• Off the tracks?County must decide whether to scrap an overhaul

  Miami-Dade Transit has postponed a federally mandated overhaul of its 136 Metrorail cars that was due in 1999 -- a delay that has left the county with a $300 million repair bill.

• New CarsCommissioners voted to buy new Metrorail cars to replace 136 that weren't maintained

  After postponing a federally mandated overhaul of the aging Metrorail fleet for nine years, Miami-Dade commissioners reluctantly agreed to toss out $9 million in consulting fees and staff time spent on the rehab to buy new cars instead.

Even though it spent four years and about $2 million trying to win the Metrorail overhaul contract that Miami-Dade County commissioners canceled Tuesday, don't expect Bombardier Mass Transit Corp. to complain too loudly.

Bombardier receives $4 million a year as the sole provider of parts to Miami-Dade Transit's now-obsolete Metromover system.

The company is working on a $26 million county contract to build 12 new Metromover cars, replacing the original driverless vehicles that went into service on the downtown loops in 1986. Delivery of the first pair is due next month.

And the county administration is poised to ask commissioners and the Citizens Independent Transportation Trust to spend $34 million to buy 17 more Metromover cars from Bombardier, to replace cars that went into service in 1992 when the Brickell and Omni extensions opened.

If Transit doesn't exercise the $34 million option by July, Bombardier receives a $1 million cancellation fee.

County rail managers admit that all 29 Metromover cars, designed for a 20-year life span, were never properly rehabilitated -- just as the Metrorail cars missed their midlife overhaul.

The result: leaky, failing air-conditioning units, faulty doors and electrical breakdowns that frequently disrupt service for the 25,000 daily passengers on the free trains. After voters approved a transit tax in 2002, county managers and Transit administrators slid a Metromover rehab item into the spending plan in early 2003, along with the Metrorail car rehab contract. Both were ratified by the Citizens Independent Transportation Trust at its first formal meeting.

The original estimate: $15 million to rehab the first 12 Metromover cars. But the county's engineering consultant, the Washington Group, urged Transit to replace the original dozen with new cars. That recommendation later morphed into the Bombardier contract -- $26.7 million for the original 12 cars, plus a $34.3 million option for the other 17.

All the money comes from the half-cent sales tax that was sold to voters as a way to provide new money for new projects, not to repair old ones.