Massachusetts citizens are fed up with the state’s congested, crumbling transportation systems, and the pressure is on Beacon Hill to do something about it. Senate President Karen Spilka thinks now is the time to take on the difficult job of devising a long-term plan and translating it into a political reality.
Spilka told a group of concerned business leaders last week that “we are in a unique political moment right now” where advocates, elected officials and the public all agree that something must be done.
“I personally think it would be a mistake to waste that moment on incremental changes and small ideas,” Spilka told the board of A Better City, according to her prepared remarks.
Next, Spilka signaled that the legislative gridlock over transportation may be shifting when she blended the Senate’s pursuit of “bold” action with the House’s most cherished buzzword, “consensus.”
“That being said, we still need to find ways to reach political consensus on our bold ideas, and that consensus building must begin now,” Spilka said near the end of her remarks.
In an interview with WGBH News, Spilka said every single meeting she goes to, whether it’s in Boston, her Framingham-area district or even Western Massachusetts, the first 10 minutes of each meeting is taken up by people talking about how long it took them to get there.
“So much of our time is spent in traffic, sitting. That’s not sustainable. We need to do something about it,” Spilka said.
So what does Spilka propose to do about it? First thing’s first — we’re getting a task force. Spilka said her hand-picked group of senators will hold meetings and determine the true scope of the transportation problems before working up a proposal that’s achievable this legislative session.
Spilka said that if the state wants to not only fix and restore existing infrastructure, but to bring in new and expanded services, planners will need to lay out a roadmap for the long-term.
“The bottom line, and I think everybody would agree, [is that] we all want a 21st-century transportation infrastructure. We need to figure out how to get there, what do we want that to look like. What do we prioritize for for the next few years, and long term, and then what do we need to do realistically to implement that plan and achieve it,” Spilka said.
“Then there may also be some pain in how do we pay for all of this as well,” Spilka said.
The Senate president was less specific about avenues with which to pay for what could end up as a multi-billion-dollar wishlist of transportation projects the state needs to complete to stave off traffic-induced madness and remain economically competitive. She acknowledged that one of the major issues that keeps big transportation bills from getting done is that each lawmaker has their own specific constituency to deal with, with their own specific highway, automotive or mass transit concerns.
Suburbanites don’t want higher gas taxes to pay for the MBTA, and urban residents without cars don’t want to pay for highways they don’t use.
Spilka’s all-of-the-above approach applies to both the massive list of projects that should be fixed and to the ways in which the state might finances the fixes. The gas tax hasn’t been raised in years after voters rejected the idea of indexing the tax to inflation.
Allowing municipalities to form regional taxation pools focused on their specific needs, known as regional ballot initiatives, could become a method of matching an area’s particular needs with it’s direct desire to pay for it.
