Steve Burns
WMAL.com
WASHINGTON – (WMAL) President Trump’s idea to look at privatizing certain public assets in the D.C. region is getting sour reviews from one local Congressman whose district includes some of those assets.
“I always want to have an open mind, but I thought it sounded crazy,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) told WMAL.
The documents released by the administration Monday say certain public assets can be privatized “where the agencies can demonstrate an increase in value from the sale would optimize taxpayer value for Federal assets.” As examples, it lists the George Washington Memorial Parkway, the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, Dulles International Airport and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airports, along with electric transmission infrastructure in Tennessee and Washington state.
Beyer said the only way to make the GW Parkway attractive to a private buyer would be to put tolls on it.
“We’ve already seen how popular the tolls are on I-66,” Beyer said. “It would create enormous bottlenecks, and I just don’t think it would be accepted by the people at all.”
Drivers could also lose the serene, foliage-filled drive if a private buyer decides to build on land adjacent to the highway, he said.
The two airports may not not look too enticing to a private buyer either, he said.
“You look at the difficulty our Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority managing Reagan and Dulles,” he said. “In terms of making the numbers work, Dulles already now is, I guess, the second most expensive airport in the country. What’s the business case for turning them over to the private sector, and somehow making them generate even more revenue?’
Beyer also mentioned Congress’ controls over flight slots at Reagan National, designed to keep plane noise from long-distance jets to a minimum.
“We have the ability in Congress to preserve the Perimeter Rule, to stop new slots,” he said. “If it was privatized, those abilities might go away, in which case the airport noise that we fight every day could get a lot worse.”
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