The Metro Board of Directors is asking the D.C. Council to delay for a year a plan to make Metrobuses free of charge within city limits, dealing a blow to an initiative that was popular with lawmakers but had faced a number of mounting obstacles and objections.

In a letter sent on Thursday afternoon to Mayor Muriel Bowser and the council, Board Chairman Paul Smedberg raised a number of concerns with the fare-free Metrobus bill unanimously passed by the council late last year, including the complexity of one of the system’s three jurisdictions moving alone to make bus rides free, a plan to overhaul the system’s bus network, and impending fiscal challenges as federal COVID-19 aid dries up and ridership remains low.

“We operate a regional system, and decisions about fare policy should be made as a region,” he wrote. “Additionally, Metro is currently working on a reimagined Better Bus network that has the potential to change the costs and obligations associated with bus service. Most importantly, we are facing a steep fiscal cliff in FY2025 that requires the region’s total attention.”

“Based on all of these factors, the WMATA Board does not believe now is the right time to engage in discussions with the District about a zero-fare program. Therefore, we ask that the council defer the legislation for one year in order to further a regional approach to zero fare policy,” Smedberg added.

But Smedberg did offer the council one concession: the board would work with the city on bringing 24-hour service to 13 high-ridership routes in the city, which boosters say would help service-industry employees who work late into the night or early into the morning and face limited transit options.

In an interview with DCist/WAMU after seeing the letter, D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, one of the initiative’s main proponents, conceded that there was little else the council could do to make Metrobus free in the short term, which would require the approval of the transit agency’s board.

“I’m disappointed. I don’t think we have a choice because the letter all but says the board says will not approve an agreement for fare-free bus service,” he said. “But I’m also hopeful that what we have done will lead to a decision regionally for fare-free bus service.”

But Councilmember Charles Allen (D-Ward 6), another of the plan’s authors, sounded less forgiving about the board’s request, saying it was motivated by Maryland and Virginia not wanting D.C. to have free Metrobus.

“I’m frustrated with WMATA, but bold ideas sometimes take time,” he said. “A one-year delay isn’t the end of the world, but I do hold some skepticism about Maryland and Virginia’s genuine interest in fare-free buses. They’re making it clear today they don’t want D.C. residents to have what they don’t want to give their own residents.”

The idea for fare-free Metrobus was birthed from a broader initiative from Allen that would have given every D.C. resident a $100 monthly subsidy for use on Metrorail or Metrobus. After concerns over cost and implementation of that idea, Allen and Mendelson pivoted to the idea of making Metrobus free, which they said would be a boon to low-income residents and entice more people to start using transit again.

The council heartily endorsed it, but challenges quickly emerged.

Bowser was initially cool toward the idea, largely because of how much it might cost. (The annual price tag is estimated at more than $30 million a year.) And earlier this year, D.C. Chief Financial Officer Glen Lee said revenues that Mendelson and Allen had earmarked for the initiative were no longer available, sparking a fight between the legislative branch and the city’s fiscal minder. The timeline for making buses free also shifted; the initial plan of starting as soon as July moved into fall, and then to Jan. 2024.

After Bowser chose not to fund the bill in her budget proposal for 2024, Allen and Mendelson executed what has become a controversial plan: they redirected funding away from a planned remake of K Street that included dedicated bus lanes (known as the K Street Transitway) to pay for fare-free Metrobus. That move sparked howls of complaints from Bowser, who rallied this week at Franklin Square Park to urge the council to reconsider. Bowser said that the new transitway was a critical step to revitalizing downtown D.C., and decried the council’s move as a “downtown killer.”

Allen and Mendelson defended their move, saying the K Street Transitway’s design (which was recently changed to remove dedicated bike lanes) was too autocentric and that fare-free Metrobuses would be have a larger impact for a broader swath of the city.

But Metro leaders, who said it was D.C.’s decision to make, still expressed hesitation on moving ahead with fare-free buses. Metro General Manager Randy Clarke said last week he’d rather see regional agreements than for individual jurisdictions to go their own way. “We want all of our partners — D.C., Maryland, Virginia — to work with us on bus transit priority, because the better we can move the buses, the better the system is for everyone, not just the people on those particular buses,” he said.

Further concerns about whether the Metro board would even sign off on the city’s plan percolated in the legislative body this week, where some lawmakers openly fretted over what might happen if the council moved ahead with yanking funding from the K Street project only to have Metro refuse to implement the fare-free bus initiative.

“We can’t provide $200 million for a program we don’t know will be implemented. How can we have confidence that even if we could provide this funding that it’s actually going to happen?” asked Councilmember Brooke Pinto (D-Ward 2), who has sided with Bowser in opposing the defunding of the K Street bus lanes.

“I really want fare-free buses and I want them soon, but we have to navigate this in a way that we achieve all our goals,” echoed Councilmember Matt Frumin (D-Ward 3).

In his letter to Bowser and the council, Smedberg also cited the fate of the K Street Transitway as a reason to pause on fare-free Metrobuses, saying that the planned dedicated bus lanes were an important part of the system’s plan for a new bus network.

“The District’s K Street Transitway, a critical piece of the bus network redesign, is expected to support 34 Metrobuses and 50 total buses an hour, and over six million riders annually on buses that use the corridor. From a planning and operations perspective, the Better Bus network may need to be reworked if the K Street Transitway does not proceed,” he wrote.

But even with the option of fare-free buses off the table for the time being, Mendelson says he’s not committed to restoring the funding for the K Street Transitway, at least not in its current form.

“I think the K Street Transitway needs to be replanned. It’s based on plans that are almost a decade old. It’s a plan based on pre-pandemic commuter patterns. It needs to be rethought,” he said. “The money may stay in but I am thinking about a requirement that you can’t spend the money until you give us a revised plan.”

It’s also unclear how the council would fund fare-free Metrobus next year, and Mendelson declined to comment further on any budget moves that may be made now or in the future. But he did warn that if D.C. does eventually want to move forward on fare-free Metrobus, he expects the transit agency’s board to agree to it.

“I will go fire and brimstone if the board tells us what we do with bus service within our borders,” he said. “I also will remind the board that the funding formula, what we subsidize relative to Maryland and Virginia, is very unfair to the District and they need to be sensitive to that.”

Additional reporting provided by Jordan Pascale.