What was promised…
The Metropolitan Transit Authority will further reduce its previously planned bus rapid transit efforts while boosting police presence on its routes and increasing its investment in so-called microtransit under its proposed fiscal 2025 budget.
The draft spending plan, unveiled on the agency’s website Thursday, includes a $973 million operating budget and $598 million in capital expenses.
That represents a 6.3 percent increase in the operating budget and 42.2 percent increase in capital spending.
The proposal calls for $7.2 million for 175 new security positions and increasing hiring incentives for the Metro Police Department, along with $10.3 million focused on more reliable service. According to Metro, those reliability investments will increase bus service by up to 3 percent.
Those investments include $1.9 million on microtransit services and funding to launch an additional curb-to-curb service route.
The proposed budget also will “de-scope” some projects, including the Inner Katy bus rapid transit line. The project will now be a high occupancy vehicle lane from the Northwest Transit Center to downtown, and comes after the agency opted to pause its planned University bus rapid transit line, citing cost and changing ridership. Both projects were part of the voter-approved MetroNext plan.
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The University and Inner Katy BRT lines were key features of the MetroNext plan, which the agency’s previous leadership had said would drastically change public transit in Houston. Voters in 2019 approved $3.5 billion in bonds for the initiative. None of those bonds have been sold.
I stand by what I said before, that this Metro board is nullifying the 2019 election and lying to our faces about it. There was an HOV lane component to that referendum, but this wasn’t it. We were promised an expansion of rapid transit, we voted to approve that promise, and now it is being taken away because this Mayor and the Metro board members he appointed don’t want to do that. I am thoroughly disgusted.