Streetsblog New York City

Believe it or not, in many U.S. states one of the biggest obstacles to active transportation is in the constitution.

Embedded in the constitutions of 22 U.S. states are bans on spending gas tax revenues and/or vehicle registration fees on anything but highways and bridges. That means no matter how much practical value a sidewalk, busway, or bike lane would add, those projects must go begging for funds.

Municipalities throughout the Denver area will soon be able to use gas tax revenues on projects like light rail expansion. Image: Captured Refractions

But thanks to the efforts of a broad coalition in Colorado, the number of states with constitutional restrictions on sustainable transportation spending is about to fall to 21. Governor John Hickenlooper will sign a bill tomorrow that opens up $250 million a year in state gas tax revenue to walking, biking, and transit projects.

Colorado-based transit and environmental advocates found a way to overcome the ban without the monumental effort and expense of a statewide referendum. And they’re eyeing six other states around the Southwest with hopes for a repeat or two.

Colorado’s constitutional amendment — passed in 1935 — states that gas tax revenues and vehicle registration fees can only be spent on highways and bridges. To make matters worse, the state had always depended on a narrow reading of the term “highways” to exclude local roads, sidewalks, and bike infrastructure, as well as transit.

Rather than try to overturn the rule, advocates in Colorado simply challenged the way it was being interpreted, said Will Toor, a former mayor of Boulder who helped lead the campaign as director of transportation at the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project.

“Fifteen years ago, a group of us began making the argument that that was really an inappropriately narrow interpretation,” said Toor. “There are other places in the constitution that describe railroads as highways of the state.”

In 2009, a coalition of transit advocates had a small breakthrough. The Colorado legislature wanted to pass a new vehicle registration fee, but lawmakers needed the political support of transit advocates. The transit coalition was able to win a small, but important, fraction of the funding for transit – just $15 million out of $1.2 billion.

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Earlier this week, there was good news for transit riders: MTA tax receipts came in higher than expected, providing up to $40 million in additional revenue this year. While the MTA isn’t scheduled to update its budget until summer, there is already talk of using the money to restore cuts or expand service.

That $40 million in extra revenue for the MTA? Cuomo took half of it away. Photo: Governor's Office

But the additional tax revenue is a happy accident. State policy didn’t change; the MTA simply reaped the benefits of an improving economy. In fact, Andrew Cuomo is still using the MTA as a piggy bank: the state budget now headed to his desk also includes a sneaky $20 million transit raid courtesy of the governor himself, which hasn’t made as many headlines.

The raid, first uncovered by the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, works like this: The governor’s executive budget declared $20 million of MTA operating funds ”surplus” without explanation, then used it to cover holes in the state budget that would have otherwise been filled by the state’s general fund.

At a joint budget hearing in January, Assembly Member James Brennan asked MTA interim executive director Tom Prendergast how this happened. ”I don’t know,” Prendergast replied.

Despite Brennan’s questioning, neither the Senate nor Assembly fought to have the raid removed from the budget. As a result, it’s survived and now awaits the signature of the man who proposed it.

Although the budget raid takes away “only” half of what the extra tax receipts provide, that’s still $20 million that won’t be available to restore service or fix up decrepit stations. For comparison, major service cuts in 2010 saved the agency $93 million.

The significance of the raid also goes beyond the dollar amounts in this year’s budget. Budget raids in the recent past were far larger, taking hundreds of millions of dollars in 2009, 2010 and 2011. This year’s budget shows that Cuomo, who gutted the transit lockbox bill, still wants the ability to quietly rob straphangers at his disposal.

The next mayor will have to take the lead on transportation funding challenges that, while difficult to address in campaign speeches, are critical to the city’s future, former lieutenant governor and MTA chairman Richard Ravitch said today at a Fordham University infrastructure forum.

Richard Ravitch says the next mayor will have to get behind congestion pricing, whether it's an election topic or not. Image: Wikimedia

Ravitch said that while raising fares to cover the MTA’s operating expenses is acceptable, using fare hikes to cover debt service for infrastructure investment — which is already happening — is highly problematic. “That’s when it begins to hurt,” he told Streetsblog after his afternoon panel wrapped up. There needs to be a new source of revenue for the MTA’s capital program, and congestion pricing is necessary, Ravitch added.

The next mayor will need to make congestion pricing a top-tier priority and work with Albany to make it happen, Ravitch said. (The other top priorities he mentioned are dealing with union contracts and retiree health care costs.) But Ravitch isn’t hopeful that a productive discussion will break out during the mayoral campaign.

“They probably won’t be talking about what they should be talking about,” he said. “It’s hard to get elected on a platform of increasing taxes. The next mayor’s going to have to do that.”

