Maryland officials who had expected to clinch $900 million in federal funding Monday to build the Purple Line will have to wait after a court ruling made the light-rail project temporarily ineligible for federal aid.
The Federal Transit Administration postponed the Monday signing event indefinitely, according to an email Thursday from the Maryland Department of Transportation to people who had been invited to the ceremony.
MDOT had planned to publicly enter into a funding agreement Monday with the FTA, which would have locked in nearly half of the $2 billion project’s construction funding. Such agreements are the result of a years-long quest for highly competitive federal transit aid and are typically signed amid great fanfare.
But a ruling Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon in Washington made the light-rail project ineligible, temporarily at least, for federal money, transit experts said. The judge ordered that the project’s “record of decision” — the federal stamp of approval on the state’s environmental impact study — be vacated, or set aside, until the state recalculates the Purple Line’s ridership forecasts to reflect Metro’s falling ridership.
Click here to read the rest of the article written by Katherine Shaver over at Washington Post