Amtrak’s Frederick Douglass Tunnel project in West Baltimore faced delays due to a short-staffed team and had an ineffective management structure, an audit released Tuesday found.

The issues with the $6 billion infrastructure project, in which Amtrak is replacing the 151-year-old Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel, are being resolved as Amtrak develops a structure, the federal rail corporation’s Office of the Inspector General found. But doing so too late means the project now “faces a significantly increased risk of cost overruns and additional delays as it proceeds into major construction,” the watchdog office said in its report.

“As always, we appreciate the OIG’s review of our important programs,” Amtrak spokesperson W. Kyle Anderson said in a statement, noting that the project is a series of firsts for the quasi-public rail company, which “has made significant strides” in the past year. “We will continue these efforts and incorporate lessons learned for all our projects as we safely, effectively and efficiently advance Amtrak’s capital program,” he said.

The project in West Baltimore is Amtrak’s single largest infrastructure effort, initially approved by the Federal Railroad Administration in 2017 but ultimately kick-started by a $4.7 billion influx of cash from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which President Joe Biden signed in late 2021.

Biden, an avid Amtrak rider, visited Baltimore last year to tout the project, funded by one of his administration’s landmark legislative efforts. It aims to eliminate the biggest passenger rail bottleneck between Washington and New Jersey by replacing 4 miles of Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, including the two-track tunnel that opened in 1873, by around 2035. The current tunnel, which runs under Bolton Hill, Madison Park, Reservoir Hill, Sandtown-Winchester and Upton, has a 30 mph speed limit and is rapidly deteriorating, with more than 10% of weekday trains passing through being delayed, Amtrak said.

The first phase involves building new bridges and tracks, as well as two new tubes designed for electrified passenger trains that will be able to travel at over 100 mph. Freight traffic would still move through the B&P tunnel until the completion of a second phase, which involves building two more tubes.

But despite the magnitude of the tunnel replacement, Amtrak’s nascent capital delivery department assigned responsibility for the infrastructure project to just one person, the report said, noting that person “had limited support to manage and oversee a program of this size and complexity.” The team “was initially overtasked,” the report says, noting that it grew from one to seven people from August 2022 to October 2023, though five of the six new staff-level members told investigators they were “overwhelmed by the workload,” the report says.

The report also says that an ineffective management structure led Amtrak to struggle “to produce the necessary planning” for the project ahead of construction. That meant the team in charge “did not have the capacity” to manage and progress through the project’s schedule, fell short on communication, established a document management program too late, and did not consistently monitor risks.

It notes that the project team was unaware of an exemption for demolition permits and unnecessarily applied for them, delaying the demolition of eight properties by “several months.”

The report says Amtrak is catching up, though auditors recommended a few changes to make sure things go smoothly.

Due to the constraints, Amtrak later decided to hire a “delivery partner” to provide management and oversight, but the contractor wasn’t onboarded until the spring of 2024, the report says. Company officials agreed that the decision “should have been made earlier” to secure a contract, a process that took more than a year, on time, and to “maximize the benefits the delivery partner was intended to provide,” the report says. As a result, the contractor has to plan a management structure as it prepares for construction.

Amtrak management agreed with the auditors’ recommendations, detailing steps to prepare for construction projects faster and setting up processes to implement project management structures “early enough to provide strong, continuous oversight for the entire life of a program,” the report says.

“As noted in the report, we’ve ramped up our capacity and matured our management capabilities to advance this important program and have already begun working to implement these further recommendations,” Anderson said.

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