In Maryland, the line between boon and boondoggle may be purple.

When the Purple Line got greenlit more than a decade ago, plans called for the 16-mile, 21-station light rail traversing Montgomery and Prince George’s counties to open in 2022.

Then the tumult began: court cases, delays, construction firms walking away from the job, even a global pandemic.

The ribbon cutting for the first expansion of the Maryland Transit Administration’s system in more than three decades won’t come until late 2027 and at an estimated building cost of $5.6 billion. The total cost of $9.5 billion, including the contract to operate the light rail, is nearly $4 billion more than the original price. But the Purple Line finally seems on track.

“We are 80% complete with construction,” Doran Bosso, CEO of the consortium of private companies leading the project, said to a crowd in Prince George’s County last month. “It’s been a long time coming.”

There’s no single reason or scapegoat for the delays and cost overruns, though blame easily spreads around. It’s not all former Gov. Larry Hogan’s fault. There’s also the first contractor, the community activists, the amphipods and inflation.

Never mind the sheer complexity of building a new rail line through developed suburbs, the University of Maryland, and urban areas like Bethesda and Silver Spring. Twenty-six bridges; 32 miles of steel rail; 18 miles of gas, water and utility relocations; more than 300 active subcontracts; all while navigating multiple governments, regulatory agencies, and corporate and community interests.

Something was bound to go wrong.

In many ways, the Purple Line is a victim of a circumstantial tsunami, and offers a case study in how the United States struggles to build public transit. With the end in sight, the lessons of the Purple Line are starting to materialize.

The first is an age-old adage: Time is money.

Any delay — caused by a lawsuit, or poor planning, or a governor taking a second look at blueprints, or COVID-19 — drives up costs. Materials get more expensive. People stay on payrolls longer.

For example, the project initially budgeted about $6 million for permitting and legal fees. After two critical lawsuits and needing to renegotiate a major contract, roughly $800 million has been spent on such endeavors, according to a March report by the state comptroller’s office.

Decades in the making

The Washington Metro subway system sprawls out of D.C. like an octopus into suburban Maryland and Virginia, offering commuters access in and out of the nation’s capital. But the system doesn’t connect those suburbs well.

Planners tossed around ideas to link them via a transit line looping D.C. like the Capital Beltway.

While other plans sputtered, Maryland leaders got behind a line connecting Bethesda with New Carrollton. After years of engineering and environmental planning, the Federal Transit Administration officially approved plans and funding for the Purple Line in 2014.

Soon after, the state requested bids to design, build, operate and maintain the Purple Line under a new contracting model for Maryland. The year before, then-Gov. Martin O’Malley signed a law authorizing the use of public-private partnerships, commonly called P3s, which his administration hoped would build big projects more effectively by relying on the private-sector expertise of companies motivated by their financial stake in them.

Hogan, a Republican who took office in 2015, was skeptical of both the Purple Line and Baltimore’s proposed Red Line, which also received federal approval. He paused both projects to reassess and, a year later, canceled the Red Line but moved forward with the Purple Line while seeking to trim its costs.

In early 2016, the state inked deals with multiple business consortiums — one that would become Purple Line Transit Partners, which would direct financing and be considered the private-sector lead, one that would design and build the line, and another to operate it later.

Construction began in 2017, but the U.S.-based builder pulled out in 2020, citing soaring costs, and forcing the state to take over utility relocation and find a new builder.

Hogan’s administration eventually found a second builder in early 2022, a new consortium called Maryland Transit Solutions involving experienced transit builders from Spain.

Since then, the project team has returned to the state’s spending board multiple times to request hundreds of millions in spending increases, costs driven largely by inflation and supply chain disruptions caused by the pandemic.

Save the amphipods

Hogan was not the first to hold the Purple Line up — its first major battle began before he took office, not long after it got federal approval.

The spark was a nearly invisible crustacean.

Two Chevy Chase residents teamed up with an advocacy group for the Capital Crescent Trail, the Montgomery County multi-use path with which the Purple Line would share land. In an August 2014 suit, they claimed that the federal approval didn’t comply with environmental laws. The Purple Line, the suit said, “will have severe adverse direct and cumulative impacts on wildlife, biodiversity, the environment, and the aesthetic enjoyment” of nearby parks.

The primary victims, the complaint said, were “two critically imperiled shrimp-like species called amphipods.” The plaintiffs described how the presence of the colorless, 10-millimeter creatures inhabiting the area helped foster their ”very special and unique bond” with the trail.

“It was NIMBYism at its height,” said Ralph Bennett, an early Purple Line advocate and a former University of Maryland professor, referring to the phrase “not in my backyard.”

The complaint evolved over time. Plaintiffs questioned ridership projections and looked for more holes in the environmental impact study, while the state and FTA stood by their work.

“They [plaintiffs] had the money to stall the project for a year, and they did ... that has to do with democracy, unfortunately,” Bennett said.

In America, even crustaceans get their day in court.

A federal judge vacated the FTA’s approval, despite the state’s claims that doing so threatened the project. It remained on hold for nearly a year.

The National Environmental Policy Act requires big projects go through extensive assessments — impacts to air and water quality, and more — that can take years and cost millions of dollars. Projects can’t get approved unless federal officials decide the benefits outweigh the costs.

But the plaintiffs — as others have with past projects all over the country — turned it into a cudgel against the project.

NEPA “was a great idea at the time,” said Beth Osbourne, director of think tank Transportation For America. Before it was signed into law in 1970, the federal government supported projects, particularly highways, that bulldozed communities or went through vulnerable areas. The law was designed to prevent that.