With shrinking federal support for transportation, the burden of investment will fall to the local tax base. “The planning commission has done a great job in rezoning large parts of the city, particularly in the outer boroughs,” Ravitch said, but he wants to drastically ramp up outer-borough growth to help generate revenue. ”There is plenty of space; it’s a question of density and access,” he said.

But there’s one rezoning project that Ravitch remains skeptical of: East Midtown. “I’m personally not yet persuaded that that’s a good idea,” he said, saying that without major investment, the additional subway crowding and traffic congestion will be serious.

Although the city has proposed transit capacity improvements funded by new development, Ravitch is skeptical of geographically-targeted funding mechanisms, such as the 7 train extension, to address challenges that are regional in nature.

He is, however, bullish on the Tappan Zee Bridge’s chances to win a federal TIFIA loan. When Streetsblog asked how the multi-billion dollar loan will be repaid, given the Cuomo administration’s apparent lack of will to raise Thruway tolls, Ravitch said that TIFIA’s low interest rates are enough to keep repayment costs under control. ”They’re going to solve the Tappan Zee Bridge problem,” he said.

The consequences of the near-certain sequester for aviation have been well publicized by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s recent media blitz, but less well-known are the effects for surface transportation.

The Second Avenue Subway is one New Starts-funded transit expansion that could be complicated by the sequestration cuts. Image: MTA

LaHood broke that silence in a memo to department staff earlier this week and released yesterday by Politico, warning that even after taking measures like “instituting hiring freezes, cutting contracts, and taking other administrative reductions,” furloughs may be necessary in the Federal Transit Administration and the Surface Transportation Board.

FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff said last month that he’ll move “heaven and earth” to keep people working in the event of a sequester, but he may not be able to avoid furloughs. The entire FTA staffing budget is subject to the 6 percent sequester cut. (See my story from Monday detailing how the sequester works and what transportation programs will and won’t be affected.)

It could also impede transit construction projects. The Tri-State Transportation Campaign has made a list of crucial projects that could get caught in the sequester’s web, from TIGER-funded intermodal facilities in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut to the New Starts-supported Second Avenue Subway in Manhattan.

“Right now, I can tell you that the sequester would require a 5 percent cut to the New Starts/Small Starts program, which would reduce funding for critical transit projects by approximately $100 million this year, creating unplanned borrowing and financing costs for states and local government,” said FTA spokesperson Brian Farber yesterday. “The cuts would also require FTA to revise its payment schedule for New Starts/Small Starts projects, slowing the payments the federal government previously committed to making.”

As New Yorkers wait to find out if Governor Cuomo is even thinking about finding someone to chair the MTA, his lack of attention to transit stands in stark contrast to another northeastern governor – one who in the past six months not only named a new transit head, but also released a plan to fund the state’s transportation system and made it a focal point of his State of the State address.

Hey, a governor who actually rides - and does something about - transit! Photo: Office of Governor Patrick/Flickr

That governor is Deval Patrick of Massachusetts. First elected in 2006, Patrick is the first post-Big Dig governor, and while he’s had to deal with the project’s fallout, including massive debt, he’s also had the chance to chart a new course for transportation.

“He’s been a really great governor for transportation in general and transit in particular,” said Stephanie Pollack, an urban policy expert at Northeastern University. “He deserves a huge amount of credit for putting the issue on the table.”

In September, Patrick lobbied Beverly Scott, former head of Atlanta’s MARTA system, out of her planned retirement to lead the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, a move that was widely lauded by advocates. But that’s only part of the story.

Patrick has reorganized and consolidated the state’s transportation agencies in an effort to improve accountability, and he has confronted the need for revenue to maintain and modernize the state’s transportation network.

All the borrowing to pay for the Big Dig, combined with the lack of sufficient dedicated revenue, had buried Massachusetts under a mountain of transportation-related debt. In 2012, 45 percent of the combined MassDOT and MBTA budgets were allotted to debt service. (While the MTA hasn’t reached this level of indebtedness, its debt load is growing at an alarming rate.)

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Mayoral candidates Bill Thompson, Christine Quinn, John Liu, Bill de Blasio, Adolfo Carrión, Tom Allon, and Sal Albanese gathered to talk transit at a Friday evening forum. Photo: Stephen Miller

Friday’s transit forum hosted by Transit Workers Union Local 100 and a coalition of rider advocacy groups offered an opportunity for a more more detailed discussion of transit policy than this year’s mayoral race has seen so far. While the candidates offered few specifics about how they would improve transit for the millions of New Yorkers who depend on trains and buses, clear differences emerged, especially on the question of how to increase funding for the debt-ridden MTA.

