Metro to get more money, those jurisdictions all have to agree.
Ridership on the system has fallen amid a series of breakdowns, including a January 2015 fire that caused a train to fill with smoke inside a downtown Washington tunnel, killing one passenger and sickening dozens more. Fires on the tracks, often caused by faulty or contaminated insulators protecting the third-rail power cables, have been a recurring problem.
District Mayor Muriel Bowser has said the region needed to agree on a regional sale tax, possibly as low 0.5 percent on retail sales, to give Metro the money it needs to serve a growing population. But McAuliffe and Maryland Republican Gov. Larry Hogan have been cool to the proposal.
On Thursday, Bowser’s chief of staff, John Falcicchio, said District officials were just hearing of McAuliffe’s proposal.
“We will review it and it would be encouraging if it includes a commitment by all jurisdictions to pass a dedicated source of revenue in 2018,” Falcicchio said.
McAuliffe said LaHood, a former Republican congressman who served as secretary of transportation under former President Barack Obama, is uniquely qualified to lead such a review. The governor’s office said the report will be issued in November, two months before McAuliffe is set to leave office.
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Associated Press writer Ben Nuckols contributed to this report from Washington.
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