John Matthews
WMAL.com
WASHINGTON — (WMAL) Metro officials will be back on Capitol Hill Tuesday to testify before a House Transportation subcommittee about ways to improve safety and reliability on the nation’s transit system.
General Manager Paul Wiedefeld will be among those speaking before the panel, and he’ll no doubt be hoping for a less contentious experience than the one he faced last month, when he and others were forcefully challenged to make drastic changes during a House Oversight Committee.
Rep. John Mica (R-FL), who chaired a meeting on April 13th, told Wiedefeld he needed to hold Metro managers accountable if he hoped to get Congressional support for Metro.
“I wish you well,” Mica told Wiedefeld. “We’ll work with you. You have the money. You need to fire people to get that place in order.”
Wiedefeld has started the cleanup process, firing 20 managers just last week, a third of them working in the rail system.
Metro has long insisted it needs a sustainable dedicated revenue source to keep the transit system operating efficiently, and it has asked Congress to provide help with that.
The federal government does spend $150 million dollars a year on capital projects for Metro – rail cars, infrastructure and the like, but does not contribute to operations – the daily running of the rail system – despite the fact that half of its employees in the capital region use Metro to get to work.
Rather than dividing as usual along party lines, the Metro debate in Congress seems to find its split more between members whose constiuents ride Metro – and those who don’t. Local members are working to get funding any way they can, but Metro’s reputation nationally as a poster child for bureaucratic waste has made it an easy target for out-of-town lawmakers.
Calling Metro “the most screwed-up mess I’ve ever seen in business or government,” Mica told WMATA officials in April, “I’m not going to bail you out. You sure as heck aren’t going to get it out of my folks,” apparently meaning federal taxpayers in his home state of Florida.
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