The officials — including Metro CEO — held a news conference on Thursday. Unfortunately, as we posted earlier, it doesn’t appear that a divided Congress is set to pass a multi-year bill anytime soon.
Below is the press release from the Southern California Assn. of Governments (link is here):
Categories: Policy & Funding
Metro needs to do away with some of the restrictions that are hurting their own revenue stream.
The no eating and drinking policy is rarely enforced, yet you still see people eating and drinking stuff, and yet there’s also illegal vending activity going on. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that restricting something and turning a blind eye to illegal market activity which there is demand for means that there’s a revenue potential here that is being lost to Metro.
When I go to other cities around the world, they PROMOTE business activity to earn revenue. Metro, PROHIBITS that and they end up losing more money.
Perhaps Metro needs to think outside the box regarding alternative revenue sources. E.g., I believe that there is a pay toilet outside of the NoHo station. Why couldn’t the MTA sell rights to manage pay toliets at stations? Or they could sell vending rights on train lines, instead of tolerating the current bootleg industry. Pehaps they could also sell naming rights to stations. I’m not claiming that any of these measures would make Metro self-supporting, but it could help to reduce reliance soley upon tax subsidies and fares.
Maybe it’s time Metro wakes up to the reality that people are sick of taxes and they should stop being forever dependent on taxpayers.
There are other ways to find money. Pay and benefit cuts for Metro officials is a great place to start to fill in the budget gap. Everyone else is getting pay and benefit cuts, government employees should not be exempted just because they’re government employees.
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