Five Democrats — former City Council City member Sal Albanese, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, Comptroller John Liu, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, and former comptroller Bill Thompson — were on hand, as were former Bronx borough president Adolfo Carrión, running on the Independence Party line, and Manhattan Media publisher Tom Allon, running as a Republican. Conspicuously absent was Republican Joe Lhota, whose resume includes a recent one-year stint as MTA chair.

The transit issue that the mayor can control most directly is the allocation of street space. How much real estate should be dedicated exclusively to transit, so riders don’t get bogged down in traffic? More than anyone else, the mayor has the power to decide.

Albanese had the most specific proposal, calling for 20 new Select Bus Service routes by 2018. De Blasio said he wants more Bus Rapid Transit outside of Manhattan, citing a JFK-to-Flushing route as an example. When Streetsblog asked after the forum if the Bloomberg administration has been implementing the SBS program quickly enough, de Blasio said he didn’t know enough to say if implementation was going slowly, but that the implicit answer is “yes” because his vision calls more more BRT in the outer boroughs.

Carrión, who called for a new goal of providing 30-minute commutes from the city limits to the CBD, cited the Select Bus Service route on Fordham Road as a successful transit enhancement, noting that it has won over merchants who were initially skeptical. Quinn and Thompson, meanwhile, spoke about improving bus service, but not specifically about SBS or BRT. And Liu said that Bus Rapid Transit should be part of the city’s transit mix, but didn’t get more specific than that.

On the issue of funding the MTA, the mayor has far less direct control than the governor and the state legislature but still commands a powerful bully pulpit that can set the agenda.

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If you thought Albany had gotten over the habit of raiding the MTA for cash, think again.

Photo: Governor's Office

Nadine Lemmon at the Tri-State Transportation Campaign reports that there’s a $20 million transit raid lurking in Governor Cuomo’s 2013 executive budget:

This $20 million diversion of funds comes from a pot of money that is statutorily dedicated to cover the operating needs of the MTA. The Executive Budget, however, declared that this $20 million diversion is “surplus,” but there is no explanation of  how funds are determined to be surplus.

The 2013 transit raid isn’t as big as other recent Albany raids, which were $100 million or larger. And unlike the 2009 raid it won’t lead to service cuts, since the MTA’s dedicated tax revenues are beating projections. Still, that’s $20 million the MTA won’t have to restore service.

This explains why Cuomo didn’t enact the transit lockbox bill that advocates pushed for in 2011: He still wants to use the MTA as a piggy bank when it suits him.

Transit raids can be tough to pick out amidst all the budgetese, and the way the Cuomo administration cloaked this year’s theft looks especially sneaky. Lemmon flagged it last week in this language in the budget proposal:

“The Budget will use surplus mass transportation operating assistance funds to pay for a portion of the debt service associated with previously issued MTA service contract bonds. (2013-14 Value: $20 million; 2014-15 Value: $0).”

What the budget summary doesn’t say is that the state’s general fund would have paid this $20 million if the administration hadn’t stepped in and diverted the MTA’s $20 million. How transparent!

As Lemmon points out, the transit lockbox bill would have compelled the Cuomo administration to disclose the raid and explain its impacts on the MTA. The way things stand, the governor can continue to sweep it all under the rug.

Thanks to reader Peter Frishauf for passing on this 1973 constituent letter he received from Ed Koch, who represented New York’s 18th Congressional District at the time. Forty years ago, Koch was putting out a more progressive message on bike policy than what we heard in 2011 from another U.S. Representative who had his eye on Gracie Mansion.

Koch, who died last night at the age of 88, introduced some innovative changes to prioritize surface transit and bicycling in the first half of his three-term mayoralty, though not all of them lasted. Many of the bus lanes on Midtown Manhattan avenues were created under his watch, beginning in 1981 with the implementation of the Madison Avenue bus lanes. Tens of thousands of bus riders benefit from these exclusive lanes to this day.

The previous year Koch’s administration had put down the city’s first on-street protected bike lanes on 5th Avenue, 6th Avenue, 7th Avenue, and Broadway between Central Park and Washington Square. The protected lanes turned out to be a short-lived experiment: On a Manhattan limo ride with President Carter, Governor Hugh Carey mocked Koch for building the lanes, and the mayor had them torn out just a month after they were installed. Twenty-seven years passed before the city got around to building another protected lane.

In Koch’s third term, his administration did a complete 180 on support for bicycling, attempting to implement a bike ban on Midtown avenues in 1987. The ensuing revolt against the bike ban, which was delayed by a court ruling and never fully implemented thanks to a rising tide of opposition, was actually the least of the woes plaguing the end of his tenure. Koch’s DOT was rocked by scandal when it was revealed, among other things, that the agency had become a nest of corruption under commissioner Anthony Ameruso, a patronage appointment doled out at the behest of Democratic Party bosses.

