COURTESY OF THE CAPE COD RTA
BOSTON – The Regional Transit Authority Caucus has submitted an $86 million budget request for fiscal year 2018 to the chairs of the Committees on Ways and Means.
State Representative Sarah Peake (D-Provincetown), the acting House Chair of the RTA Caucus, said the request aligns with the funding schedule for RTAs established in the Transportation Finance Law.
The request is $6 million more than Governor Baker allocated in his proposed budget. Baker’s budget cuts funding for the authorites by $2 million from the fiscal year 2017 levels.
The caucus’s request restores what the House and Senate voted for in the transporation reform bill and returns financing to the funding schedule.
“The ask for fiscal year 2018 of $86 million is just to bring the level of funding up to what the commitment was back in 2012 when we enacted the transporation reform act,” Peake said.
More than 60 legislators in the House and Senate signed onto the letter from Peake to support the $86 million request.
“For a while the RTAs have sort of been like the poor stepsister to the T,” Peake said. “Everybody focuses on the T, but there are more people served by RTAs than there are served by the T.”
Peake said the Cape Cod Regional Transit Authority is important to the region and should not be underfunded.
“They help get people to the grocery store, people to their doctors appointments, into downtown Hyannis, in and around the Lower and Outer Cape,” Peake said. “And of course in the summer they help move our tourists from one place to another without them having to get in their cars and clog our highways.”
Peake said the services offered are especially important to the elderly population, which continues to grow on Cape Cod.
“You are reliant on public transit to get to the grocery store or doctors appointments, or just to get out and socialize,” Peake said. “Isolation becomes an even greater and more acute issue as we age and often it is public transit that stands between the senior citizen just staying home alone or being able to get out and still have a good quality of life and enjoy the world.”
The CCTRA works closely with all of the councils on aging to make sure all of the bus services are run in the best way possible, According to Peake.
“We certainly don’t want to see programs like that cut back,” she said. “It’s important now more than ever that we support those services.”
The caucus plans to focus future efforts on legislative priorities that include establishing a Regional Transit Authority enterprise fund and adding a new subsection to the Massachusetts Office of Business Development dedicated to providing transit services for businesses in the state.
Peake said they are working to get RTAs included when large business projects study the impacts to traffic and public transportation.
“We want to make sure that the Office of Business Development looks at RTAs,” she said. “Will they have to increase ridership? Is this new development going in near a bus stop? Do we need to add a bus stop or add a route to include this new office park or shopping center? We want to be on the list and be considered and I think that will lead to a higher quality of life for everybody across the Commonwealth.”
Recent accomplishments of the caucus include the implementation of a capital financing program allowing the RTAs to advance $30 million in federal capital projects without increasing state capital funds, reinstitute the ability for RTAs to borrow money under the credit of the state and the implementation of forward funding for the authorities.
By BRIAN MERCHANT, CapeCod.com NewsCenter
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