It’s not about TARC’s future. It’s about TARC’s present. Louisville — and every transit agency around the country — has to make the very same hard choices: cut service, raise fares, lay off workers, or mortgage the future.

Looks like Louisville is doing a bit of all four.

If TARC has a $2 million shortfall, it means it must find $2 million to cover the expenses for the service it already ran. It cannot recoup this $2 million. It must find another $2 million to get back into balance.

In any case, you are not saving money to acquire something in the future. You are using money to pay off a loss.

But Dave, understand that it’s the feds, not the transit agencies, who dictate how the money can be spent. The feds don’t want agencies to get too creative, because they don’t want agencies getting money for one thing and using it for another. They demand agencies use the money to fund capital projects, not to take the capital monies and spread them around to cover operational holes.

I agree, though, that in these extraordinary times, it may be necessary for a one-time transfer to operations. But it should come with some form of agency discipline. The agency should either have to repay the funds without interest when it has the ability to do so (when revenues rebound, the money must either be given back to the FTA to replenishing the capital account and not put into operations).

There’s a reason why transit agencies should resist tapping into capital: It offers the temptation to eat the seed corn.

California is precisely all but insolvent because of this. The voters have mandated that the state lock in a formula to spend the budget on education and transportation. The legislature cannot override these voter-dictated limits … with one exception. These limits do not apply when there is a fical emergency, which is anytime there’s a budget shortfall.

Both the Democrats and Republicans in the Senate and Assembly perform fiscal year street theater by deliberately putting the state in a financial shortfall. The Democrats, with solid majorities but not the 2/3rds to steamroll the Republicans, always overload the budget with spending. Even in good times, the budget would not be able to support the spending. The Republicans circle the wagons and stop the budget process. So every year the state passes a budget late, and ultimately what does pass is what would have been in the budget in the first place but with an end-run around citizen mandates.

California did this when it was high on the real estate bubble hog, when the crisis was a fiction. Now it finds itself in a legit crisis, and there’s no seed corn to eat.

Don’t let the same happen anywhere else.

“You see the problem yet of using stimulus funds to pay for operating costs? Operating funds pay for the service TARC already ran so workers can get to their jobs to pick up paychecks for the work they already did.

“Where’s the recovery in that? The transit money goes to pay for the bus trips already made”

No, could not disagree more. This is about the future. We’re going to budget meetings. There’s a $2m/yr shortfall. We’re looking the following options for 2010: Service cuts, fare hikes, layoffs, or siphoning some of the capital from ARRA – prolly 10% – $1.67m worth.

I also understand that robbing the capital to pay the operating results in less capital. The question then becomes what do you need more? I read that St Louis has mothballed 300 buses for lack of operating costs. Do you think they need more ARRA capital funds? Of course not, they should sell off some of their capital and use the remainder to fund operations. Sometimes you have to make these decisions.

In these exceptional times, those decisions should be left to the TAs. The ideologues in congress need to back up off the neck of the people who rely on transit, and let the TAs do their job.

You see the problem yet of using stimulus funds to pay for operating costs? Operating funds pay for the service TARC already ran so workers can get to their jobs to pick up paychecks for the work they already did.

Where’s the recovery in that? The transit money goes to pay for the bus trips already made … not for the trips people will make when a recovery does appear.

You basically want TARC to pick up stimulus funding to keep service levels exactly the same. The money would essentially backfill what has been lost with local sales tax receipts.

Also, federal operations money given to transit agencies is not a blank check. It is not, as you say, “Nobody’s being forced to spend on operations if they don’t want to. Let the Transit Authorities make their own choices.”

The Federal Transit Administration not only forces transit agencies to spend on what it considers operations, but it dictates how the money is supposed to be spent. Also, the transit agencies only get the money after the services have been supplied.

TARC would not be able to buy more buses. Bus purchases are a capital expense. TARC cannot use that money to lease buses or purchase service, unless the arrangement has been existing before the funding agreement was formed. FTA also expects matching subsidies from the state or the local service area, so if your tax base has fallen, so will the feds’ contribution to your subsidy.

