Maryland has a lot of rail plans. These bills could finally make some of them reality.

When it comes to transit, Maryland hasn’t been lacking for studies or plans in recent years. Whether it be the MARC Cornerstone Plan of 2019, the 2020 bill to study extending MARC Penn Line service south to Alexandria and north to Newark, Del., the 2021 bill to study extending MARC Brunswick Line service west towards Hagerstown, or Prince George’s County’s 2021 plan to boost transit-oriented development (TOD) around its four Blue Line stations, the state has had no shortage of schemes to expand and improve its rail lines and the development that springs up around them. What by and large those plans and studies have been lacking is any way to turn any of their key ideas into reality. But if a pair of bills currently under consideration in the Maryland General Assembly are any indication, that could soon change.

Much of that change would come from HB 778/SB 514, or the “Maryland Regional Rail Transformation Act” from Del. Jared Solomon (D-Montgomery) and Sen. Pam Beidle (D-Anne Arundel). The bill’s provisions are numerous and wide-ranging, but the key idea of the legislation is having the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) create individual “investment programs” for each of the rail expansions and improvements identified in the MARC Cornerstone Plan and Solomon’s 2020 bill, the MARC Train Expansion of Service Act.

“It’s really requiring MTA to start really putting pen to paper on investment plans in a lot of the expansion pieces that frankly always seem to exist in these big-picture, high-level vision documents but there’s never any detail to it, ” Solomon said. “So what we really want is actual ridership models, we want planning documents, we want stuff to be in the works for a third track on the Brunswick Line or a fourth track on the Penn Line or expansion to Western Maryland, expansion and runthrough service into Delaware and to Virginia, or even just to understand what is it really going to cost.”

As currently written, the Regional Rail Transformation Act calls for the MTA to develop “service operations plans” for those last two projects, as well as completing 30% of the design for a third track on the Brunswick Line between Rockville and Germantown and 15% of the design for a fourth track on the Penn Line. It likewise calls for the MTA to start planning infill stops on the Penn Line at Elkton in Cecil County and Johns Hopkins Bayview Hospital in Southeast Baltimore and facility upgrades at Germantown on the Brunswick Line, where ridership (and parking demand) have long since outstripped capacity. The bill also requires the MTA to hire three new full-time staff members in the next fiscal year for planning and programming so as to ensure the agency has enough staff to leverage the federal funding necessary to complete all of these projects.

Of course, building out a commuter rail system doesn’t mean much for commutes or the climate without building transit-oriented developments (TOD) to accompany that rail. And that’s where the second leg of this regional rail package comes in: the “Equitable and Inclusive Transit–Oriented Development Enhancement Act”, or HB 710/SB 516 from Del. Jazz Lewis and Sen. Malcolm Augustine (Both D-Prince George’s).

HB 710’s provisions are a little more complex than its Senate counterpart but essentially, the bill as it stands as of publication would expand one already existing program, More Jobs for Maryland, to better incentivize TOD, while also creating a new one, the TOD Revolving Grant and Capital Loan Fund.

More Jobs for Marylanders was established in 2017 to promote manufacturing growth in the state, largely through giving tax incentives to manufacturers who move to or expand within Maryland. In 2019, the tax credit part of the program was expanded to include nonmanufacturers who located or expanded within “Opportunity Zones”. HB 710 would expand this provision even further by broadening it to allow nonmanufacturers to invest in Opportunity Zones if they’re also officially designated by the State as TOD zones.

Lewis acknowledged and agreed with the concerns many have raised about Opportunity Zones — namely, that they give tax breaks to developers in areas critics don’t particularly see as disadvantaged. But Lewis said he figured that as long as Opportunity Zones still exist, the state might as well use them to promote TOD, especially if investing in those areas encourages private investors to do the same.

“A lot of folks aren’t fans of Opportunity Zones and I have my own criticisms of them but it is the current law of the land,” Lewis said. “So we need to make sure we are using all the current resources available to us to build investment, particularly in a lot of formerly forgotten communities.”

As of publication, the Senate Budget & Taxation Committee, which was assigned the Senate version of the bill, was considering eliminating the More Jobs For Marylanders provision from the legislation to reduce the bill’s cost but hadn’t yet officially decided whether or not to do so.

At the same time, Lewis said the status quo in Maryland still doesn’t throw enough resources behind TOD. Back in 2008, the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT) designated 17 locations around the state as official “Transit-Oriented Development Sites”, spread across WMATA Metrorail, MTA Baltimore Light Rail, MTA Baltimore Metro Subway, and all three MARC lines, and encouraged developers and local governments to build around those sites. But, Lewis said, what neither the General Assembly nor MDOT has done since then, is put any real “resources” behind the program. And that’s where the other program in Lewis’ bill would come in: a $10 million revolving loan and grant fund to help local municipalities and counties build up the infrastructure around TOD sites across the state like walk paths, dedicated bus lanes, and ride sharing.

One of the rail package’s supporters, Greater Washington Partnership executive Joe McAndrew, said in an interview that by creating a dedicated gap funding source for local governments, HB 710 would also allow them to pursue TOD plans like the one Prince George’s County announced last year for its Blue Line corridor without having to go to the trouble of securing a special one-off program in the state budget.

“The State of Maryland has 100 stations, many of which are underdeveloped,” McAndrew said. “This bill ultimately looks at all of the stations equally and asks folks to go ahead and put in more plans to create community-anchored, transit-oriented development communities through their zoning and other plans and then makes targeted investments to support and catalyze those developments to actually come to fruition.”

That’s not to say that all of the funding for the regional rail package is set, although another bill from one of HB 778’s co-sponsors, Del. Marc Korman (D-Montgomery), HB 1324, does offer an intriguing possibility — that bill would create a “Maryland Rail Authority” off of the proceeds from Maryland’s non-P3 toll roads and infrastructure which would finance, build, and potentially operate most of the rail projects named in the Regional Rail Transformation Act.

But in proposing more concrete paths forward to improving Maryland’s commuter rail and TOD, both these current bills have gained the support of both the Maryland Transit Caucus and multiple members of Congress.

Solomon and Lewis are optimistic about their respective bills’ chances of passage. But Solomon said that regardless of their ultimate fate, it was important to lay out those paths with Maryland electing a new Governor this fall and receiving unprecedented federal infrastructure funding.

“The hope is that with the bills we’ve laid out a road map or we’ve laid the tracks, no pun intended, for future administrations, regardless of party, to really take advantage of that,” Solomon said. “We want this to be a priority for the State and we want these plans to be there.”