(The Boston Globe published the following story by Mac Daniel on its website on August 21.)
BOSTON — Opponents of fare increases on the T have begun lobbying Governor Mitt Romney to veto a measure that would allow the MBTA to raise fares even in periods when ridership is declining.
On Monday, lawmakers, at the request of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, deleted a sentence in state law that blocks the MBTA from raising fares if ridership has fallen more than 4 percent.
Romney said yesterday that he was considering the request to veto the provision.
Fare opponents plan to step up their challenge to the change with a march from the state Transportation Building to the State House today.
Romney said at a news conference yesterday that he was carefully reviewing the T provision, as well as another part of the bill that would make it tougher for people to challenge waterfront developments on public-owned lands.
”We’re looking at them very carefully, and I don’t have a direction for you yet as to how they’ll come out,” Romney said. ”We want to make sure that we thoroughly understand the provisions of each of the measures, to make sure there’s no unintended consequences of any of the measures themselves.”
The MBTA wants to raise fares by between 25 and 36 percent beginning Jan. 1. Subway fares would increase from $1 to $1.25, bus fares from .75 to $1. The increases for commuter rail fares would vary.
If the sentence was left untouched, the T would have been unable to raise the fares. T officials and state transportation officials have said the change in the law is minor, adding that the 4 percent figure is arbitrary.
”I don’t think a fare increase should be accepted or rejected on the preponderance of the law,” said state Transportation Secretary Daniel Grabauskas, who chairs the T board and has promised to hold a series of public hearings next month on the proposed fare hike’s impact.
Opponents of the increase disagree.
Without that sentence, the ”MBTA in tight financial times will turn all too easily to increasing fares, at the risk of sending the region’s transit system into a death spiral of rising fares and declining ridership,” states a letter to Romney that was signed by members of the Pioneer Institute, the environmental group MASSPIRG, the Conservation Law Foundation, and the group Alternatives for Community and Environment, Inc.
T general manager Michael Mulhern yesterday would not discuss the specifics of the legislative change.
He did say that, outside of massive service cuts, there are few options for the T other than raising fares.
”This is really a discussion of last resort for us,” Mulhern said.
The T currently has 6,002 full-time active employees, the lowest in at least 20 years, Mulhern said.
State sales tax revenues, the T’s most critical source of funding, have dropped this year and are expected to be flat next year.
In addition, Mulhern said all 29 unions in the T agreed to a wage freeze during the first year of their contracts to keep costs down.
At the same time, the T is upgrading its bus fleet, refurbishing stations, and attempting to make the system cleaner, he said.
”But to continue fulfilling that commitment, I need to make sure that the organization is on stable financial footing, and unfortunately the only way we can close the budget gap today. . . is to raise fares,” Mulhern said. ”Not to do so will leave to inevitable service cuts and a degradation of the system’s reliability.”
(Rick Klein of the Globe staff contributed to this report.)