This does not even get to the paperwork requirements that both the agency and the FTA have in place. The auditing, along with the rules, is a sort of tax that means agencies lose about 10 to 20 percent the of the money they get.

Federal funding should be a last resort. If Louisville can find a new funding source without having to go to the feds, you’d get more service per dollar.

First you failed to see that the Post report said the guy was 23 years old. Maybe they got the facts wrong, but you got wrong what the article said.

In the same way, you got wrong what I said. Maybe you are so angry you can’t see straight.

I said, when I was the chief shop steward in my union, I urged the negotiators to extend medical benefits to the part time employees already on the payroll in our shop. But the Local President sneered, “How far down the food chain do you think we should we go?’

It is not my position to hire part timers, and I never said that it was. It is my position that if a union contract already allows management to hire part timers, it will be a better contract if those employees get medical benefits.

Do you prefer part time employees without medical benefits? I’m just trying to nail down our differences, if this is one.

More generally, however, I do believe that the way the world works is that if the feds supply “free money” to local transit operations, then in short order the free money will get soaked up by higher wages and benefits for all employees of the system, from the CEO to the part timers, with little or none going to better service for riders.

That said, I would support federal funding of operations for a year or two during this current crisis, when tax revenue has fallen so dramatically. But if it turns out that revenue does not recover in a year or two, and we face an L-shaped recovery with a long flat period of no growth, we would need to think about how to deal with that problem, and not necessarily continue federal funding open-ended.

To hold the position the guy held requires 25 years of seniority. Write it in stone. This particular deal, as embarrassing as it maybe, really doesn’t get to anything except what it has elicited here, an amazement that a “grease-monkey” (and yes, that is a pejorative akin to “porch-monkey”) could earn that much money.

I’ll give you a brief history of what it took this guy to become a car repairman. He started about 1979 and cleaned the piss off the floor when all the suburban commuters couldn’t be bothered to hit the toilet. That took him about six or eight years, usually at night, lots of chemicals, not a thing he bragged about at the cocktail parties and the fraternity rushes.

Then he worked in the shop for the next twenty years with progressive responsibilities starting with changing out seats and flooring. Then maybe setting up the trucks or knuckles or air brakes, maybe the AC, trying to develop a speciality. Then he had to gamble his hard won day shift position to take the training committment to become a car inspector, piss in the bottle a lot and then bust his balls for the last five years of his career, his job on the line with every inspection, until he maxed out his earnings in the manner sneered at by all the “progressives”.

Yeah, hire some part-timers, great plan, you negotiate it they’ll give you a prize. Or maybe you should hire out as a car cleaner and follow this guy’s career path, enjoy yourself, maybe you could team up with the Post reporter. It’ll be a lot of fun. Trust me.

Still, I think the stimulus is an unusual response to an unusual situation. Most transit agencies can do some useful pruning in response to an occasional 0.5% service cut, and you do need to hold open the risk of cuts to keep state and local feet to the fire.

But we’re now seeing severe service cuts that really damage mobility in high-impact places. For example, CalTrain — the San Francisco Peninsula line that serves one of the most educated and tech-savvy and environmentalist markets in the universe — is cutting midday service to hourly. Hourly! Forget about taking the train to the next town to meet someone for lunch.

Here’s an idea. What if Federal assistance for operations were focused specifically to places where ridership is growing despite the downtown?

This shouldn’t just be about saving jobs. It should be about saving services that are clearly in demand. Part of the argument should be that the services we’re saving have a clear multiplier effect in terms of their economic benefit.

I guess the rest of your comment was meant to reassure us if the feds open the faucet for subsidizing operating expenses forever into the future. YOu seem to suggest that situations like this one will not become ‘more so’ if that happens, but I was unpersuaded by your argumentation.

We do agree that three workers taking down $80,000 a year would be better than one coasting along on earnings three times that.

….and if he’s doing 47 hours a week every week in overtime maybe it’s time they hired some apprentices.