In crafting the $350 Billion state and local assistance package included in the $1.9Trillian American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), the Biden Administration and Congressional Democratic leaders have not overlooked some the public authorities that are so often forgotten in the public discourse about fiscal federalism.
The most obvious case-in-point: the $30 Billion specifically intended to firm up the finances of public transit agencies which are all hurting to a greater or lesser extent due to fall-office in ridership and shortfall in dedicated tax and fee revenue streams on which they have relied for decades. Thanks to good continuing coverage by a variety of journalists including the NYTimes' Christina Goldbaum and Pranshu Verma on 3/15, we are getting a pretty good look at how the public transit sector's needs are being addressed by ARPA And as I and many others have pointed out early in the pandemic's life, transit workers - bus drivers, train conductors, cleaners, etc. - were hard hit with illness and fatalities as they went about their jobs with too little PPE and other forms of protection, so the fiscal problems of the agencies they work for were compounding these public servants' personal tragedies with the threat of layoffs and furloughs.
Previous rounds of pandemic response support totaling $39 billion kept these agencies on fragile life support, but the ARPA provides them all with large enough additional amounts that their budget directors can plan rationally for their no-doubt slow return to normal post-pandemic levels of service to the riding public. (For good coverage of these agencies' ridership recovery challenges, check out this previously published NYTimes piece by Veronica Penney with its terrific graphics.)
The New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) and its workforce may have provided the most spectacular example of the fiscal problems hitting all the nation's transit agencies during this pandemic. Previous research by NEMW Institute intern Zanagee Artis strongly suggested that, for a variety of reasons, the more densely populated the service area, the greater the amount fiscal stress experienced by the transit agency serving that population, and previous rounds of emergency assistance didn't appear to take that very important factor into account. That New York's MTA receives $6 Billion from the ARPA - permitting the agency to cancel draconian service reductions and employee layoffs - demonstrates that this time around, Congress and the new administration, got it right, or at least a lot closer to right, the two branches did in previous rounds of pandemic related fiscal stimulus.
And after being largely ignored in previous rounds of stimulus, the other key transportation agency serving the New York metropolitan region - the interstate compact-based Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ) - also received substantial fiscal support helping off-set its losses from the huge drop in airport traffic, bridge and tunnel usage, etc. which were blowing a huge hole in that critical agency's budget.
While neither the MTA nor the PANYNJ appears to be 'made whole' by the ARPA money for both their increased expenses and decreased revenues attributable to the pandemic , coming their way (MTA still seems to have a $1+ billion shortfall left to deal with), a substantial degree of operating budget stabilization seems to have been achieved.
But what about the capital side of these agencies' budgets? It appears that only future federal infrastructure spending initiatives can help with that side of the ledgers, beyond what their tightly constrained bonding capacity can accomplish. Only time will tell whether Congress and the President can move forward on that front in anything like bi-partisan fashion. I hope the sake of the planet as we wean ourselves from a over-reliance on cars that bipartisanship can return to the realm of federal support for public infrastructure development.
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