Time is running out for a deal this year on Pa. state funding for public transportation

Without legislative action this fall to increase state funding for Pennsylvania’s public transportation systems, SEPTA will have to slash its services, despite short-term aid, its own cost-cutting moves, and a proposed fare increase, board chairman Ken Lawrence Jr. warned Thursday.

“Service cuts, on the scale necessary to balance up the budget, will be nearly impossible to undo, and will have serious, long-lasting impacts on our riders and the region’s economy,” Lawrence said during a two-hour hearing in Philadelphia of the state House Transportation Committee.

The transit agency faces a $115 million deficit in its current operating budget, which runs through June 2025. Lawrence said it would need to implement cuts to help fill that hole and deal with a deficit in the following year stemming from the inability of the legislature and Gov. Josh Shapiro to come to an agreement on a long-term source of new funding for transit.

But the main takeaway from Thursday’s hearing was that there may not be enough time or bandwidth for lawmakers to get such a deal done in an election year, with a mere 12 voting days scheduled for the rest of the year.

It was the eighth hearing the committee has held around the state on the funding issue.

Shapiro initially asked that the state pump $283 million into the Public Transportation Trust Fund by increasing the annual allocation of state sales-tax revenue it receives, which would have brought $160 million more to SEPTA.

Leaders in the Republican-controlled Senate insisted that new mass transit funding would need to be paired with more spending for highway and bridge infrastructure, too. Democrats were willing to work on a broader measure as part of the state budget. In the end, lawmakers could not agree on how to fund it — with the sales tax, a new levy on slot-machine-like “skill games,” or some combination of revenue sources.

As what was called a “down payment” at the time, $80.5 million was added to the budget that passed in July for transit (SEPTA got about $53 million of it) and an equal $80.5 million appropriation for roads and bridges.

The two streams of transportation spending historically have been coupled.

“When you have something being talked about in public transportation, you usually don’t ignore roads and bridges,” Larry Shifflet, executive deputy secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, told the lawmakers.

The even split put in the state budget “is really representative of a bipartisan effort,” Shifflet said.