The MBTA Needs Debt Relief

This week's decision by MBTA leadership to renege on paying $43 million in back wages to thousands of unionized employees is but one more reason for the Massachusetts legislature to revisit the issue of debt relief for our state's main public transportation system.

Serving almost 200 cities and towns around Massachusetts, the MBTA is the transportation lifeline for over 1.1 million riders daily - in a state with a population of 6 million.

Last year, a coalition of transportation advocacy groups - including Alternatives for Community and Environment, the Conservation Law Foundation, and MassPIRG among others - called for the legislature to pay off over $2 billion of the beleaguered MBTA's debt, now estimated at over $8 billion.

According to the advocates, and to the MBTA's own citizen advisory board, the huge debt is a result of unfunded state and federal mandates over the last 20 years that the quasi-independent state agency was expected to handle through its regular funding mechanisms. These include fares, a chunk of the state sales tax, and state and federal money for specific projects.

However, in an era of diminishing sales, the monies raised by the sales tax - intended to cover a significant portion of the MBTA's budget - have fallen short of projections made early in this decade. And the agency simply doesn't have enough income from other sources to keep up with its debt load. Ironically, a large portion of that debt was run up due environmental offset agreements to The Big Dig fought for by some of the same advocacy organizations mentioned above. The idea was that some of the horrendous environmental impact of expanding the huge downtown highway system in Boston in over much of the last two decades could be mitigated by a concomitant expansion of our public transportation system.

Problem was, the federal government forced the MBTA to pay for needed offsets itself - even as the feds hemorrhaged money on The Big Dig ... surely one of the most ill-considered oil and auto industry inspired boondoggles ever perpetrated on the American people.

The partial debt relief would have made it possible for the MBTA to continue to pay its bills - and pay its workers their contractually negotiated cost-of-living raises - while staving off its impending financial collapse for a several more years. But of course, the legislature did not act on the debt relief bill after it was filed last year, and now the situation continues to get worse.

Given that public transportation is a basic human right, and that the MBTA provides a vital service to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the City of Boston, Open Media Boston calls on the legislature to provide debt relief to the MBTA immediately.

On these same grounds, we further call for the Commonwealth to take over the MBTA and make it a state agency, fully-funded out of the state budget. With 3 fare hikes in the last 8 years and another doubtless on the way, the cost of using the MBTA is spiraling up and out of reach for poor and working residents who depend on it for all their transportation needs.

The state needs to assign a portion of its general budget to the MBTA, and take over the service on its debt. It then needs to push the federal government to pay off debt accrued due to The Big Dig, and to fund public transportation more generously.

Only these types of bold actions will save the oldest public transportation system in the United States from drastic service cuts and fare hikes - at the very moment when the global ecological crisis cries out for all of us to switch over from carbon-burning vehicular transportation to public transportation.

Only this type of reform will pave the way for moving back to government in the public interest in the Bay State. We sincerely hope public transportation advocates have another debt relief bill cooking up for the next legislative session. But this time around we'd like to see some language proposing a state takeover of the MBTA. Failing to do that is failing our transportation future.