More than half of $72m budget gap stems from last year’s problems Metro’s board is considering cutting back bus and train service instead of asking local governments to pony up $72 million to cover the entire budget gap next year.
| Borrowing for the future from the future |
| Metro’s board of directors has postponed making major service cuts for at least two years by cobbling together money from other sources. |
| • In 2009, the board tapped $13 million from the agency’s rainy day fund to help avoid service cuts for the fiscal 2010 budget. |
| • But in 2010, ridership dropped below projections and snowstorms hurt the bottom line. The agency ended the budget year $16.6 million in the hole, but pushed the shortfall forward to the 2012 budget now under consideration. |
| • In approving the fiscal 2011 budget last June, the board decided to borrow $30 million from its capital budget to plug a hole in the operating budget – under the condition the agency paid it back. “Surprise, surprise, none of those things happened,” Mortimer Downey said, noting that ridership and revenue haven’t boomed. “I don’t think we’ll be $30 million ahead of budget at the end of the year.” |
Nearly $47 million of the $72 million gap in the proposed $1.46 billion operating budget comes from the pain the directors postponed from last year, while the rest comes from lower-than-expected revenues.
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