Photo by ::FiZ::.

WMATA’s board of directors held committee hearings this morning, and, yet again, discussion about controversial SmarTrip reforms has been tabled and will be revisited further at a future date to be determined. It’s another delay in a series of postponements in the debate surrounding whether or not to alter the price of SmarTrip cards and possibly eliminate negative balances.

The most recent development seems to be that a portion of Metro’s braintrust has concluded that the best available option for SmarTrip — which, it should probably be noted, will have to undergo major overhauls in the near future when Metro runs out of the cards, anyway — is just to let it be. That’s “Option D,” (which, yeah, sounds like a world domination plan in of a Bond movie), which would keep the price of the card at $5 and continue to allow negative balances. It appears that the reason for the delays is that Metro board members had been told that the cost of producing a single SmarTrip card was one dollar; in reality, it’s $3.40. That information obviously cramps Metro’s ability to reduce the cost of the card to $2.50, as it previously was planning.