The coming year is shaping up to be one of big bills to pay in our commonwealth, and there are worrying signs not everyone is prepared.
Transit costs look set to take up the lion’s share of the tab. In early 2024, the MBTA will start its next round of budgeting for capital improvements over the following five years, the venue where we’ll see General Manager Phil Eng turn his staff’s frightening $24.5 billion dollar estimate of the T’s maintenance and repair needs into a concrete plan connected to specific dollar requests.
But alongside that conversation, the agency will be rapidly approaching twin fiscal cliffs. As the T’s own budget team has chronicled, its $2 billion in federal COVID-19 relief funds will start to run out, putting the accounts that pay for day-to-day running of trains and buses into a deficit that could balloon to $551 million by 2027.
The agency’s capital budget is facing a similar leap into the void. The Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation has repeatedly pointed out that because the state’s habit of giving the state legislature an unusual degree of say over money for capital projects like replacement trains, the T will face a roughly 50 percent drop in the money available for infrastructure improvements by the middle of next year – around a $1 billion shortfall each year.
This is the same pot of dollars that will have to pay for many of the needs rolled up in the T’s $24.5 billion repair bill. And neither that $24.5 billion tab nor the $551 million operations shortfall include the $2 billion or more needed to start electrifying the commuter rail – an investment everyone in the state agrees we need to unlock significant amounts of desperately-needed housing – nor the enhanced local bus service some experts quietly acknowledge we’ll need to take a true bite out of congestion.
Figuring out how to address these needs while boosting long-term investments in housing will be a “hard, hard discussion,” as Transportation Secretary Monica Tibbits-Nutt said at a forum recently. And pressure to avoid cuts to other parts of the state budget in the event of a recession and to backfill local and state spending fueled by federal pandemic relief money will make that harder.
But one thing that won’t make these discussions any easier is Beacon Hill’s lack of transparency and an opposition to accountability that infects many parts of state and local government, as every regional chamber of commerce in Massachusetts argued in a letter to Gov. Maura Healey and legislative leaders last week.
Our state’s investment needs and the fiscal demands they place on taxpayers are so large that anyone proposing a big tax or spending increase must be ready to show their work in detail about how specific deliverables can be achieved – something the MBTA’s Eng, for his part, is already leading on. And state legislators need to prove to the public that they’re scrutinizing these proposals with educated eyes.
Without a commitment to accountability, businesses and everyday voters will be left wondering what value they’re actually getting for the billions they pay in taxes. And we all know what happens to politicians in power when that happens.
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