The White's Ferry Acquisition is a Sinking Ship

A 100-year-old, out-of-service passenger ferry capsized in Oregon, July 2022 (Photo: U.S. Coast Guard)

Montgomery County is holding a press conference this morning where, according to WTOP News and the Washington Business Journal, officials will announce a deal with the owner of White’s Ferry to acquire the Maryland-side land and defunct equipment for $1.5 million.

This high-stakes, taxpayer-funded gamble is doomed.  There are two likely scenarios: either the legal impasse on the Virginia side persists, leaving the county holding a useless, expensive dock, or the crossing is successfully reopened under county management and subsequently descends into operational and fiscal chaos. 

Scenario A: Virginia Shore Impasse

The most immediate risk is that Montgomery County remains legally and physically marooned on the Maryland shore. A cable ferry is useless without two landings. The Virginia landing at Rockland Farm in Loudoun County is privately owned by Libby Devlin, who has consistently resisted efforts to reopen the site of the ferry landing in Loudoun County. According to WTOP, “she wasn’t aware of the deal and was not invited to Friday’s news conference.”

Without securing landing rights on the opposite shore, White’s Ferry will become the watery version of the MCPS Gaithersburg warehouse lease debacle. In that asset management fail, the Board of Education signed a binding $29.5 million lease before securing the $13 million capital appropriation required for its buildout, leaving taxpayers stuck making payments on an empty, unusable commercial shell. Under the White's Ferry deal, the county appears to be spending millions of dollars of public funds on a marine shell. It's an idle boat and a one-sided landing with no guarantee that it will ever complete a single crossing.

To bypass the Virginia problem, Montgomery County officials want Loudoun County to use eminent domain to seize the Virginia landing. This is a fantasy that ignores interstate legal realities and the county’s own operational impotence. Because Montgomery County has zero legal jurisdiction inside the Commonwealth of Virginia, it must rely entirely on Loudoun County to execute a hostile, politically radioactive land seizure against Rockland Farm. Loudoun's own attorneys have warned it would face steep constitutional challenges in Virginia courts.

Taxpayers are likely to pay the price for legal and physical stagnation reminiscent of the Takoma Junction Development, where the government became entangled in a 99-year commercial lease that legally handcuffed a municipal lot, blocking any physical, aesthetic, or stormwater upgrades while racking up endless legal fees behind closed doors. White's Ferry is poised to become another permanent line item of litigation costs for a worthless asset. And even if Libby Devlin is ready to make a deal, a sinking on the Potomac is inevitable.

Scenario B: County-Run Ferry

Let us assume the Virginia side cooperates, and Montgomery County is handed the keys to a functioning bi-state ferry service. This is the real fiscal and operational nightmare. Operating a commercial cable ferry requires highly specialized competency, compliance with U.S. Coast Guard safety regulations, continuous vessel maintenance, and complex traffic management. How is that supposed to happen in a county that can't maintain asphalt parking lots? At the Milestone Park & Ride in Germantown, the county assumed custodial responsibility and promptly abandoned routine maintenance and code enforcement. The site has decayed into an unmonitored lot littered with wrecked cars, expired tags, and people living in vehicles. The county cannot safely manage and enforce its own property standards on a suburban parking lot, yet officials are confident they could run a safe, federally compliant maritime crossing?

When the county attempts to construct, rehabilitate, or upgrade the ferry docks, vessel, and vehicle access, get ready for the river to overflow the budget banks. The county's capital projects are notorious black holes for taxpayer cash. In the transportation realm, the Paul S. Sarbanes Silver Spring Transit Center (SSTC) tells you everything you need to know. What was originally conceived as a modest $20 million state-funded hub ballooned into a heavily delayed $141 million structural nightmare. The county spent over $12 million in taxpayer funds just fighting its own contractors in court. Then there is the Shady Grove Bus Depot Relocation, which has dragged on for nearly two decades, forcing the county to convert $250 million of short-term interim debt into high-interest General Obligation Bonds because they could not execute their land development plans on schedule.

Let's face it, Montgomery County is strong on planning and weak on execution, especially when it comes to unique spaces. Remember the Gude Landfill Remediation project? It experienced a nauseating 115 percent cost overrun, ballooning from $28.7 million to $61.7 million, all due to inadequate early design and planning failures. If the county attempts to manage the physical infrastructure of White's Ferry, taxpayers will likely find themselves funding emergency remediation work for deteriorating docks, expensive environmental permitting, and endless bureaucratic delays. This is the government for which basic utility and physical site coordination repeatedly trips up county planners. Like when the Nebel Street Homeless Shelter was completed but sat empty and unusable for months because the Department of General Services failed to coordinate routine gas, water, and power line hookups with local utility providers. 

Montgomery County gaining ownership and administrative responsibility for a bi-state marine operation is guaranteed to bleed cash while the ferry remains out of service for years at best, forever at worst. The county has been kicking the can on a stack of overdue capital improvement projects for years. We saw the consequences play out a few months ago during the MCPS budget battle, where our children's needs were sacrificed because we couldn't afford them. In that kind of atmosphere, spending public capital to bail out a failed private real estate venture is an insulting misallocation of resources.  Whether the ferry remains legally stranded on the Maryland shoreline due to an unresolvable land dispute or reopens only to become an operational and financial black hole, the outcome is the same. Montgomery County taxpayers are being saddled with a sinking ship, setting them up to foot the bill for an expensive novelty project that the government is wholly unfit to manage.