The Maryland Transit Administration will seek approval next month for as much as $425 million in “relief payments” related to delays in the Purple Line light rail project.
Officials announced the extra payments along with a roughly 234-day delay that will push the line’s completion back from spring of 2027 to December of that year.
“The MTA team has been working incredibly hard and over the past year,” Holly Arnold, administrator of the Maryland Transit Administration, said in an interview Friday. “We did complete the utility work. So, October the utility work was completed. December the operations and maintenance facility work was complete. We’re now out of that part of the construction business and so it really is now on the concessionaire and the design builder. But as part of that, we did need to kind of do a final change order to close out that chapter of the project. And so that’s what this is doing now.”
Arnold said Friday the money represents the final payment related to delays in utility work. That work was taken over by the agency in 2020 as the original contractor began to exit from the project, which will connect New Carrollton to Bethesda when it’s completed.
“We made the choice at that time: Let’s keep everything going with this. It’s an important project. We need to keep advancing it,” Arnold said. “We don’t want to let the community sit with it half finished and suffer for two years. And so doing that we did take on a lot of utility work. Which is a risky part of any project.”
Click here to read the rest of the article written by Bryan P. Sears over at Maryland Matters
