Sunday editorial: Prop M is people
Robert Cohen/Post-Dispatch
Emily is 27 years old and has Down syndrome. She lives with her parents in Webster Groves, but her mother says she hopes to live on her own one day. Emily’s path to independence lies along Metro’s transit routes.
Emily has a food service job at a high school in a neighboring municipality. Call-a-Ride is too expensive for her, so Emily walks to her Metro bus stop, makes a connection with a second bus and then walks the rest of the way to work.
She is proud of her independence, her mother says, and proud that she learned to navigate the system by taking Metro’s “bus training” for people with disabilities. Public transit also took Emily to the volunteer jobs that prepared her for her paying job.
All of which is background for why Emily’s parents — both of whom work outside the home — wrote last week to say that they plan to vote for Proposition M, the half-cent sales tax increase on the Nov. 4 ballot in St. Louis County. “Daily riders like our daughter need dependable public transit to stay independent and productive,” they wrote.
Half of the estimated $80 million a year that Prop M would raise would go toward the day-to-day operating costs of the system. The other half would be banked for future expansion of the MetroLink light rail system.
If Proposition M fails, Metro says it will be forced to make major cuts in service. Some of Prop M’s opponents say Metro is bluffing. We’ve looked at the budget numbers, and we believe that the projected cuts would be necessary.
Critics also blame Metro’s circumstances on poor management decisions by prior agency managers. We criticized those decisions, too, but they account for only a small part of the agency’s financial problems.
The larger problem is that the St. Louis region funds public transit mainly with sales taxes. In our slow-growing local economy, sales tax revenue has increased at a rate of 2 percent or less per year while system costs have been growing about 3 percent annually. No matter how well the system is run, those numbers make a reckoning inevitable.
Meanwhile, the state of Missouri is shortchanging St. Louis.
Les Sterman, executive director of the East-West Gateway Council of Governments, says, “Missouri is an
exception to the rule among urban states in providing no meaningful financial support to transit.”
He cited the 59 percent share that the state of Minnesota pays for the transit system in Minneapolis, the 35 percent share Tennessee pays in Nashville and Indiana’s 21 percent in Indianapolis. Closer to home, there’s the 50 percent share Illinois pays for Metro’s operations in Metro East.
If Missouri contributed just 20 percent of Metro’s operating funds, it would amount to about $45 million a year — almost exactly the budget shortfall projected for 2009.
Much has been written about how health care workers at area hospitals and nursing homes would be displaced by cutbacks in Metro services. But we also heard from Bob Blaser, account manager for Kelly Services, a temporary help agency at Maritz in Fenton. Metro has said that if the tax doesn’t pass, it will be forced to eliminate Metro routes west of Interstate 270. “I have over 300 temporary employees here. . . . Perhaps as many as 50 use the bus,” he wrote. “I would expect to lose all those employees.”
And Phyllis Forney, president of Sanford-Brown College’s campus in Hazelwood, wrote that “My students are non-traditional students working full time with families . . . . I have a sense of urgency to protest the elimination of bus routes . . . which happen to service approximately 55 percent of my student body.”
With our economy sagging badly, even more families will be working even harder to “change their economic situations.” They will need a stable, reliable transit system.
We all do. Vote Yes on Proposition M.
So Maritz has 50 employees who ride the bus … that’s great. If they value those employees, it would cost them a lot less than $80 million a year to run a shuttle from the nearest Metro route to their campus. Why do these businesses think St. Louis county families should spend more to subsidize the needs of their businesses? Let them run a shuttle to the nearest Metro line. Or, I’m sure Metro would consider making arrangements with some of the business communities in the far-flung suburbs where an extended line would be subsidized by a Chamber of Commerce or a large corporation. They want the employees, and they don’t want to pay them enough so they can afford a car. So let them pay for the transit subsidy.
If the liberals believe Obama is going to win and he is going to push through massive infrastructure programs, why not wait to see if the Feds will pay for this boondoggle? It is said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again. Metro wants to expand the system to get people to vote for the increase to pay for the last expansion. The new expansion will lose more money and require even higher taxes. Asking for a tax increase in the depths of a recession, perhaps the worst one we’ve ever seen is also stupid. The greed of this request will be seen by voters who will defeat it handily.
Hmmm. On one hand, we have a corrupt agency asking for money instead of just taking it? They can raise fares, they can “ask” the state for the funding, or what about having the companies that get TIFs and other incentives to operate their businesses where they do use some of that resource allocation THAT THEY HAVE ALREADY RECEIVED to sponsor the routes and lines that they feel that they would benefit most from? That’s what those TIFs and other incentives are for! Do they think that we were just giving them money for posterity?
On the other hand, we have businesses that apparently feel that we gave them incentives and such merely for posterity (hint hint Kelly), and they want us to help support their businesses by shuttling their employees for them in times of economic crisis, because it would not allow them to make a profit without these additional taxpayer subsidies. Well, my family really isn’t getting ahead either in these times, so I think that I will pay for the transportation that I need, and Kelly can pay for theirs. Or they can lay off 50 people who can’t make it to work as a punishment to us for not providing social transportation services, but a warning to Kelly: you are exposed. Remember: people who use your services rent those “bodies” from you, so if you don’t have them, you will wither up and die. And companies that need those workers will not feel your sense of “community” if you just throw these guys under the bus, instead of getting them, and we will not hire from you, quite often with that same thing in mind. I suppose you should buck it up and hire a driver, or support Metro with the funding that YOU are benefitting from. When I ran a little shop out of the Chesterfield Mall, I used to pay my people bus fare out of my own pocket if they could not afford it, since they were willing to ride an hour and a half each way for a six hour shift. And in return, they worked their souls into the ground for the opportunity.
I will not be voting yes on this measure, because it is not a fairly distributed tax. Maybe Kelly and other local businesses sit down with Metro and see how many monthly bus passes it would take to support a route, and buy that many passes to ensure their route. Then they could give the passes to whoever they wanted - maybe even as an employee benefit, since temp firms are so well known for the benefits packages that they provide to employees. Most employers don’t feel it is their responsibility to be in the transportation business, and rightfully so, but IF you want the best possible workforce, maybe it’s an idea to look at. Then decide - before asking voters for money for your bottom line.