MBTA General Manager Steve Poftak. State House News Service File Photo | Sam Doran
The budget the legislature sent to Gov. Charlie Baker on Monday allocates an extra $23 million to the MBTA, but the T’s general manager was hesitant Tuesday to discuss plans for the funding boost before the ink dries on a final spending plan.
Asked Tuesday what the MBTA would do with the additional revenue – which is more than two-thirds as much as the agency expects to bring in from fare hikes it pitched as essential – General Manager Steve Poftak observed that the updated figure was included in a conference committee report lawmakers approved and has not yet been approved by the governor.
“That’s in the conference budget,” Poftak said. “We don’t have a final general appropriations act, so we will start to think about that, but obviously, we still have the rest of the budget process to go through.”
In the conference committee report, submitted Sunday after the six conferees privately negotiated the spending plan for weeks, lawmakers upgraded the fiscal year 2020 expected revenue by nearly $600 million and bumped spending up $317 million over the initial budget bills.
Sen. Michael Rodrigues, chair of the Senate Ways and Means Committee, said during a Monday session that $23 million more would go to the MBTA as a result.
Fares increased by an average of about 6 percent on MBTA trains and ferries on July 1, a move that T officials said would bring in about $30 million in revenue needed to prevent the agency’s deficit from growing.
Boston Mayor Marty Walsh also met with Poftak and Secretary of Transportation Stephanie Pollack on Tuesday for a “very honest, straightforward conversation” about the state of the transit system. In the wake of a derailment that has snarled Red Line service and frustrated commuters since June 11, Walsh last week wrote to Pollack slamming the MBTA as “not currently a functional service.”
Walsh told reporters that he met with Pollack, Poftak, his chief of staff Dave Sweeney, Chris Osgood from the city’s transportation department and Brian Golden from the Boston Planning & Development Agency Tuesday morning before he came to the State House to testify at a pair of committee hearings.
“The mayor is concerned, as are we, that the transportation system works for the city and, in particular, that we make progress on the Red Line,” Poftak said. “There was general agreement that we would work together with his staff to identify areas where we could improve, and that’s something that will be in process for a number of weeks.”
In his letter, Walsh asked the MBTA to invest about $9 million to run Red Line and commuter rail trains more frequently as mitigation for ongoing delays stemming from the June 11 derailment. Asked if the T would act on that request, Poftak said internal discussions are still ongoing “at the staff level.”
The same day, the MBTA announced it has spent more than $1 billion on capital programs in fiscal year 2019. The T spent $875 million on its capital program in fiscal 2018 and $811 million in fiscal 2017.
In May, officials forecast that they would not meet the $1 billion threshold targeted for the fiscal year as the MBTA attempts to ramp up its annual investment. But by the end of the fiscal year, the T surpassed its goal with about $1.06 billion spent on total capital investment, about $850 million of which was on reliability and modernization efforts.
The T’s current five-year capital plan includes $8.2 billion worth of projects of about $10 billion in needed upgrades, but the MBTA has funding and programming for as much as $9.4 billion, Poftak said Tuesday. “To the extent we can accelerate our spending and hit that $9.4 billion target in five years, we will,” Poftak said.
