Metro Needs New, Guaranteed Funding

Statement of Sierra Club at the Oct, 2005 Metro Funding Summit

FUNDING METRO FOR A CHANGE
For over 30 years Metrorail has taken cars off the road, fostered convenient development at Metrorail stations, provided easy commutes for visitors and workers, and reduced pollution in our region. The first sections of the Metrorail system opened back in 1976. Metrobus began serving the Washington region three years earlier. While Metro has become an integral part of life for the Nation’s Capital region, its trains, buses, tracks, and stations are starting to show their age as ridership continues to grow.

Riders are already paying too much. After years of fare increases, riders already contribute a higher percentage towards Metro’s costs than most other systems. Unfortunately, unlike other transit systems of its size, Metro has no dedicated source of funding. Every year, the transit authority must ask the jurisdictions it serves for the resources to keep the trains and buses moving. After several lean years, Metro is facing an average annual capital and operating deficit of $296 million between 2008 and 2016.

The overwhelming need for Metro remains a stable and reliable source of funding. The Brookings Institution and a recently convened Blue Ribbon Panel both agree: the public needs Metro more than ever, and our public officials must do what is necessary to establish a dedicated source of funding. Only this can ensure Metro can continue to play its vital role for residents, workers, and businesses.

Sierra Club Statement on Metro Funding
Regional Summit – Laying the Trackwork to Metro Funding

October 3, 2005

Good Morning. My name is Chris Carney and I am a conservation organizer for Sierra Club, the nation’s oldest grassroots conservation organization. I am here speaking on behalf of our 18,000 members in the Metropolitan Washington area.

Sierra Club thanks Metro Board Chairman Dana Kauffman for his leadership in assembling this summit. Sierra Club is a strong supporter of improving and expanding public transportation for our nation’s capital.

We have the third worst traffic congestion in the nation, and the Metro DC area receives an F from the American Lung Association for air quality. Metro provides a clean air alternative for over a million passengers every day. Our region is growing quickly. While commutes get longer and we fight to hold onto our farmland and open space in the outer suburbs, the land around Metro stations offers opportunities for more compact development and reinvestment in our urban core.

Overcrowding and deteriorating infrastructure threaten the ability of Metro to keep up with demand. We are encouraged by the possibility of $1.5 billion in federal funds to fund long needed capital improvements and maintenance needs. We believe that the uncompleted 10-year Capital Improvement Program offers a roadmap, and that as jurisdictions establish their own sources of funding they would use it as their guidance. Similar CIP planning would then reoccur on a regular cycle, to map out the system’s capital needs for the next ten years.

Additionally, we believe that our regional commitments must ensure that our state and local jurisdictions match the federal commitment to guarantee full funding for Metro, but without imposing limits on which revenue sources are chosen, and without prompting a reduction in other state and local commitments to WMATA.

To improve service at Metro and strengthen public confidence in the system, we should enhance accountability by creating the position of an independent Inspector General, who would report directly to the WMATA Board, and by adding both a non-voting federal and a rider representative on the WMATA Board of Directors.

We must support transit-oriented development to generate increased revenues and ridership for the system, and accomplish local and regional land use and transportation goals.

We are committed to working with public officials, Metro, and other supporters of Metro toward providing the revenues that will enable our regional transit system to fulfill its critical mission.

Related Information:

Metro System