Transit (Re)Funding
Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit
You know, there are weeks where transit just can’t win.
Last week wasn’t one of those weeks. Facing the brewing infrastructure crisis head on, the Minnesota Legislature voted to override a veto leveled by Governor Pawlenty against a bill raising state gas and sales taxes and increasing registration fees on new vehicles. This bill will now fund $6.6 billion in infrastructure improvements for the next 10 years.
Unfortunately, this was one of those weeks.
This week’s theme seems to be how can we spend our transit funds in the worst way. Take the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority for example. It now has to begin refunding $12 million it collected in taxes and fees since January. Why? Because the Virginia Supreme Court recently ruled that the authority’s taxing ability was unconstitutional.
Now let that sink in for a minute. The state supreme court ruled that the authority’s taxing powers were unconstitutional. Meanwhile, they kept collecting taxes. Now understand the process and how long court proceedings can take, but didn’t anyone stop to think about whether this was possibly against the law before they began to collect the taxes? And now we’re not just talking about giving back $12 million in taxes, we’re talking about money spent on employee salaries to make sure those collected taxes are returned to the correct people.
Unfortunately, Virginia doesn’t hold a candle to Milwaukee. If you didn’t know, Milwaukee received a $289 million appropriation from the federal government to build a bus-only highway along I-94. You might not know because this happened 17 years ago.
This $289 million should be held up as a lesson to all transit authorities in how not to watch your funds get frittered away. After the bus-only highway project was shutdown, the federal government took $48 million back, and another $149.5 million was spent on other road, bridge and pedestrian projects.
The remaining $91.5 million has been sitting there since before the turn of the century, unable to be spent because the powers that be can’t decide how best to spend it. You would think they could get an agreement after nearly a decade of sitting on the money. This week the latest indignation came when a local study committee looking to find the best way to spend the money found its funds running short due to some FTA snafu, leaving the committee without any money to continue its study.
So yet again Milwaukee sits with $91.5 million for transit sitting in a bank waiting to be spent, this time locked behind a wall of red tape. How long it will sit there this time is anybody’s guess.
As those of you heading to Capitol Hill next week during APTA’s Legislative Conference seek funds for your systems, keep this lesson in mind. It’s not just about securing that funding, it’s about making sure you can really spend it.
For the latest industry news, check out MassTransitMag.com’s Daily News section.
Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,
March 7th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
yea the situation in Milwaukee is ridiculous. We’ve had so many different plans but no political will to get it done. To make it worse now we have a Republican County Executive that will not support anything with tracks and who diligently worked to destroy our bus service in Milwaukee County.
March 8th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
It is a twist of the Republican Party legacy, the irony of Abraham Lincoln and his role in the USA railway story, vs. the blind spot our generation of Republicans exhibits with the railway mode.
James Howard Kunstler writes of the opprobrium the republicans are going to endure as the infrastructure collapse -now in progress- will be laid to ignorant responsibles. The general seizing up of transport is not difficult to imagine; it happened when Katrina brought miles of cars to a standstill & effectually ran the region out of gas for a short time.
Few are aware that European Union shift of Gasoline to the USA for over a month was instrumental in keeping us rolling in the aftermath of Katrina. They (EU)have stated that this generosity will probably not be possible again, as worldwide supply of liquid fuels for transport is tighter.
It seems timely to make a case for prosecution of planning officials -in most of the 3066 US Counties, alas,)who are deliberately ignoring ever-increasing evidence of dire ramifications of Peaking Oil. We are for all intents & purposes, without wriggle room as stand now, without adequate railway matrix as existed in mid-Twentieth Century.
Authoritative source for the above assertions can be googled: James R. Woolsey; Richard D. Heinberg; Julian Darley; Rep Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD); Jan Lundberg; Matt Savinar; Colin Campbell; Daniel Yergin; James H. Kunstler; Matthew Simmons & T. Boone Pickens. Yergin wrote book: “The Prize”. Simmons is confidante of Bush Family, and is CEO Simmons Energy Co. Intl. Woolsey is former CIA Director. Colin Campbell is founder of “The Association For The Study Of Peak Oil & Gas.
Democratic & Republicans are responsible, from grass roots up to Presidential wannabes, to exercise one of the crucial requisites of a democratic society- to be informed and act on emergencies before matters get out of hand. This energy/transportation situation is an example of “Matters getting out of hand”!