Local and Regional Funding Mechanisms for Public Transportation (2009)

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60 Each year through the NTD, FTA collects operating and financial data, including the sources of funds used for operat- ing and capital expenditures for systems serving both urban- ized areas. Over 600 agencies in 450 urbanized areas over 50,000 population report annually. In addition, reporting is now required from rural systems receiving federal funds in FY 2006. NTD data and guidance for reporting can be found at http://www.ntdprogram.gov/ntdprogram/. NTD funding information is reported in four major categories: • Directly generated funds; • Local government sources; • State government sources; and • Federal government sources. Transit systems are required to report the original source of all funding even when the funding is passed through another agency. For example, FTA Section 5307 funding that is admin- istered and distributed by state departments of transportation to small urbanized areas are to be reported as federal funds. The category of directly generated funds is perhaps the most unclear of the categories reported and is meant to capture funds obtained from nongovernmental sources, including: • Revenues earned by the transit system as a business entity providing passenger service. These revenues typically are earned directly as the result of providing passenger service, e.g., fare revenues, or as auxiliary revenues that are earned by activities closely related providing passenger service, e.g., bus advertising, station concessions, and parking fees at stations; • Revenues earned by the transit system not closely related to providing passenger service. These funds are categorized as nontransportation revenues and, in many cases, are rev- enues that could be earned by business entities not involved in providing passenger service. Examples include invest- ment income, incidental rental revenues earned from unused equipment and land, donations, grants received from private foundations, and development fees; and • Taxes, tolls, and fees that are imposed by transit agencies that are independent political entities. Some transit sys- tems are organized as independent political subdivisions with their own taxation authority. They can earn funds from taxes, tolls and fees that they are specifically authorized to enact to generate revenue to support transit programs and projects. These are funds dedicated to transit at their source; they can only be used for transit. Other transit systems are a part of local or state government, as noted in an earlier section. The revenues to the transit systems raised through the taxing authority of the grantor governmental units are reported as local or state funds. Within the directly generated category are the following sources: • Revenues earned by the transit system as a business unit; • Dedicated taxes—sales, property, income, gasoline, other; • Bridge, tunnel, and highway tolls; • High occupancy/toll lane tolls; and • Other dedicated funds. In 2002, NTD started collecting information on tax rates for the dedicated tax sources. This requirement was dropped 2 years later because of reporting problems. Currently, no information is reported to the NTD on tax rates. At a very general level, funding data in the NTD provide a reasonable picture of the mix of local funding sources. However, the reporting categories are broad and do not pro- vide information on key characteristics or implementation details such as the tax base, rates, yield or fluctuations, or sta- bility under varied economic conditions. Also, the publicly available NTD data do not provide information on mecha- nisms that fall into the “Other Dedicated Funds” category that might be new or innovative. A P P E N D I X C Observations from the National Transit Database

61 Experience also suggests there are interpretation errors and definitional confusion among local NTD reporters that lead to some incorrect reporting on funding information. Three problems have been observed: • Reporting of federal or state funding as local government funding from the general revenues. This can occur, for example, when a transit system receives funding from the city’s human services department and believes that the funding came from the city’s general fund. If the transit sys- tem had checked the source of funding with the human services department, it may have found out that the fund- ing came from a state or federal grant, a distinction that is of less consequence for this study; • Reporting of dedicated local funding as local govern- ment funding from the general revenue fund. Like the problem noted above, this can occur when the transit sys- tem makes, but does not confirm, an assumption about the source of funding. The reporting of dedicated parking fees as a general revenue fund source is an example of this problem; and • There is evidence that often times sources entered as “other” should have more properly been reported under the more specific funding categories, i.e., there remains some vagueness for reporters in the funding source defini- tions, while at the same time routine computer checks of data in “other” NTD categories are not effective. Like other NTD reporting issues, it is unknown how wide- spread these problems are. Experience suggests that they are not common and probably will not affect aggregate findings from NTD analysis for this project. However, this same experience suggests that it would be dif- ficult to revise the NTD reporting system to collect more com- prehensive information on local funding sources. It appears that inaccurate reporting of funds received from local govern- ments will always be a problem. The transit systems have lim- ited resources and do not have the incentives to properly research the sources of local funding. The NTD program also has limited resources and can only provide a general consis- tency review of the funding data reported. Finally, access to and use of the NTD data are sometimes dif- ficult. The data are presented in Excel spreadsheets and do not always follow the order of the data items used in the data forms. Also, sometimes, the explanation of uncommon or unique sources of funds is not provided because it is difficult to share responses in a public database. Given these weaknesses, the NTD does not inform potential users fully on the characteristics, advantages, and disadvan- tages of alternative local or regional funding strategies, nor can it help guide informed consideration of specific sources. However, with these caveats, the 2005 NTD data provide a snapshot of what general sources of funding are in place at the local and regional level. For overall capital investment, over two-thirds of local and regional funds for public transportation came from “other” sources. The NTD did not provide information on what these sources were except that they might include vehicle licensing and registration fees, communications access fees, surcharges and taxes, lottery and casino proceeds, and the sale of prop- erty and assets. The majority of these funds—$1.2 billion— was reported by the New York MTA, however, and only nine other systems reported revenues in this category. For overall operating support, after fares and earned income (55.4 percent), over two-thirds of the remaining local and regional revenues are from sales taxes (43.3 per- cent) and local general revenues (28.4 percent). “Other” sources (16.2 percent)—property taxes (5.6 percent), tolls, gas taxes, and income taxes—provide the balance (6.7 percent). The large proportion of funds entered in the NTD as “other” sources provides another indication of the limited usefulness of the NTD as a tool in advancing consideration of new sources on the local or regional level. Among the major features emerging from the national aggre- gate numbers are the following: • The revenue mix for transit capital investment and for oper- ations is distinctly different. • Local capital investment is predominantly from “other” sources and sales tax revenues; and • Transit operations are supported largely from fares, sales taxes, and local general fund revenues.