(The following story by Paul Nussbaum appeared on the Philadelphia Inquirer website on July 18.)
PHILADELPHIA — Promising an end to the annual brinkmanship over SEPTA funding, Gov. Rendell yesterday signed a landmark transportation law to provide an average of almost $1 billion more a year for transit and highways over the next 10 years.
Surrounded by smiling legislators who a week earlier were at each others’ throats, Rendell signed the transportation bill in the warm confines of 69th Street Terminal in West Philadelphia as evening commuters rushed past.
Rendell predicted the law will solve mass transit’s funding problems “for at least the next decade.” Sen. Vincent J. Fumo (D., Phila.) was even more optimistic: He predicted two decades of predictable, rising funding for SEPTA and other mass-transit agencies around Pennsylvania.
The law will provide $300 million in new funding for mass transit and $450 million in new money for highways and bridges this fiscal year, with the total rising to $1.07 billion by 2016.
The money will come from future toll increases on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, anticipated new tolls on Interstate 80, and 4.4 percent of the revenue from the state sales tax.
SEPTA is expected to get $156 million more in operating funding this fiscal year, enough to prevent fare increases and service cuts threatened for September. But SEPTA will proceed with a fare hike that took effect on July 9. That provides for subway, bus and rail fares to increase by an average of 11 percent and for transfers to be eliminated on Aug. 1.
SEPTA general manager Faye Moore said she was “happy that it’s done. . . . This is a good thing.”
She said the new funding would allow SEPTA to repay money it had borrowed from future construction projects to keep operating. And she said she hopes the transit agency can move to buy environmentally friendly hybrid buses and proceed with plans for modern fare collection.
The new law also provides SEPTA with about $58 million more in capital funding, the money used for construction projects and vehicle purchases.
State Rep. Dwight Evans (D., Phila.), the House Appropriations Committee chairman who vowed to block the state budget until mass transit was provided for, said yesterday: “I don’t know why this had to be so hard.”
“I’ve been fighting for this for decades,” said Evans, who said the measure would provide many new jobs, both directly and indirectly.
Both Rendell and Fumo said they hope to prompt a settlement soon in talks between SEPTA and the Philadelphia School District over how to provide for students who depend on free bus and subway transfers to get to class. Tentative plans call for those students to receive weekly or monthly passes instead of tokens and transfers.
The new law provides the largest single-year transportation funding increase in state history. Rendell had advocated leasing the Pennsylvania Turnpike and taxing oil-company profits to raise the necessary money. Those ideas got little traction in the legislature.
SEPTA and other mass-transit agencies in Pennsylvania have issued dire warnings of fare hikes and service cuts almost every spring, as they pleaded for more money from the legislature to balance their budgets.
The new law may finally provide the dedicated, inflation-sensitive funding the transit agencies have long sought.