My favorite story about Montgomery County....has to do with Silver Springs (a actually nice suburb) that was going to get this state-of-the-art subway station and transit center. Fantastic amount of money was going to be spent on this underground facility. 110-million dollars.
So, METRO writes up the plan. Company starts work. This is an odd station. The buses will be required to pull up to a downward ramp...go down to a sub-level basement...and dump people off to a escalator which will take you even deeper down to the subway platforms (about as deep as you can imagine).
So they get about 80-percent done. Then someone wakes up and asks about the reinforcement requirement on this basement bus parking and receiving area. They look over the numbers, and come to agree that the whole thing would have collapsed if just two or three buses pulled onto it. Was supposed to have room for like a dozen buses (big area).
So, who screwed up? They spent months arguing over this, and who failed to put in adequate reinforcement for this bus platform. Then they had to hire some company to figure a way out....to put reinforcement in with minimal change. Some suggested that you’d have to tear out the whole thing as it was built, and start from scratch.
It opened in late 2015...about four years behind schedule. No one talks about the extra costs. If the defect hadn’t been discovered...would have been some catastrophic accident with a lot of folks dead or wounded.
You have to understand, they didn’t want to offend the engineers, or any diversity candidates who bid on any of the work, by appearing to criticize. That would have been “privileged”, “-phobic” or “-ist” of some kind.
If the collapse happened under republican President, the wall to wall mainstream media blame would have been "a lack of Infrastructure spending", similar to Bush and the I-35 Bridge that collapsed during repair of the bridge that was fatally underdesigned in 1961.