While the new stadium for the Washington Nationals slowly rises from the ground, city officials gathered yesterday to break ground on the renovations slated for the Navy Yard Metro station. The station, which can currently handle 5,000 passengers an hour, will undergo a series of changes to allow for an additional 10,000 passengers an hour to flow through on game days. Everything seems to be coming together for the new stadium, right? Well, not really.

The renovations, slated to cost $20 million, were supposed to funded by the federal government, thus allowing the District to squeeze everything else into a tight, D.C. Council-mandated $611 million price-cap. But as WMATA details in its press release on the ground-breaking, “the $20 million project budget is being funded on an interim basis by the District of Columbia.” What gives?

According to a D.C. Wire report on the matter, the federal funds, written into the 2007 budget, were never approved in the waning days of Republican control. Now that power has passed to the Democrats, it’s up to the District to convince them that the renovations should be paid for by the feds. And if they pass? City Administrator Dan Tangherlini, in a moment of surprising candor, said: “Then a bunch of District transit priorities crumble.”

Huh. That’s not good. There’s not really any positive spin to “crumble.” Beyond us again raising questions as to how well the stadium plan was thought out before it was run through the Council in the late hours of the night, we’re really hoping D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton can get that $20 million. After all, the District’s transit infrastructure hardly needs any more help crumbling, does it?