The design work on the planned Purple Line through suburban Maryland could roll to a stop later this year unless state legislators raise transportation taxes, according to the Maryland Department of Transportation’s capital budget. If the Maryland General Assembly can’t come up with the requisite funds through a tax hike, transportation officials will be compelled to transfer nearly $49 million in funding for the Purple Line and an express bus line to other projects, The Washington Post reports.

The Purple Line, which would connect a 16-mile route between New Carrollton and Bethesda, and the Corridor Cities Transitway, a 15-mile dedicated bus route, stand to lose important funding on June 30 if lawmakers can’t find the money elsewhere, and now proponents of both projects are a bit miffed, according to the Post:

Word that both projects might be put on hold after this fiscal year caught local transit advocates by surprise and prompted the Montgomery County Council to protest the plan in a letter Wednesday to the acting Maryland transportation secretary, Darrell B. Mobley.

If state funding ends, the council wrote, “these two lines will stop dead in their tracks. After more than a decade of work on these two projects, this is unacceptable.”

Maryland legislators defeated a proposal last year by Gov. Martin O’Malley to apply the state’s 6 percent sales tax to gasoline, though Senate President Thomas Mike Miller is offering a 3 percent gas tax increase.

Assuming the projects don’t get derailed in their preliminary stages, both are still a long time coming. The Purple Line is expected to cost $2.15 billion by its scheduled rolling date of 2020, while construction on the Corridor Cities Transitway would not begin until 2018.