The Utah Transit Authority is dead. Long live the Transit District of Utah! Actually, it would be better for taxpayers and most travelers if it didn’t live very long.
“Lavish” is a word that applied to the Utah Transit Authority (UTA), which until last week served Ogden, Salt Lake City, Provo, and Orem. As of 2016, the agency had spent $1.4 billion in capital costs on commuter trains that carried an average of 8,100 round trips per day. That alone is enough to buy a new Toyota Prius for every round-trip rider every three years for the next 20 years. On top of that, fares cover just 15 percent of operating costs.
The people who run the agency are also lavishly paid. A 2014 legislative audit revealed that the agency’s general manager was paid $350,000 a year, including benefits. He wasn’t even the highest-paid person in the agency: the rail service manager was paid more than $450,000. At least one other executive was paid more than $300,000 a year. For comparison, Utah’s governor is paid around $150,000 a year and the head of the state department of transportation receives around $221,000 a year.
Although the agency is required by Utah’s transparency law to report executive pay, the audit also found that the agency had underreported pay by 15 percent. Taxpayers were also upset when UTA gave out huge bonuses to its executive staff even as it was gearing up to ask for tax increases to pay for its programs.
All of this pay hasn’t translated to sound or efficient management. The audit found several questionable projects, including transit-oriented developments and other projects related to rail construction. For example, UTA gave $10 million to a developer to build a parking garage without providing any design specifications; when nothing was built, UTA contracted with another developer to build it and the first one paid back only part of the $10 million. This year, an estimated 60 percent of UTA’s sales tax revenues will go to repay the $2 billion in debt it has incurred to fund rail projects and transit-oriented developments.
UTA is overseen by a sixteen-member board, but they too are tainted by scandal. Several of them resigned after it was revealed a political action committee made up of contractors that built UTA rail projects funded a trip to Switzerland for the board members, supposedly so they could see how transit works in other mountain communities. Later, UTA made a controversial land deal with a transit-oriented development company that turned out to be partly owned by one of those former board members. All of these revelations prompted a federal investigation into corruption on the part of board members, employees, contractors and consultants that is now on-going.
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In March, the state legislature responded to these scandals by passing a bill that does little more than rearrange the deck chairs. First, it changed the name of UTA to the Transit District of Utah, a move that the agency claimed would cost $50 million because it insisted it would have to repaint every station, train, bus, and bus stop right away to avoid customer confusion even though the legislation allows it to make the change gradually (the agency has since said it would go slow). The new name went into effect last week.
But that’s not all. The legislation also replaces the sixteen-member board with a three-member commission, all of whom will be appointed by the governor and paid $150,000 a year (plus benefits). The commissioners and their staff are estimated to cost taxpayers $2.1 million. But they will sit at the governor’s pleasure, meaning he or she can appear to take action by firing them whenever there is a scandal, without actually getting at the root causes of the scandals, which is too much money.
Just before the new law went into effect, the board fired the agency’s CEO, claiming it was required to do so by the new law but giving him more than $200,000 in severance pay. No one else has been fired, and the rail manager who earned more than the CEO has been named acting CEO.
In other words, the executive staff will continue to be overpaid. Contractors will still profit from rail construction. Developers will still get cushy deals for building transit-oriented developments.
Oh yes, the legislature made one more change: it gave UTA more money, including the revenues from a $28 increase in vehicle registration fees and diversions of other tax revenues that now go to highways. Apparently, legislators decided that the best prescription for a bloated, scandal-ridden agency run by overpaid bureaucrats is to give it more money. So while the Utah Transit Agency is no more, the waste of funds that it represents will accelerate.
Average citizens are too un-interested to express missgivings. Afterall they deserve those benefits, they’re entitled. Say the government passes a small 500 million dollar raise to support their government workers. That’s a lot of cash but since the total cost is spread among so many taxpayers they only see a 5 cent tax increase, a nickel. The taxpayer get’s dinged for five mesely cents, really has no incentive to be outside all day protesting it. Would you spend all day protesting yelling at the top of your lungs over a nickel a year? That’s why government always grows bigger, whenever there’s a proposal that boosts spending, the group that benefits fight for it, meanwhile the taxpayer shrugs the extra nickel…….but those nickels add up. And this explains California’s last decade, a cycle of taxation, spending, taxation, demanding we tighten our belts while their spending splurges. It offers a coming attraction of the future of the US as a whole.
The Antiplanner wrote:
As of 2016, the agency had spent $1.4 billion in capital costs on commuter trains that carried an average of 8,100 round trips per day.
Does this agency (regardless of name) run the light rail that was built for the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City?
Yes. UTA built and finances the operation of all of it.
LazyReader wrote:
Average citizens are too un-interested to express missgivings. Afterall they deserve those benefits, they’re entitled. Say the government passes a small 500 million dollar raise to support their government workers. That’s a lot of cash but since the total cost is spread among so many taxpayers they only see a 5 cent tax increase, a nickel. The taxpayer get’s dinged for five mesely cents, really has no incentive to be outside all day protesting it.
Regarding government salaries, ever noticed how upper-level management (generally not including boards of directors) of transit agencies tend to be very generously compensated?
Usually they are paid much better than similar managers at state highway departments, for reasons not clear to me (never mind that essentially everyone depends on the highway network, while transit agencies usually serve a fairly small percentage of travel). Even when comparing the compensation of transit agency managers to what what a state department of transportation secretary or commissioner is paid, the transit agency managers are frequently better-paid.