As various news outlets have reported, the fact that the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission has made the last of its legislatively mandated annual $450 million payments to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) doesn’t mean the commission will halt its annual toll increases.
But neither does it mean that mass transit in Pennsylvania – to where so many of those dollars were funneled – will go wanting.
And both situations represent the worst of government ineptitude.
The General Assembly’s onerous transfer legislation (Act 44 of 2007) has allowed it to siphon nearly $8 billion from the Turnpike Commission over the past decade-plus.
That left the commission with intractable debt and constantly rising tolls to cover it. But the toll increases, though scheduled to be smaller and more in line with inflation by 2028, won’t go away.
After all, the commission has to figure out some way to retire the legislatively forced $14 billion debt.
Act 89 of 2013 drops those $450 million annual payments to $50 million at the end of the current fiscal year. It will be up to the Legislature to determine how to replace those dollars from the state’s general fund.
But don’t cry for mass transit.
Federal legislators were quick to exploit the coronavirus pandemic fiscal crisis by dumping copious amounts of public dollars into systems, many with out-of-whack cost structures held hostage by union cartels. The Port Authority of Allegheny County is a member in bad standing of this group.
As a Wall Street Journal editorial reminded on Friday, “(M)ass transit … received $70 billion in pandemic relief. Only about $20 billion of that has been spent. Yet Congress now will dole out another $90 billion over five years.
Referring to a White House fact sheet that boasts about the subsidies being the “largest federal investment in public transit in history,” The Journal puts it all into succinct context:
“Taxpayers in Little Rock are again subsidizing New York City’s subway and its fat union contracts. The deal includes an additional $66 billion for rail, $30 billion of which is earmarked for Amtrak’s northeast corridor—a subsidy for political commuters.”
Here’s some more context from The Journal:
Mass transit typically receives $13 billion in federal money each year.
Congress provided an additional $70 billion for urban transit last year in the pandemic spending bills – “more than six times the normal transit budget and more than the annual operating and capital spending of every transit agency in the U.S. combined.”
While the money was intended to make up for lost revenue during lockdowns, “most mass transit systems” – the Port Authority included – “face a larger structural budget problem that pre-dated the pandemic:
“Ballooning operating costs from generous labor contracts and pension payments, which are siphoning off money from system improvements and repairs. Many systems have also been losing riders due to lousy service” and competition from ride-sharing services.
Gee, what could go wrong with this extraordinary money dump? Look for even more dysfunction by spendthrifts emboldened by darn near limitless “free money.”
Talk about public transit rides being on the road to public purpose perdition.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
