For Burlington residents, the city’s experiment with a public bus system is only getting to be a worse deal for taxpayers.
And the likelihood is that it will get even much worse in the years ahead.
When Link Transit was first initiated almost ten years ago, city officials made much of the fact that most of the funding would be “free money from Washington,” our term, not theirs.
Residents were repeatedly told that the federal government would pick up the tab for many, if not most, aspects of the bus service.
But that largesse may be eroding, and we fully expect it to decline even more.
But city officials, somehow, remain enamored of the idea of having mostly empty buses riding around the city, even if they end up costing taxpayers millions of dollars a year.
There was no pent-up demand for bus service when it began and there is no significant enthusiasm now, even after almost a decade of service.
A simple glance, if one can see through the tinted glass (which we suspect is intended to prevent people from noticing how few riders there actually are) often reveals totally empty buses – with only a few having even a smattering of riders.
But now the price tag is about to rise.
The contractor that the city hires to run the bus service is about to change. The existing contractor, who’s handled the system since its inception, didn’t seek to be considered for the next contract period.
Instead, the city decided to take the highest bidder from among the new applicants, who wants more than $3 million for each of the five years of the contract period. Somehow, city officials thought paying an extra $300,000 to $400,000 a year more than lower-priced bidders was “worth it.”
Government at its best.
This bad news followed another round of potentially explosive costs that the council heard last month from a consultant who had all manner of ideas of additional Link Transit facilities – a potential transfer hub, a maintenance center, and/or a headquarters or operations center – that she thought city officials should consider.
Does anyone other than us see a pattern here?
Bureaucracies like to grow – and they always want to dig deeper into taxpayers’ pockets.
The consultant estimated that property for any of these new facilities would likely cost somewhere between $140,000 to $211,000 per acre, and, of course, the city would need at least a few acres.
The consultant conceded that her recommendations might cause sticker shock: “The price tags can get pretty steep pretty quickly for these facilities,” she acknowledged. But, as always, the impact of the price to taxpayers was minimized: “But federal funding is the primary way to fund these types of facilities,” she told the city council.
Yeah, don’t count on that any more.
We don’t know if the consultant or Burlington city council members have noticed, but there’s a new administration in Washington, D.C., and there’s a much more taxpayer-oriented emphasis in its decision-making.
We seriously doubt that these federally-funded boondoggles are going to go unnoticed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) or other watchdogs.
We don’t believe federal largesse is going to continue in the way that it has, and particularly not to subsidize empty buses running around a mid-size city that doesn’t really need them in the first place.
We think it is an unnecessary program, but for those who insist that transportation should be a municipal service, we’re reminded of the late U.S. Senator William Proxmire’s contention when awarding one of his famous “Golden Fleece” awards for wasteful spending. In his rebuke of a Washington, D.C. subway system, Proxmire argued that it would probably be cheaper to pay out tax dollars for individual cab rides rather than have taxpayers bear the far larger burden for public transportation projects.
Proxmire gave out more than 100 Golden Fleece awards between March 1975 and December 1988. In his own words, the award singled out a “wasteful, ridiculous or ironic use of the taxpayers’ money.”
Proxmire, much like the modern-day DOGE inspectors, fought for American taxpayers by focusing public attention on budgetary waste in every branch of government.
And, by the way, lest consultants or city council members forget, Burlington residents are having to pay the federal taxes that are being wasted through these handouts from Washington.
It’s just a matter of which pocket they want to be picked – and by which (federal, state, or local) public officials.
