House Dems rally at Lincoln High for SEPTA funding now. ‘Time’s up.’
SEPTA is less than three weeks from raising fares and slashing transit service by 20% overall just hours before schools open across the city Aug. 25.
Democrats representing Philadelphia in the state House crashed Republican Sen. Joe Picozzi’s district in Mayfair on Monday to demand that Senate Republicans do their jobs and pass a budget that fully funds mass transit.
“Senator, time’s up,” said Rep. Morgan Cephas of Overbrook Park, chair of the city’s all-Democratic House delegation.
SEPTA is less than three weeks from raising fares and slashing transit service by 20% overall just hours before schools open across the city Aug. 25.
Cephas and her colleagues spoke at Abraham Lincoln High School, where about 2,000 students depend on SEPTA to get to class, sports, and other activities.
Picozzi, a first-year senator and the only Republican representing the city in Harrisburg, has said he supports more state transit funding. Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R., Indiana) has the power to call the Senate back into session and to schedule votes.
“It’s OK for you to be an advocate of SEPTA, but where the rubber meets the road is when you demand to your leadership that there is a vote,” Cephas said.
In the Northeast, SEPTA’s Route 88 bus, with stops on the Lincoln campus, will be eliminated, while Routes 66 and 70 will be reduced.
Those buses, Cephas noted, also connect students to Baldi Middle School and Archbishop Ryan, Father Judge, Little Flower, and St. Hubert high schools.
In recent weeks, Democrats have begun to pressure Picozzi and two other GOP state senators in SEPTA’s backyard: Sens. Frank Farry (R., Bucks) and Tracy Pennycuick (R., Montgomery).
Earlier, they’d mostly avoided calling out anyone by name, but argued the importance of action and noting they’d done their share by passing out of the House four versions of transport funding.
Pittman and most Senate GOP members have resisted giving more to SEPTA — which already receives more than $1 billion in state funds annually from the state’s sales tax — saying they see the transit authority as mismanaged and lacking accountability for fare evasion, public safety, and more.
Picozzi and the suburban Republicans have written a package of accountability bills that would require SEPTA to publish performance reviews every other year on its progress toward financial stability and how it used state funds. Additionally, the state would establish “minimum system performance criteria” for SEPTA to improve fare evasion issues, public-private partnerships, and bus routes.
SEPTA welcomed the idea, but no funding mechanism was attached. Some of the requirements in the bill appear to duplicate reports the transit agency already must make to PennDot under Act 44, a 2007 transit funding law.
The budget is more than a month overdue and SEPTA says it must have new state money to halt the planned Aug. 24 cuts. Senate Republican leadership holds the balance of power in trilateral negotiations with House Democrats and the Shapiro administration.
“Step away from the political theater,” State Rep. Rick Krajewski (D., Philadelphia) urged senators. “To my Republican colleagues, the decreased state revenue, the disruption of our economy, the loss of livelihood for thousands of people — you and you alone will be responsible."