Doctrina_Stabilitas t1_iujxstr wrote
Reply to comment by Ironman2179 in Mass. Tax Refunds Will Start To Flow On Tuesday by husky5050
the T still has an unfunded capital budget, and an even more underfunded maintenance budget. It can't hire people. It can't expand. Those are all issues solvable with more money. The MBTA already has one of the least subsidy rates in North America so the solution really is more money
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#North_America
The only major city ahead of Boston in terms of reduced subsidy is Seattle, the MBTA is underfunded
Ironman2179 t1_iujzi7u wrote
That's because they directed most of their cash towards capital projects and deliberately underfunded maintenance. That's a leadership issue.
Doctrina_Stabilitas t1_iujzvlw wrote
again, their capital budget is still underfunded, as is the maintenance, how would you solve that without more money? greater Boston is growing, you can't just say "stop expanding"
Ironman2179 t1_iuk02wg wrote
It was underfunded because they pulled money from the maintenance budget to pay for all their projects. They could have done fewer projects and had plenty of cash to pay for maintenance. It's a leadership problem.
Doctrina_Stabilitas t1_iuk7dve wrote
So you mean to say that the T which already underserved a lot of metro Boston should have cut back on service expansion plans because it had insufficient money or otherwise cut back on expansion in a growing region
Sure fine that’s all well and good, but that doesn’t change the fact that the T has insufficient money to make it’s near term maintenance goals as well as meeting larger economic growth goals for metro Boston
The real solution is to fund both maintenance and capital projects appropriately and not force the T to choose
Ironman2179 t1_iuk93ze wrote
No that's called bad budgeting. Had the leadership properly budgeted their cash they could do both. They didn't. The leadership constantly has been fucking it up.
Doctrina_Stabilitas t1_iukb93q wrote
The MBTA has a 13B unfunded maintenance budget https://www.masstaxpayers.org/mbta-finances-cast-long-red-shadow-incoming-leaders
The 2020-2024 CIP for MassDOT includes 9.4B earmarked for the MBTA
https://massdot.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=33a118c32b3f47b3b90a769498aa68bd#
Which accounts for both expansion and maintenance / modernization
Even if we assumed all the funds earmarked for both maintenance and expansion went to the MBTA's maintenance shortfall, we're still short more than 3 Billion dollars at minimum, the MBTA needs more money
The approved capital budget says
>This $13 billion capital sources gap does not include sufficient funding to reduce greenhouse gas emissions nor to protect MBTA’s infrastructure from sea level rise and storm surge. Factoring in climate change costs, the MBTA is short approximately $20 billion for the period from 2023 through 2031. The federal infrastructure bill, if passed, will not meaningfully change this shortfall.
How do you propose we address this $20B capital shortfall (not even the operating shortfall which runs approximately half a Billion per year) the state itself acknowledges exists when making its capital budgets without adding more money and/or revenue
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