Photograph by Michael DeFilippo
Each weekday, William Jenkins rises at 6 a.m. He bathes, eats breakfast, and then heads down his family’s driveway, where a waiting Call-A-Ride van ferries him from his Manchester home to his job as a customer service representative 13 miles away in Fenton.
At 30 years old, Jenkins works 40 hours a week. He makes $10 an hour, has an active social life, and recently became engaged. Nonetheless, cerebral palsy forces him to walk with two canes. He lives with his parents, and although he strives to be functionally independent, Jenkins does not drive. Rather, he relies on Metro service for everything from going to work to meeting his fiancée, who also suffers from the condition.
But all that may be coming to a screeching halt.
“He’s been using the Metro bus and Call-A-Ride for 15 years. But now he will not have any service at all,” says Jenkins’ mother, Bren Pathenos. “He will not be able to go to the doctor’s. He will not be able to go to work. He won’t be able to do anything socially—nothing.”
If anyone in St. Louis has yet to hear, Metro is enacting some of the most severe service cuts in its history. Effective March 30, the cuts—intended to counter the agency’s $50 million budget deficit—are being felt across the board: Metro is shrinking its bus service by nearly 44 percent; light-rail service is decreasing in frequency by nearly 30 percent; and Call-A-Ride is taking a 15 percent cut. In more concrete terms, the service reduction means that buses will run less often. Express bus service has been eliminated from St. Louis County, general bus service—including Call-A-Ride—has all but vanished outside the I-270 ring, and the agency has laid off approximately 550 employees in the past two months.
“That’s the real tragedy: Everyone’s talking about jobs, jobs, jobs,” says Metro chief Robert Baer. “We could be creating jobs if we were growing the system.”
Metro supporters say the cuts could not have come at a worse time. Demand for public transit is at an all-time high (St. Louis ridership increased 8.4 percent in 2008 alone), and with the nation’s deepening economic crisis, that need is expected only to grow in 2009. Worse yet, advocates say, the cuts mean that thousands of transit-dependent people like Jenkins will no longer be able to get to work—forcing them to relinquish otherwise secure employment and enter a job market whose unemployment rate hovers around 8 percent.
But Metro, which is statutorily obligated to balance its budget, doesn’t have much choice. The contentious Shrewsbury expansion ended up costing roughly $680 million—nearly $300 million above the original 1999 estimate—and saddled the agency with an annual debt service of roughly $29 million. Worse yet, the extension went live before the region secured funding for the new line’s daily operations—a cost of roughly $15 million per year. That funding was supposed to arrive last November courtesy of Proposition M, a ballot measure that would levy a half-cent sales tax in the county. But lingering resentment remained over the extension’s exorbitant cost. Prop. M failed, and Metro, facing an estimated $50 million shortfall, went into crisis mode.
“The expectation was that the future would be much better: There would be growth in sales tax and future taxes—Prop. M would pass,” says John Noce, the agency’s chief financial officer. “But the money’s simply not there.”
Metro may be facing an acute fiscal crisis, but in a larger sense, the money has never been there to begin with. The federal government, which once provided money for transit operating costs, stopped that funding in 1999. Meanwhile, as taxpayers in cities like Pittsburgh or Portland, Ore., pay about $150 annually per capita to maintain their transit systems,
St. Louisans pay less than $70 per year.
“Most mass-transit systems run at a deficit,” says Don Sweeney, associate director of UMSL’s Center for Transportation Studies. He adds that transit agencies’ deficits are often overlooked because the services they provide—lowering pollution, easing traffic congestion, transporting those with lower incomes—are thought to benefit the region’s entire population, not merely those individuals who access the service. Still, he adds, “Riders in St. Louis only pay for about 24 percent of the cost of operating the system—the rest must be made up by subsidies.”
Critics of the agency, however, doubt whether Metro’s greater social benefits are significant enough to merit increased taxpayer subsidy. They charge that the debt-ridden agency is a bad steward of public finances and question whether the region, with its low population density and robust highway system, ever should have allowed the costly light-rail system to be built in the first place.
“[E]ven with light rail, transit is barely ‘treading water’ in St. Louis,” Wendell Cox, a Belleville-based demographer, wrote in an op-ed published by the Show-Me Institute, urging voters to defeat Prop. M. “Cars carry virtually the same percentage of metropolitan area travel as before MetroLink was built. Why has there been so little impact? It is simply a matter of access. Transit systems are good at providing access to high-density employment areas, but not elsewhere. There are only a few such areas in St. Louis.”
And therein lies the rub: Missouri is, both literally and figuratively, a roads state. While in neighboring Illinois, the state government doles out more than $20 million annually so Metro East riders can access Metro, the Missouri Department of Transportation is constitutionally barred from using state fuel tax and licensing fees to finance mass-transit systems. The upshot? Last year the state contributed a mere $1.4 million to Metro’s $222 million budget.
“We’re charged to do business as a transportation department, but the fact of the matter is that we are funded as a highway department,” says Ed Hassinger, MoDOT’s district engineer for the St. Louis region. “Constitutionally, all the money from the gas tax has to be spent on roads and bridges.”
Absent a constitutional amendment, MoDOT will be hard-pressed to significantly increase Metro funding in the coming years. Even then, Hassinger says, the state’s entire transportation funding mechanism is in bad need of repair. While Amendment 3, which requires that all vehicle sales tax go to MoDOT, has allowed the department to embark on several high-profile projects (including the $535 million I-64/40 redesign), much of that money is already committed, and MoDOT expects to be paying it off for the next 15 years. What’s more, fuel tax revenues are declining as people drive less, engines become more efficient, and alternative fuels gain a greater market share.
“We don’t see that revenue source coming back,” says Hassinger, who adds that, given the department’s dwindling revenues, moving money from one mode of transportation to another isn’t a good solution. “We would like to have a statewide funding mechanism that would provide funding to all forms of transportation.”
In the meantime, MoDOT is receiving a healthy $639 million cash infusion courtesy of the economic stimulus package. But while MoDOT initially proposed a few projects that would benefit Metro (such as money to purchase buses and vans statewide), the majority of the department’s projects focus on roads and bridges.
“Which is not necessarily what we need,” says Metro’s Baer.
What the agency does need, on the other hand, are operating funds. And though the stimulus package does provide the state with an additional $103 million for transportation construction, Baer says it’s unlikely Metro will see much benefit from that money, adding the agency is hoping that other federal dollars can temporarily restore some of the cuts.
“There’s no point in building anything else when we’re scaling back,” says Baer. “We’re a distressed agency.”
Short of a financial windfall, Metro’s only option is to shrink the system. Still, the current cuts will only sustain the agency through next year, and Metro CFO Noce warns that more cuts are coming if it doesn’t find a new revenue source soon.
“The current cuts should allow the agency to end this fiscal year in the black,” says Noce, noting that the fiscal year ends June 30. “Our forecast is that we’ll even out this year and be sustained through next year, but 2011 is a new game. We’ve got inflationary pressures, and we don’t know where the sales tax is going. There could be more cuts.”
But for Bren Pathenos and her son, any future service reduction is nearly inconceivable as the family still reels from the March cuts.
“My son makes $10 an hour—how could he afford a $25 cab ride to Fenton?” asks Pathenos. “He’s worked so hard to gain his independence. How can they allow him to lose a job that he’s worked all his life to get?”
Malcolm Gay, the magazine’s editor-at-large, writes frequently for The New York Times.
