It took an incredible amount of chutzpah for Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority Board members to suggest last week that Metro riders are the ones who must “make sacrifices” as the transit agency attempts to correct years of its own bad decisions. What do they think Metro riders have been doing all this time? Instead of the safe, efficiently run, and properly maintained regional mass transit system serving residents and visitors to the nation’s capital that taxpayers and passengers have every right to expect, Metro’s management has allowed it to degenerate into one in which rising crime and diminished safety have become the rule rather than the exception. In fact, the Metro board undertook its current stepped-up maintenance program only after damning reports from the National Transportation Safety Board, the Tri-State Oversight Committee, and a task force from the Greater Washington Board of Trade and the Metropolitan Council of Governments left it no other choice. D.C. Metro representative Tom Downs says that “somebody has to pay the price” to return the system to what General Manager Richard Sarles calls “a state of good repair.” The board’s odd notion that Metro’s customers should be the ones to sacrifice, instead of Metro employees who allowed the system to deteriorate to its current state of disrepair, is telling, especially in light of Metro’s continuing fiscal irresponsibility. As The Washington Examiner’s Kytja Weir reported Thursday, Metro already spent its entire $48 overtime budget within the first seven months of the current fiscal year, and is on track to hit $84 million by year’s end, exceeding last year’s record by $9 million.
Metro officials had the nerve to blame maintenance problems and a large number of vacancies for busting the OT budget. However, the maintenance problems are a direct result of Metro’s historically too-generous compensation of its unionized work force at the expense of system safety, maintenance and repair. Furthermore, the vast majority of the 263 new hires Metro has requested will be sitting at desks, not driving trains and buses or fixing escalators.
Four years ago, when The Examiner first reported that Metro employees routinely padded their retirement accounts by collecting a staggering $70 million in overtime, we predicted that the transit agency’s growing unfunded pension liability would result in “higher taxes, more fare increases, deferred maintenance and diminished service.” All of those unfortunate consequences have since come to pass, along with a series of horrendous accidents that caused injury and death. We’d say that Metro riders have already sacrificed quite enough.
