Let it Ride

Hey, here's an idea for a reality TV game show: you're a municipal department in a big-ish city and you're about 15 million dollars in debt and have only six months to find the money. What do you? Raise parking fees? Increase parking tickets? Try and win it all at Cache Creek? And you know who would be eligible to play? The Municipal Transit Agency as they're $15 million dollars in debt and have till July 1 to do something about it.

At last night's meeting, they talked about ways to make up the budget shortfalls. Proposed ideas are the usual ones: lots of fee increases (parking, license and tickets) and selling residential parking passes online (cuts down on shipping and handling charges). One thing not being discussed is fare increases or cuts in service. We're pretty sure everyone is aware of the fact that if that were to happen, bad things could happen. Speculation is that the only fee that could cause any trouble would be increasing parking meters, as businesses are afraid it would hurt their business.

The MTA is hoping to increase their budget for the next year to help service along. Which sounds great but Arnie's budget, you know the one all about the environment, could also potentially take away millions from the MTA's budget. Which would mean we're all back to where we are now.