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Doctrina_Stabilitas t1_iuk7dve wrote

Reply to comment by Ironman2179 in Mass. Tax Refunds Will Start To Flow On Tuesday by husky5050

So you mean to say that the T which already underserved a lot of metro Boston should have cut back on service expansion plans because it had insufficient money or otherwise cut back on expansion in a growing region

Sure fine that’s all well and good, but that doesn’t change the fact that the T has insufficient money to make it’s near term maintenance goals as well as meeting larger economic growth goals for metro Boston

The real solution is to fund both maintenance and capital projects appropriately and not force the T to choose

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Ironman2179 t1_iuk93ze wrote

No that's called bad budgeting. Had the leadership properly budgeted their cash they could do both. They didn't. The leadership constantly has been fucking it up.

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Doctrina_Stabilitas t1_iukb93q wrote

The MBTA has a 13B unfunded maintenance budget https://www.masstaxpayers.org/mbta-finances-cast-long-red-shadow-incoming-leaders

The 2020-2024 CIP for MassDOT includes 9.4B earmarked for the MBTA

https://massdot.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=33a118c32b3f47b3b90a769498aa68bd#

Which accounts for both expansion and maintenance / modernization

Even if we assumed all the funds earmarked for both maintenance and expansion went to the MBTA's maintenance shortfall, we're still short more than 3 Billion dollars at minimum, the MBTA needs more money

The approved capital budget says

>This $13 billion capital sources gap does not include sufficient funding to reduce greenhouse gas emissions nor to protect MBTA’s infrastructure from sea level rise and storm surge. Factoring in climate change costs, the MBTA is short approximately $20 billion for the period from 2023 through 2031. The federal infrastructure bill, if passed, will not meaningfully change this shortfall.

How do you propose we address this $20B capital shortfall (not even the operating shortfall which runs approximately half a Billion per year) the state itself acknowledges exists when making its capital budgets without adding more money and/or revenue

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