keep your eye on the ball

http://www.thesentinel.com/mont/sports/County-executive-candidates3-13-2014

• It isn't about politics.
• It isn't about the race for Montgomery County Executive.

• It's about the severely flawed, over-budget, yet-to-be-opened Silver Spring Transit Center.
• It's about "widespread cracking in the slabs, beams and girders on the second and third floors of the building."
• It's about slabs that are more than one inch thinner than the 10 inches thick called for in construction documents.
• It's about no expansion joints in the 315 ft. by 580 ft. SSTC, even though standard construction practice and WMATA construction standards call for expansion joints. According to WMATA's criteria, to which the SSTC was supposed to have been designed and built, expansion joints are to be spaced no more than 100 ft. apart.
• It's about 250 underdesigned beams.
• It's about watered down, understrength concrete, and lack of heat during curing.
• It's about exposed reinforcement and missing reinforcement.
• It's about suspect concrete test reports that show exactly the same test readings.
• It's about why Montgomery County, with its fulltime, on-site, construction management team and periodic visits by other County employees, didn't deal with the extensive concrete cracking sooner, before the SSTC was almost complete.
• It's about how and why Montgomery County selected the SSTC's contractor/builder, engineer/designer and concrete inspection/testing firm and Special Quality Inspector.
• It's about why Montgomery County is proceeding with tens of millions of dollars in repairs to the brand new, $120+ million (so far) yet-to-be-opened SSTC without holding public meetings to explain to the public what the County is doing and why, and to allow the public to ask questions and make their comments on the public record.

It's easy to become distracted with a 3-ring circus. We need to keep our eyes on the ball; we need snwers to our questions, including: 

• Is the SSTC safe? 
• Why has so much public money been wasted on the SSTC?
• Will, as WMATA's engineers claim, future operation and maintainence costs for the SSTC be exorbitantly high because of the SSTC's numerous construction flaws, resulting in even more public money being wasted on the SSTC?