A bill before Congress that transit advocates are battling could restore key federal transit benefits that they fought for just months ago.
It’s an interesting dilemma: will individual transit riders score one for their pocketbooks, while the systems they ride take a hit? The impact could be especially big locally where more than 250,000 riders rely on the SmartBenefits program that delivers the transit benefits for Metro.
Metro has forecasted that it could lose 2.8 percent of its rail riders without the higher benefit levels. But Metro also relies on federal transportation money.
The issue is that the surface transportation bill calls for changing how the funding for transportation works, by eliminating a provision that sets aside some of the fuel taxes for transit funding.
Transit groups and activists are mobilizing their supporters, urging their congressional representatives to oppose the bill. Some newspaper editorial pages came out against it Thursday, with The New York Times calling it a “uniquely terrible” bill and the Sacramento Bee’s board calling it a “giant step backward.”
But D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton said Thursday she plans to offer an amendment to the bill next week that would restore transit benefits that dropped Jan. 1 from a maximum of $230 to $125 per month. Her motion would raise them to match parking benefits that max out at $240 per month.
Many federal workers get the benefit outright, giving them essentially free trips on Metro or heavily subsidized ones on Virginia Railway Express and MARC. Private employers tend to offer the benefit as a pre-tax deduction for workers’ paychecks, in exhange for a tax break of their own.
Norton said she is opposed to the underlying bill, and voted against it in in committee, but said she plans to make the amendment “so at least some good would come from the legislation if it passes.”
