The Pioneer Valley and the Berkshires got some welcome news last Tuesday when Gov. Charlie Baker dropped the cold shoulder he had been giving to a proposed train line from Boston to Springfield and points west. 

Two days later, the MBTA Board of Directors stamped its approval on a $2.55 billion draft budget for the agency that covers the last fiscal year before the T runs out of financial rails as federal COVID aid lapses without new state funding ready to fill the gaps. 

These two seemingly unrelated events last week are in fact signs of a political struggle coming down the track: How to adequately fund public transportation. 

Baker’s tête-à-tête with Congressman Richard Neal at Springfield Union Station didn’t conjure up bags of cash for an East-West Rail project. But now, the same governor whose administration tried to bury the project in transparently inflated cost estimates – his mind seemingly focused by federal infrastructure funding in the offing – will now do his part to make it a reality.  

By contrast, the T’s funding sources are known, at least for fiscal year 2023. Its draft budget for that year leans on $316 million in federal COVID aid to hike spending by 8 percent year-on-year to pay for sorely needed safety staff and more of the network’s vast maintenance backlog, courtesy of Beacon Hill’s long neglect.  

But come fiscal 2024, the transit system faces a budget gap anywhere between $236 million and $421 million, depending on ridership trends, enough to make any financial professional blanch. And that’s without accounting for the agency’s questionable juggling of $500 million in operating funds over to immediate capital projects and urgent future investments in the commuter rail network.  

It’s a gap that doesn’t have to exist. Former House Speaker Robert DeLeo nobly corralled business groups, state representatives and transit advocates to support a serious, substantial package of tax and fee hikes in March 2020 that would have balanced the T’s checkbook. But the pandemic put paid to that idea when the Senate declined to take it up. 

Fortunately, the T’s looming budget deficit and East-West Rail’s $2.4 billion to $4.6 billion price tag – not to mention its need for operating funds – offer a fresh opportunity to fix our transit funding structure. With legislators and residents from across the state deeply invested in transit’s success at the same time, surely the moment on Beacon Hill is ripe to find a way to boost transit funding with regional equity in mind? 

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East-West Rail Needs Funding Plan

by Banker & Tradesman time to read: 2 min
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