Beacon Hill is immersed in debate over how many more millions of dollars to devote to the MBTA, but transit services outside of the T region are absorbed in their own challenges they must face with even less funding.
House Democrats will seek a vote this week on a roughly $1.3 billion spending plan that would inject hundreds of millions of dollars into the MBTA as the agency wrestles with a major budget gap.
The administration says the MBTA needs the $870 million to stay afloat and preserve progress made in the last two years, but “this didn’t look like equity or anything close,” two legislators say.
The MBTA has not had any federal grants rejected or revoked amid a major belt-tightening campaign by the Trump administration, according to the T’s top boss, who also warned that tariffs could impact costs for materials purchased by transit agencies around the country.
The survey indicated residents remain in a fiscally conservative mood, but they are open to studying other ways to pay for transportation upgrades and improvements, such as congestion pricing.
Despite having one of North America’s most extensive commuter rail and subway networks, Greater Boston has some of the least-dense areas around transit stations, according to a new report.
Healey promised that the report’s recommendations and her transit funding plan are no longer “kicking the can down the road” by underfunding transit and roads. But task force members say new revenue options will still be needed in the future.
Gov. Maura Healey says she’ll lean heavily on higher-than-expected returns from the state Millionaires Tax to keep the MBTA from going broke in the coming fiscal year, while setting three-quarters of a billion dollars aside for capital investments like bridges and rail lines.
After missing its Dec. 31 deadline to finish its work, the task force Gov. Maura Healey created to recommend transportation funding reforms will hold its final meeting Tuesday.
The task force Gov. Maura Healey created to propose a new funding model for transportation in Massachusetts has missed its end-of-2024 deadline, and sources say the concepts currently being bandied about fall well short of what some had been hoping for.
MBTA budget-writers have warned the agency could run out of cash in the first quarter of fiscal 2026 amid a roughly $700 million gap, but the agency’s leader is feeling “optimism” about the prospects of addressing the shortfall.
The MBTA Advisory Board, an independent group that represents cities and towns that help fund the T, is calling on Beacon Hill to make debt relief a central part of the next MBTA financial rescue plan.
When Massachusetts voters passed the Millionaires Tax in 2022, there was an expectation that the funds generated by the 4 percent surtax on income over $1 million would help solve the problems in the state’s transportation sector, particularly with the struggling MBTA system facing an operating deficit.
The House budget chief wants to direct $1 billion in surplus income surtax funds towards transportation investments, mainly MBTA capital investments, he told business leaders at an event in Boston.
The man widely viewed as the heir apparent as speaker has a message for the state’s business community, which has complained about the economic climate since voters passed the Millionaire Tax two years ago: Get over it.
Congestion pricing was one of the most contentious issues in Swedish politics for years, as one transportation official from the Scandinavian country recently recalled. And then something unexpected happened: people got used to it.
Sources say the side-meetings grew out of concern about the slow pace of the task force and frustration with the Healey administration’s push for a “tool kit” of revenue options rather than a curated list of preferred options.
With policymakers leaning toward a basket full of revenue-raising options to fund transportation, the Metropolitan Area Planning Council tried to kickstart the debate on Wednesday by analyzing three relatively minor initiatives that combined would raise between $250 million and $400 million a year.
Public transportation is on the verge of an “existential crisis,” a key transit watchdog warned, as the MBTA moves ahead with a budget plan that drains its reserves in the face of a looming deficit and uncertainty about Beacon Hill’s approach to long-term funding fixes.
Sen. Jacob Oliveira counted the dollar bills first, eight of them. Then he moved onto the dimes, eight coins clanking Thursday morning onto his desk in the Senate Chamber.
