Op-Ed from State Representative Denise Provost

In
March of 2007, details of the scandalous fiscal mess in the
transportation sector reached a wide audience. The Massachusetts
Transportation Finance Commission issued its long-awaited report,
"Transportation Finance in Massachusetts: An Unsustainable System." [http://www.eot.state.ma.us/downloads/tfc/TFC_Findings.pdf]
The Commission, established by the legislature in 2004 and composed of
a dozen respected experts, found that the state's transportation
departments, and independent authorities had relied too much on debt
and chronically underfunded maintenance system-wide.

The
Commission estimated the resulting funding gap to amount to almost $20
billion over 20 years. It found that some practices of transportation
agencies, such as employee benefits, were simply too costly to
maintain. Yet the Commission didn't suggest that internal reforms and
economies alone could put our transportation system back on a sound
financial footing.

The antidote to years of neglect and
excessive borrowing was straightforward. To restore our transportation
system to a decent condition, and keep it functional, additional
revenues would be required. Prominent among the Commission's
recommendations was that the tax on gasoline be increased by twelve
cents per gallon.

This revenue boost was aimed at bringing
maintenance and operations up to an acceptable level of service. It
would not fund new construction of either highways or transit – what
are known as capital projects. About the latter, the Commission had
cautionary words:

"The MBTA has a variety of projects in
planning that many people would like to move forward. The Silver Line
Phase 3 is considered essential by the City of Boston and the

Greater
Boston business community. The Commonwealth has committed to design the
Blue Line/Red Line Connector and to construct the Green Line to
Somerville project as part of the Artery mitigation program. No
commitments have been made to actually construct these projects, and
there is no finance plan for them. And even if these projects were to
be built, the MBTA could not afford the additional operating expenses."

Their
message could not have been clearer that Massachusetts needed to
establish a capitol plan for financing transportation improvements.

It
was especially important to plan financing for the transit improvements
that Massachusetts was required to provide as mitigation for the
increase in highway travel that the Central Artery project would
provide. Massachusetts has been in violation of the Clean Air Act for
so long that the fact rarely surfaces in public discourse, but the
violation was the basis for a series of successful lawsuits by the
Conservation Law Foundation (CLF). CLF secured an agreement that the
state actually built the Big Dig Mitigation projects on a fixed
schedule – including completion of the Green Line Extension by December
31, 2014.

On May 31, 2007, however, Transportation Secretary
Bernard Cohen asked the legislature to hold off on advancing any
transportation bills until the administration could complete its review
of the system and its finances. In late November, 2007, the
administration filed a Transportation Bond Bill – a three year
borrowing plan for the Commonwealth to take on $4.8 billion more in
debt, with no clear repayment source. There was still no transportation
finance or reform plan in place by the time the other shoe dropped.

In
early December 2007, Secretary Cohen received a pair of letters from
the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) and the Federal Highway
Administration (FHWA). Federal officials informed the Commonwealth that
its State Transportation Improvement Program (STIP) for 2008-2011 had
been disapproved for lack of adequate state funding. This
innocuous-sounding message was in fact a bombshell – it meant that
projects in the disapproved program were not eligible for federal
funding.

Typically, the federal government pays for at least
80% of qualifying transportation projects; the federal share can be
even higher if the project has federal earmarks, or qualifies for a
grant, so the amount of federal aid in jeopardy was enormous.