P.G.-Montgomery Co. rail project drawing more interest than Baltimore’s

The proposed Purple Line that would link Prince George’s and Montgomery counties has generated more interest as a public-private partnership candidate than Baltimore‘s Red Line, a top state transportation official said Thursday.

“The Purple Line looks very good. I haven’t gotten a negative comment about the Purple Line as a public-private partnership,” said Leif A. Dormsjo, the Maryland Department of Transportation’s acting deputy secretary. “Maybe elements of the Red Line make sense as a P3, [but] maybe not the whole project.”

Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown said Thursday the state still planned to build the two projects at the same time, with projected openings in 2020 or 2021. But it’s unclear what the Purple Line’s better standing for a long-term lease and construction agreement with a private company would have on the two projects’ timeline.

The mass transit systems — which combined are expected to cost about $5 billion — are the top transportation projects in the state’s construction queue. Both are competing for money from the Federal Transit Administration, which could match about 50 percent of total construction costs. The state has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars planning both projects.

“It is possible, maybe even likely, that the federal government will make a decision it will only move forward with one of those two projects,” Brown said.

Brown and Dormsjo made their comments while addressing members of the construction industry at a meeting of the Maryland chapter of the Associated General Contractors of America, who met at the Embassy Suites Baltimore in Linthicum Heights to hear about the new public-private partnership procurement law passed by the General Assembly and signed by Gov. Martin O’Malley this year.

There has long been doubt that there would be enough federal and local money to build the two light rail projects at the same time, but the streamlined public-private partnership law — meant to formalize and make more predictable a procurement practice already occasionally used by the state — was supposed to drum up enough private investment to help address that concern.

The Purple Line is a $2.15 billion, 16-mile, east-west light rail line that would connect New Carrollton in Prince George’s County with Bethesda in Montgomery County.

The Red Line is a $2.6 billion, 14.1-mile, east-west light rail line that would connect Woodlawn in Baltimore County with the Johns Hopkins Bayview medical campus in East Baltimore.

Brown and transportation officials have hosted two information sessions for members of the transportation and construction industry — one for the Purple Line and one for the Red Line.

The state has not yet decided whether it would seek such a deal for either transit line, but Brown said this week he’d like Maryland to enter into “three to five” public-private partnerships a year. He also said the Red Line did not have to be one of those deals.

Significant administrative work needs to be completed up and down the state bureaucracy before such decisions can be made. The Department of Transportation submitted a set of draft public-private partnership regulations for review by the governor on Wednesday, Dormsjo said.

Michael A. Gaines Sr., assistant secretary in charge of real estate for the state Department of General Services, said DGS regulations would be completed within the next few months.

O’Malley is also expected to issue an executive order detailing how agencies would work together to evaluate potential public-private partnerships. Brown said he hoped that would happen within a few weeks.