In terms of a long-term transportation legacy, the most significant act of Koch’s mayoralty was to team up with Carey and Albany to fund the MTA’s first five-year capital program in the early 1980s, at the insistence of then-MTA chair Richard Ravitch. The investment in transit reversed the decline of what had become a decrepit, unreliable system, turning it into the engine of the city’s recovery. Koch and Carey’s successors have let transit funding deteriorate since then: Direct city and state support for the MTA’s capital program has shrunk to almost nothing.

Here’s a transportation funding idea that aligns incentives nicely: taxing parking lots to pay for transit.

That’s what one former high-ranking state official is proposing for Massachusetts, ahead of a big announcement by the state Department of Transportation. Earlier this week Governing Magazine looked at the parking lot tax plan, part of a series of policy recommendations laid out by former Massachusetts Department of Transportation Secretary James Aloisi.

A former high-ranking Massachusetts officials says parking lots should generate revenue for the state's transit systems. Photo: Kunc.org

Writing for Commonwealth last fall, Aloisi said the state’s transit system (specifically the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority) is in a crisis that will only be solved by hard decision making, and he urged the state’s leaders to resolve it with a series of bold proposals.

Aloisi proposed both a vehicle-miles-traveled tax and a 20 cent per-gallon increase in the gas tax, to be split evenly between transit and roads. But what’s garnering the most attention is Aloisi’s proposal to tax non-residential parking lots and garages with more than 20 spaces and dedicate the revenue to transit. The idea isn’t exactly new. All of these proposals emerged as part of a 2004 study on transit finance, commissioned by the state to fix the MBTA’s still-unresolved budget woes.

Observers are anxious see whether the parking tax put forward by Aloisi makes it into the state’s formal plans. The state of Massachusetts was set to release a new Department of Transportation comprehensive plan this past Monday, but officials have delayed the announcement until early next week.

Shoring up the transit system in Massachusetts’ largest urban area is vital to the state’s economy, environment, and social equity, Aloisi says. And he argues that it’s a mistake to continue funding transit with sales tax revenue — which should be directed to priorities like healthcare and education — and with unsustainable levels of debt:

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When New Yorkers go to the polls less than a year from now, they’ll definitely be voting for a new mayor, and they might also be voting for billions in state-backed transportation funding, if a measure put forward by Assembly Member James Brennan clears Albany.

The second time around: Assembly Member James Brennan wants to put a statewide transportation bond on the ballot in November.

Brennan, a Brooklyn Democrat representing Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, and Kensington, is reintroducing his bill for a $4.5 billion statewide transportation bond, evenly split between roads and transit. Starting in January, he’ll be making a push to sign up additional Assembly co-sponsors (there are now 16, all Democrats), and to find a sponsor for a Senate companion bill, with an eye toward recruiting Republican support.

“When we put it out there last year, we had no intention of passing it,” Brennan legislative director Lorrie Smith explained, saying that they wanted to begin circulating the issue in Albany before making a push in 2013. ”We’re taking the next step and trying to fashion a proposal that will go before voters in November.”

Some of the bond money is expected to go to the MTA’s next five-year capital program. Although that slate of maintenance and expansion work is still undefined (the current capital program runs through 2014), it’s likely this time around that keeping the system’s existing infrastructure in a state of good repair will be a higher priority than big-ticket projects like the 7-train expansion.

“We’re going to have to find different sources of revenue in order to find the capital necessary to sustain a state of good repair,” MTA Chairman Joe Lhota said earlier this year.

Although advocates welcomed the bill’s reintroduction, they cautioned that it is by no means a complete fix, for either the MTA or the state’s larger transportation system, which both have tens of billions of dollars in unfunded needs.

“We remain a little concerned that this might pass and voters and legislators might think that our funding needs have been resolved when, in fact, they have not,” said Tri-State Transportation Campaign Executive Director Veronica Vanterpool. Separately, both Tri-State and Transportation Alternatives said that Brennan’s proposal should be part of a larger revenue plan. Brennan himself said in April that the bond issue would still leave a hole of at least $6 billion in the capital program, even with federal matching funds taken into account.

While a more ambitious legislative package would address a heftier chunk of the MTA’s funding needs, it would also be tougher to enact.

“Brennan at the moment is the only game in town” because he’s “proposed something other than agency borrowing,” said Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign. The Brennan bond would be backed by general tax revenues, unlike much of the borrowing for the current capital plan, which is paid for out of the MTA’s operating budget. Moving borrowing from the MTA’s books to the state’s can take pressure off straphangers, who, absent initiative from Albany, are paying for debt service through fare hikes.

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