In practice today, Osbourne said, NEPA often slows the development of and even kills transit projects that could be considered environmental wins for taking cars off the road or spurring more housing density.

One result, she said: a country with many fledgling transit lines, and highways sprawling everywhere, environmentalism be damned.

“I would argue that we have different questions now,” Osbourne said. “We need to find a modern way to address things based on what we’ve learned.”

A public-private parting

Hogan’s team held an official groundbreaking ceremony in August 2017, not long after an appeals court overturned the judge’s ruling on the environmental issue.

But growing delays and costs added up.

The amphipod lawsuit resulted in 266 days of delay, adding more than $130 million in costs, and the MTA caused a further 79 days of delay by failing to get right-of-way permits in time, adding $90 million, according to the builder, Purple Line Transit Constructors.

Design elements imposed by freight railroad CSX where the Purple Line paralleled its tracks: 161 days and another $130 million. Issues with stormwater and culvert design that the Maryland Department of the Environment claimed violated code: 470 days and $168 million.

The builder said in 2020 that it tried to work things out with the state, even offering to build the project at cost. Unable to reach an agreement on $800 million in added costs, the consortium triggered a contract clause allowing it to drop the project if delays caused by the state reached a year or more.

The state rejected the idea that the design-builder could simply walk away, arguing there was a formal dispute process that the design-builder needed to follow.

Back to court.

Public-private partnerships can be a great tool when used correctly, said Lisa Buglione, executive director of the Association for the Improvement of American Infrastructure. They shift project risk from the public sector to the private side, where companies can be better equipped to mitigate it, she explained.

But the free market also introduced risk to the Purple Line.

The original $2.2 billion construction contract turned out to be massively underbid, current and former state officials said. After the work began, a fuller picture of the utility relocations, the permitting and the delays turned what the builder saw as a profitable venture into a money loser.

The state and the builder ultimately settled, with the state coughing up $250 million. The MTA took over more than 100 subcontracts and construction sites to keep the project moving, while seeking a new builder.

With the pandemic upending supply chains and an accurate scope of the work coming into focus, the state approved a new $3.4 billion design-build contract in 2022 with Maryland Transit Solutions.

The builder issues all happened under Hogan’s watch, which made him an easy scapegoat for some.

While the buck needs to stop somewhere, perhaps a political lesson emerges: Long-term projects must rise above partisan administration changes, with support from a strong coalition, including business community buy-in, the lack of which, some say, doomed Baltimore’s Red Line.

But as the Purple Line teetered on disaster, Hogan never wavered — his administration could have pulled the plug, but instead carried it through.

Hogan did not respond to The Banner’s request for an interview. But when campaigning for a U.S. Senate seat last year, he called the Purple Line “transformative.”

“The delay and the cost and the reason it’s not done had nothing to do with the public-private partnership. It had to do with frivolous lawsuits,” he said.

It doesn’t help that the U.S. doesn’t build transit often, Osbourne said. Projects happen so infrequently that staff are often inexperienced. The MTA, where officials have complained for years of understaffing, hasn’t delivered a new transit line since Baltimore’s Light Rail in the 1990s.

More than transportation

When Rushern Baker drives through Greenbelt, the ongoing Purple Line construction makes him reflective.

“I can’t believe this is actually happening,” he said.

Baker has been involved with the Purple Line for roughly 30 years, back to when he was a state delegate and it was just an idea. Later, he was Prince George’s county executive when it launched.

He’s always seen it as more than a transportation project. And he wasn’t alone.

“It’s not just getting people from A to B,” said Gerrit-Jan Knaap, a University of Maryland professor and former director of the school’s Smart Growth Center.

Knaap and other advocates argue that the project’s success shouldn’t just be measured by whether it gets cars off roads.

“This is as much an investment in urban fabric as it is a transportation mode,” he said. “The idea is to create a more livable and inclusive and sustainable urban environment.”

Changes are evident already.

Developers are eyeing the areas around future Purple Line stations for mixed-use projects, encouraged by a state effort to promote housing and development around transit. Pushed by the Purple Line Corridor Coalition’s advocacy, project officials agreed to a community development agreement aimed at combating gentrification and addressing affordability.

That’s happening as one of Maryland’s richest jurisdictions debates housing and land use.

Polling commissioned by The Banner shows that only 25% of Montgomery County residents have a favorable view of housing availability there.

Respondents split evenly on a question about changing residential zoning to allow for more multi-family dwellings in a county dominated by single-family homes, with many unsure of where they stand.

“If they don’t want to see growth in the places that already have the opportunities and the jobs, it means it’s going to go beyond us and those people will still have to go through us,” said Barbara Sanders, who has lived on the outskirts of Silver Spring since 1979.

Even if the population stagnates, traffic won’t get better unless people drive less. The Purple Line could enable households to go from two cars to one, Sanders said, or allow new residents to move without a car at all.

That changes the way people live and interact in their community.

Soon enough, her “neighborhood of walkers” will become better connected, and businesses that have endured years of disruptions may have access to more patrons. She’s part of roughly half of Montgomery County residents who believe, the Banner poll shows, that the Purple Line will be worth it.

Sanders plans to use the Purple Line to run errands, go see shows, visit her son.

“I can’t wait,” she said.

Banner reporter Justin Fenton contributed to this article.

The article has been updated to correct the name of the National Environmental Policy Act.