It was in the late 1990s when a consulting engineer named Alice Bravo was assigned to an ambitious study: how to extend rail west into the Miami-Dade suburbs. Some 20 years later, Bravo runs the county’s Transportation Department and Miami-Dade is once again studying the same thing.

“That was when I was a little girl. I worked on it,” Bravo joked Thursday after a meeting of Miami-Dade’s Transportation Planning Organization, which two years ago authorized a new study on whether to extend Metrorail along State Road 836 and connect the Doral area with downtown Miami. “When we did that east-west study, the city of Doral didn’t exist.”

A county audit offers the latest reminder that Miami-Dade’s current push to settle on a historic transit plan is a repeat of past efforts. A 2018 audit of Miami-Dade’s transit spending includes a brief passage summarizing past expenditures on the six commuting corridors being studied under the county’s 2016 SMART Plan.