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A closer look at the MTA’s Red Line jobs-creation report

Gerald Neily 8 months ago, January 7, 2010 View Comments

by GERALD NEILY

There’s some irony to the recent city government report revealed in today’s Sun which trumpets the nearly 10,000 jobs they say would be created by the proposed Red Line east-west transit line project.

An earlier Maryland Transit Administration report, aimed at showing how cost effective the Red Line would be, basically strove to show it would be designed to pay less-than-prevailing wages and attract big national construction firms rather than small local ones. Not such great news for the local workforce.

The piece in today’s Baltimore Sun doesn’t say why the Maryland Transit Administration’s Red Line plan would be any better at creating jobs than any other recycling of $1.6 Billion of the taxpayers’ money back to the region. It’s all part of Baltimore’s fierce competition with the rest of the country, including with the Prince George’s/Montgomery County Purple Line, for federal transit funds.

This competition is why the MTA needs to show it will keep wages down and big-scale efficiency up. To win a 50/50 share of the available federal cash, the MTA must demonstrate that its Red line project would be “cost effective” and avoid cost overruns. This includes a document prepared for the MTA this past August called the “Risk Assessment Report”.

The Risk Assessment documents how the MTA has declined to create a Project Labor Agreement to assure paying prevailing wages, and is also resisting efforts by the Associated General Contractors to minimize the size of contract packages to accommodate small local businesses. The MTA wants to entice big national contractors to save labor costs and red tape associated with more contracts for smaller local contractors.

Meanwhile, what’s really important is to demonstrate that the MTA’s Red Line will create a cogent and comprehensive transit system to foster true long-term re-development, something which in my opinion the MTA has utterly failed to do.

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