Healey: T will ‘take care of business’ in short term, TBD on revenues

BRINGING THE MBTA up to state of good repair comes with a hefty price tag – $24.5 billion, according to a stunning announcement in mid-November – but Gov. Maura Healey says she’s confident in the agency’s assessment that riders won’t need to wait for an allocation of that size to see improvements. 

That number reflects a “thorough assessment and to build the kind of public transit system that we want,” Healey told Jim Braude and Margery Eagan on GBH’s “Boston Public Radio” on Monday. “That said, it’s not going to cost $24 billion to do what we need to do. And I’m saying that because just a couple of weeks ago, [MBTA General Manager] Phil [Eng] released a proposal – it’s more than a proposal, it’s a plan that I’ve endorsed – which basically gives the T a year to get all the slow zones eliminated, to make all the repairs, to make that T run safe, reliably, smoothly, and quickly, which is what the public needs.”

Part of the Green Line is currently shuttered for repairs – the first of nearly two dozen closures that the MBTA says will lead to lifting all of the system’s slow zones by the end of 2024. 

“The reason we are doing that – and it’s a pain point for the public, and I totally get it – but if we don’t bite the bullet and take care of business, it’s never going to get better,” Healey said.

A recent 16-day closure of the Ashmont branch of the Red Line and Mattapan Trolley eliminated all speed restrictions from that stretch of track. About 20 percent of the Red and Orange Lines are still afflicted with speed restrictions, along with 22 percent of the Green Line and 33 percent of the Blue Line as of Monday.

Bringing the system up to scratch will be expensive, with the slow zone elimination mission just one slice of the $24.5 billion estimate that Healey said includes “the whole system and all the things that could happen, maybe should happen.”

But in the short term, the governor said, “I need to have a public transit system that’s safe, reliable, running on time, riding at speeds that actually get people there quickly, and I believe we can get there within the year under the proposal that the GM Eng put forward. That also will take a lot of money.”

The MBTA has long struggled with its revenue streams, which depend on a combination of fare collections and government allocations. A sizable operating budget gap looms. Though state and federal aid plus T emergency funds helped cover a projected $366 million budget gap for fiscal year 2024, future shortfalls could grow to $542 million by 2028, transit officials said in May.

Ridership numbers, which plummeted during the pandemic, are hovering at about 60 percent of 2019 levels.

The independent MBTA Advisory Board’s operating budget oversight committee, concerned that fares may rise given the looming budget shortfall, wrote in May that “the revenue model in the FY 2024 budget assumes overall ridership will increase by 9.8 percent. This seems aggressive. We would like to know the contingency plan if ridership does not reach this level.”

Passenger fares, which covered about 43 percent of the costs incurred by running MBTA passenger trips pre-pandemic, are projected to cover about 19 percent of those costs this fiscal year. 

When Braude asked the governor where the $24.5 billion would eventually come from, Healey did not offer specifics.

“Obviously, it’s driven by revenue and it’s going to come from a few places,” she said. “Our capital investment plan, that we put forward every year, incorporates some of that. Phil is continuing to look at and assign what needs to be done in terms of best practices and also technologies and the like. So it’s going to be the subject of a lot of discussion.”

The recently enacted Fair Share Amendment, or “millionaires tax,” on incomes over $1 million is expected to generate over $1 billion in revenue in Fiscal Year 2024, which must be spent on education and transportation. Lawmakers dedicated $301.5 million of the funds to public transit capital and service improvements, with transportation initiatives overall receiving a little less than half of the revenue generated by the surtax.

Other revenue-generating options, like raising the gas tax and tolls, would likely prompt intense debate from the Legislature.

Transportation Secretary Monica Tibbits-Nutt said in mid-November that the MBTA is in a tough spot juggling fare revenue and state aid.

“The amount of money that is coming from the Legislature is not enough,” Tibbits-Nutt told the Advisory Board. “And I don’t think that that’s even a controversial thing to say; that’s just simple math. It isn’t enough,” the secretary said. “So how do we get enough money for it? Because we cannot make that money contingent on, ‘Oh, well, the service needs to be this level of quality, you need this level of on-time performance to get that money.’ Because you can’t achieve that if you don’t have that money. You put the T in a difficult position where they can only lose, because there’s no winning that way.”