House and Senate negotiators agreed Tuesday on a $1.56 billion spending package that strikes a middle ground on the distribution of income surtax funds for education and transportation.
If the transit system is not currently broken, can the MBTA still convince legislators to provide increased state budget support?
The surge in state dollars that fueled the MBTA’s recovery leaves the it more reliant than ever on Beacon Hill to hold on to its service gains and make further improvements.
At first blush, the latest budget crunch forecast at the MBTA looks like déjà vu all over again, to borrow Yogi Berra’s famous phrasing.
Business leaders in Massachusetts are starting to call attention to the impending expiration of federal transportation funding, and urging the Legislature to act this spring.
Last year, state leaders set specific priorities and followed through. But as we begin 2026, we should not confuse incremental progress for long-term success.
Sustaining the MBTA’s progress, according to several current and former state transit leaders, is going to require new sources of revenue, particularly with future federal funding uncertain.
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.
