(The following article by Jere Downs was posted on the Philadelphia Inquirer website on March 16.)
PHILADELPHIA — When a SEPTA strike was averted Sunday, riders dodged a bullet. Now, they can expect the transit agency to strike their wallets.
In the next two weeks, SEPTA brass will privately brief the agency’s 15-member board on plans for a fare increase to raise money for the $70 million void projected in the $875 million fiscal 2005 budget, the agency’s chief financial officer, Joseph Casey, said yesterday.
How much riders will get socked is not yet known.
SEPTA riders pay a $2 cash fare – among the highest in the nation. A 22 percent increase, to $2.45, would solve the $70 million problem, but that would force the agency into a downward spiral, Casey said.
“You would lose riders on that,” he said.
As SEPTA enters a second year of financial meltdown caused by chronic state underfunding, its officials are not inclined to repeat last year’s threats to abandon one-fourth of the Regional Rail system, a subway spur, and such crucial city routes as the C bus.
After public outcry last year against the scope of unexpected and severe cuts announced April 1, SEPTA and Gov. Rendell mended the agency’s $55 million budget deficit by digging into agency savings, switching highway funding to transit, imposing small cuts, and doubling parking fees at SEPTA lots.
“We are still crunching the numbers… . The public at large wants the service,” Casey said. “We received very little response [last year] from people that did not want a fare increase.”
As part of its original budget-cutting proposal last year, SEPTA planned a 10-cent increase in the cost of tokens, to $1.40, and 4 percent to 7 percent increases in the cost of monthly transit passes. But, like the proposed service cuts, the fare increases did not happen.
The board is not expected to decide anything about SEPTA’s budget until late June, but the agency customarily announces a proposed budget by the end of March. The closed-door budget session this month with the SEPTA board, Casey added, is for information only.
“We’re not going to ask them to make a decision,” he said. “We are going to brief them on what we plan on doing.”
Advocates for riders yesterday encouraged any SEPTA board budget briefings to be open to the public.
“This impacts thousands of people. We need to know the details of what the leadership of SEPTA is thinking,” said Pedro Rodriguez, a spokesman for Action Alliance for Senior Citizens, a group that criticized SEPTA’s board last year for discussing its fiscal woes in private.
SEPTA’s board “took a lot of flak for all their secrecy last year,” Rodriguez added. “You figure they would be more transparent. Stakeholders and advocates and the riding public have an interest.”
SEPTA’s last fare increase in 2001, when the cash fare rose from $1.60 to $2, took riders by surprise. In a move not debated in public, in June of that year the SEPTA board raised the cash fare by a dime more than proposed during public hearings. That fare was the highest in the United States until it was eclipsed by a $2.25 cash fare recently imposed in San Diego.
The agency can rejoice that it averted a strike by its largest union – at least for one year. SEPTA reached a tentative and unusual one-year agreement Sunday night that preserves health-care benefits until costs are certain to rise upon the expiration of a deal with Independence Blue Cross.
Riders will get no such reprieve, lamented Irv Ackelsberg, a transit advocate and lawyer for Community Legal Services in Philadelphia.
SEPTA “will hit the riders because that is the easy way to go. And then they’ll hit the riders next year when they hit the reality of their health-care disaster,” Ackelsberg said. “We don’t have leaders that are solving the people’s problems. We have an underfunded mass transit system that this region can’t live without, and nobody is dealing with.”
In Harrisburg, Rendell expressed little more than sympathy about unpredictable transit funding yesterday.
“We have to look for some way of getting dedicated [transit] operating support to mass transit,” Rendell said. “I’ve said that from the beginning, and we should continue to pursue that.”
Rendell’s proposed budget for fiscal 2005 would put an $8 million dent in SEPTA’s projected $70 million deficit.
Among the many states and regions that contribute more funding to public transit, experts say, Pennsylvania is unusual in that state law requires SEPTA to recover half of its costs at the fare box.
Across the state, riders are readying for another year of protests. In Pittsburgh, recent cutbacks and fare hikes have already prompted a 7 percent drop in bus and train ridership. The Port Authority of Allegheny County has not announced how it will deal with a $30 million deficit in a budget about a third the size of SEPTA’s.
In Philadelphia yesterday, Jean Alexander, president of Transportation Workers Union Local 234, said she would “fight against a fare hike for riders.” Over the last year, she has lobbied extensively in Harrisburg on behalf of SEPTA.
“I will be knocking on Rendell’s door, telling him he must save transit,” she said.
If only to ensure SEPTA’s survival, the cost of that undertaking is huge. The agency’s budget book spells out future deficits if state transit subsidies do not increase.
For fiscal 2006, SEPTA projects $100 million in red ink. That tide is expected to grow to $130 million in 2007, $170 million in 2008, and $209 million by 2009.