Lawmakers got their opportunity Wednesday to question the new fiscal overseers charged with accessing and addressing financial problems at the MBTA.
Representatives and Senators heard from members of Gov. Charlie Baker’s fiscal and Management control board, the panel Baker assembled to get the T into sounder fiscal shape after last winter’s disastrous performance.
The board’s appearance before the Legislature’s Transportation Committee coincided with the recent release of their report on the MBTA’s problems as they currently stand and where trends suggest they’re headed.
The numbers aren’t good. There’s a $7 billion backlog for fixing assets — over three billion of that’s from the subway system alone — and the board says it would take $765 million a year to eliminate the backlog completely — by 2040.
Senate committee co-Chairman Sen. Tom McGee (D-Lynn) was appreciative of the panel’s candor.
“I know you’re just 60 days in, but I think as you move forward, the more transparent you can be on everything that we face, the better we all are and I think it lends itself to a much better discussion of how we solve a lot of these problems,” McGee said.
House co-chair Rep. William Straus (D-Mattapoisett) wanted to know more about specific oversight of Keolis, the company that operates the Commuter Rail Service. Straus asked for breakdowns on each train line’s performance, as well as information on the growth rate of expenses.
The control board’s report set a baseline for the challenges the MBTA actually faces and will be followed up by a second report in December. Board members will set out plans and prescriptions for righting the T in the end-of-the-year report.
The control board testified on new approaches to informing the public and state officials about how the T is operating. Board member Monica Tibbits-Nutt described a “dynamic interactive online report” that would use new analytical data to share information on productivity, spending and on-time performance.
Beyond the state of good repair maintenance backlog, the MBTA has a big headache when it comes to how much it needs to spend to operate versus the incoming revenue it generates itself or receives from the state. Revenue and ridership have been flat for the past two years, reported board member Steve Poftak, but spending continues to grow and outpace the T’s coffers.
“The story on the operating budget side is really the irresistible force meets the immovable object,” Poftak said at the State House hearing Wednesday morning. “We have a system that, on the revenue side, that revenues do not grow at a robust level and at a level to match the level that expenses grow.”
Revenues will grow at 1.6 percent, Poftak said, but expenses will continue to expand at 4.4 percent, and debt service payments will go up by 4.5 percent. Much of that growth is coming from wages and benefits for T employees, which is a side effect of the T’s move of employees from its capital budget to its operating budget.
“Our challenge now for the December report is to come up with a set of scenarios, a set of proposals, that allow us to examine all of the assumptions that underpin our current projections and determine a way forward for the T to operate on a sustainable basis without a structural deficit going forward,” Poftak said.
Part of Tibbits-Nutt’s testimony concerned changes to the internal and external communications system the T uses during storms, which broke down last winter and left passengers wondering when or if trains would be coming at all.
“We’re moving operations into one location and the customers are going to know what’s going to be happening. So, God forbid, we have another winter last last winter, everyone’s going to know what they can expect. So they’ll know whether or not they’ll be able to get to work that day,” Tibbits-Nutt said.
The control board’s report set a baseline for the challenges the MBTA actually faces and will be followed up by a second report in December. Board members will set out plans and prescriptions for righting the T in the end-of-the-year report.
