Metro taxes the IRS

Pity your colleagues at the IRS this week. I’m not even talking about the House Judiciary Committee meeting Wednesday to talk about the dreary subject of possibly impeaching Commissioner John Koskinen. I’m referring to the damming up of the Metrorail Blue line.

IRS employees at the 1936 headquarters in downtown D.C. might be used to the hassles of 14th, 12th and 10th Streets and the principal avenues nearby. The occasional basement flood when the long-buried Tiber Creek acts up. The motorcades. The tourists, some of whom stick out their tongues at the IRS.

Those at the big New Carrollton IRS facilities have a beautiful building  — a campus, really — less than 20-years old. It’s full of amenities — restaurants, child day care, credit union. It sports the black pyramid sculpture with the mysterious, somewhat weird white hands at the top of the striped pillars -— all with their mysterious, secret society implications.

And of course great access. The big curved building stands right off the Beltway and right on top of the conjunction of Amtrak and the Metro Orange Line.

Which means, starting today and for the next three weeks, New Carrollton IRS employees find themselves cut off from main headquarters downtown. At least there’s no easy way to get back and forth between the two locations. Metro has swung its SafeTrack repair blitz to the Blue line until July 3. The IRS in New Carrollton lies at the end of the Orange line, but the Orange and Blue coincide at the Stadium Armory station in Northeast D.C. Two stops beyond that, Metro has shut down the Eastern Market station. This means IRS people can’t go downtown to headquarters using the Metro station just under their noses.

Trust me, driving from New Carrollton to 10th & Constitution during daylight hours is no fun. Short of driving around the Beltway to Montgomery County and heading in from there (awful) you’ve got to cross a river. Then snake through blocks of snarled city.

Sometimes people are glad to have a moat between themselves and headquarters. When I first moved to the area, I worked for a company headquartered in Massachusetts. Our business unit sort of did things our way. Once in a while, someone would traipse down from Rome, as we called it, and we put on a good show.

As the crow flies, the distance between the two main IRS loci stretches only a few miles. The big muckety mucks, including Koskinen, can go between in chauffeured cars, so they don’t strictly care about the Metro pinch.

For everyone else, the Metro project offers the magnificent possibility of fewer in-person meetings or more meeting via telephone when you can mute yours and continue with your email.

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