Council prez Wu: ‘We need to be thinking big-picture’ on transit fix
City Council President Michelle Wu said the beleaguered MBTA needs investment immediately and Mayor Martin J. Walsh is proposing a tax hike to pay for it.
“We need to be thinking bigpicture,” Wu said. “We have to get the Legislature to talk about allocating money from the state budget, we should be talking about this as it connects to the fair share amendment that has been proposed, and we should have the conversation about taxes and what that means and whether it’s worth it for each resident of the commonwealth to contribute to something very fundamental.”
Walsh wants a plan to overhaul the MBTA’s aging fleet of vehicles and is pushing a temporary tax or fee to pay for it.
“If you want to upgrade the system and have a world-class system here in Boston, here in Massachusetts, which we deserve, we need the revenue for it,” Walsh said. “So I think we have to get a little creative here, maybe do some kind of tax with an end in sight.”
Walsh suggested a “10- or 15year master plan” to upgrade MBTA infrastructure and a tax or fee that would end when the plan is done. The mayor specifically mentioned the sales tax and the gas tax as possible revenue sources.
“You need a steady flow of money coming into the T, and the way you do that is by assessing a fee to something or some type of tax increase and there is certainly a way,” he said. “I think if the public knew the tax increase would be over a 10-year period, but the public knew they’d have a first-class transit system, I think the public would be open to the idea.”
Wu passed through Back Bay Station twice Wednesday night when a faulty motor sparked a fire that caused panicked riders to kick out windows in order to escaped their locked train cars.
The station was shut down for about 90 minutes during the busy evening commute as the T steered passengers onto waiting buses. Wu said officials need to focus on making a plan to fix and expand the MBTA.
“It was horrific to see what happened on the Orange Line, people busting open the windows, jumping out ... the sad part is this is getting more and more frequent, less and less unexpected,” Wu said yesterday on Boston Herald Radio. “We see the T in the news every day for something ... we need major investment right now.”