The deficit in the Maryland Department of Transportation’s draft six-year capital spending plan, released Tuesday, isn’t as scary as last year’s multibillion-dollar figure. But it will still require putting some plans on hold.
The mammoth document, updated every year, is a compilation of ongoing and future projects that charts the course for the transportation department’s spending and is approved by the state legislature during its General Assembly. It includes money that will funnel to every sub-agency for initiatives that range from repaving airport runways and purchasing buses to repairing roads and engineering tunnel plans.
The department is facing a roughly $1.3 billion gap over that timespan, said Maryland Transportation Secretary Paul Wiedefeld during a recent roundtable with reporters, as it continues to wrestle with inflation and increasing operations costs. Structural factors choked off some revenue streams. But the department also found about $1.8 billion in new revenues thanks to legislative changes that helped minimize the gap.
It all adds up to nearly $19 billion worth of work over six years. Here’s how they made it all work.
1. Hitting pause on certain projects
If there aren’t already shovels in the ground, there’s a chance they’ll stay out of the dirt for even longer. Wiedefeld and his team will hit pause on certain major projects that are currently in pre-construction phases. They’ll do so at a “logical defer point.”
“Some of those projects are in different levels of study, so we want to make sure that they stop at a point where we don’t lose any of the effort that we had done,” Wiedefeld said.
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A little more than $672 million will be deferred for the Maryland Transit Administration. Most of that is wrapped up in delaying the electrification of the bus fleet, but it also means waiting to replace the light rail tracks on Howard Street.
Some big-ticket projects with marquee federal assistance like Amtrak’s Frederick Douglass Tunnel in West Baltimore and the renovation of CSX’s Howard Street Tunnel will continue unscathed, Wiedefeld said. The department will look for those same defer points on the thousands of smaller projects planned out in the program, as well.
The State Highway Administration is poised to feel the biggest hit, Wiedefeld said, in part because the department doesn’t have the state funds necessary to “unlock” as much federal matching funds as it has historically. It will have to defer more than $1.7 billion over six years, including nearly $800 million for rehabbing and resurfacing roads and bridges.
Even still, SHA remains the largest single recipient of dollars over the six-year span, accounting for 34.3% of the program. It’s also poised to receive a little more than $4 billion from the federal government, roughly 60% of all federal aid going to the department.
2. Operations > state-of-good-repair
Last year, Wiedefeld proposed operations cuts that would have made changes including eliminating some commuter bus routes and scaling back hours at the Motor Vehicle Administration as a way to address a big shortfall.
That’s not happening this year, he said, thanks to the $1.8 billion in new revenues. That’s particularly salient in a post-Key Bridge Baltimore where rush-hour traffic has gotten worse for some, and the state is encouraging the use of MARC trains and other modes of transit as a way to get cars off the road. It also will keep grass mowing and litter removal humming at the State Highway Administration, and grants for local jurisdictions for their own transit systems and road repair intact.
But key maintenance initiatives to maintain a “state-of-good-repair” across the agency’s portfolio of assets will take a hit.
If a train or road isn’t in a state-of-good-repair, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s unsafe or unusable. And it’s normal for a transportation department not to be able to keep all of its assets in such a state all at once. It’s a balancing act, Wiedefeld said, as the department prioritizes the most pressing needs before others. And all initiatives directly concerning safety will move forward, he said.
Though 35% of the six-year program will go to state-of-good-repair, it’s still short of filling all the needs. The department won’t be able to meet the minimum threshold set by state lawmakers for maintenance and rehab at the Maryland Transit Administration, which is facing a growing, multibillion-dollar backlog of such work. Wiedefeld said that’s something his department will need to work out with the legislature.
And riders are feeling it. The light rail has struggled to come back in full force since its two-week December shutdown. The MTA was awarded a federal grant earlier this year to cover much of the cost of new railcars, but it will be years before new cars replace the aging ones due to the procurement timeline.
Last week, advocacy organization the Central Maryland Transportation Alliance sent a letter to the agency expressing concern that the existing rail cars may not make it that long and asked for a detailed status report on all of the existing rail cars.
3. The Red Line and Purple Line stay on track
Construction, though delayed, is well underway on the Purple Line, a light rail system in Prince George’s and Montgomery counties just outside Washington, D.C. — as a continuing project, its funding isn’t in jeopardy. Though once mired in a chaotic public-private partnership, the agency anticipates riders can board the future light rail in the winter of 2027.
Further north, there still aren’t shovels in the ground for Baltimore’s east-west Red Line, which Gov. Wes Moore announced in June would be a light rail. But the department will keep all the money for pre-construction planning.
“We’re continuing to do that work to basically position ourselves to get after those large federal dollars,” Wiedefeld said
Officials estimate the Red Line could cost as much as $7.2 billion in total. Construction is still three to four years away. A little more than $158 million is in the six-year plan for design and engineering as the team eyes potential federal grants.
4. The Key Bridge and Bay Bridge study are unaffected
The Maryland Transportation Authority, which owns and operates toll facilities across the state, pays for its own stuff through toll revenue and investments. So they aren’t feeling the same pressures as the rest of the department.
The rebuild of the Francis Scott Key Bridge can proceed without concern; the federal government will likely pay for most of it, if not all. Last week, the MDTA board voted to approve a contract with Kiewit to work alongside agency engineers to make the design of the bridge. The firm, which is also working on a future passenger rail tunnel underneath West Baltimore, will most likely build the bridge.
The authority hasn’t lost sight of an approaching need to replace the aging spans of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, either. It is currently in the midst of environmental reviews of several general proposals for the future bay crossing — it should finish that work and select its preferred option in about two years.
5. Delaying bus electrification
Transportation is the single largest contributor of greenhouse gas pollution in Maryland and across the country. So delaying the MTA’s transition to fully-electric buses could impact Moore’s ambitious climate goals.
The agency rolled out seven zero-emissions buses this February as the first replacements for roughly 800 diesel buses to great fanfare, despite the writing on the wall that a slow transition was coming. The full transition will require massive overhauls at the agency’s four Baltimore bus depots that include building the charging infrastructure to keep them running.
The industry hasn’t evolved at the same pace as the demand, Wiedefeld said — fully electric buses cost about $1.4 million, roughly twice the price as diesel buses.
The Maryland Zero Emission Bus Transition Act, passed in 2021, has prohibited the MTA from making additional purchases of nonelectric buses since mid-2022. But the MTA would have to ask the legislature for reprieve from that law, MTA Administrator Holly Arnold said back in February.
Some federal grants will keep construction and installation going for electric vehicle chargers across the state. In Maryland, 2023 was a record year for EVs, though electric vehicles still only represent 1.5% of cars on the road across the state.
What comes next?
Maryland’s 23 counties and Baltimore City now have a couple of weeks to digest the hundreds of pages in the draft plan and compare it with its own priorities. Each jurisdiction has a chance to comment on and discuss the draft during county-level meetings with Wiedefeld and his staff.
The first such meeting is Sept. 6 when Wiedefeld will address the Baltimore Regional Transit Commission in Locust Point. Dates for future meetings, which do include time for public comment, are listed here.
