 Western Massachusetts has to fight really hard to get its share of resources and everybody out here knows that that's the case. And one of the areas where we feel that there's been some inequality is the fact that the Mass Bay Transportation Authority, otherwise known as the T, which serves approximately 50 communities in eastern Massachusetts, they get a dedicated revenue source for their public transportation. We out here in Western Massachusetts and in the other 13 regional transportation authorities, we don't have a dedicated revenue source. We have to fight every year to get our funding in the annual operating budget. And there's a further problem when you're dealing with the regional transportation authorities and that is that it's the only part of government that has what is known as lag funding. That is a budget is approved by the local organization, that is the PVTA or the Franklin Transportation Authority or any one of the other 12, and then they spend the money and then at the end of the fiscal year they send the bill to the state and the state then appropriates the money to pay for last year's services as opposed to appropriating money for next year's services. Well we have the same problem with the T and in the mid 1990s we fixed the problem by going to forward funding. What it required was to appropriate twice as much money in one fiscal year so that we could pay the bills for the previous year and have the money in the budget for the next year. Well the way we did that was to bond the previous year's spending and pay for it over a number of years and then put the funding for the next fiscal year in the budget. And so we want to do the same thing for our regional transportation authorities because otherwise they have to go out and borrow money, spend their budget, pay interest on the money that they're using to pay for their operations and then come to the common wealth get their budget reimbursed for the expenses for the previous year including the interest on the borrowing. So we want to stop that and we've been trying to fix that for oh probably a dozen years or so now and finally we decided to organize a caucus a gathering of legislators it's not a a standing committee it's not an official committee it's a voluntary committee that members of the legislature come together and form in order to work together on behalf of a particular cause or issue and so in this case the regional transportation authority caucus was born and Dan Bosley former state representative from North Adams and I were the co-chairs of it and over the course of three years we were able to fix a number of the problems with the RTAs being able to use the full faith and credit of the commonwealth for example allowed for lower interest rates on their borrowing and so that was a benefit we also were able to fight to make sure that they were getting adequate funding in the budget to pay the bills for the previous year even in the years when we're having recessions and and the funding is more difficult to come by so because they had already spent the money we argued they had to get that amount of money and could not absorb cuts and so we kept working on a variety of these things including forward funding and finally we were challenged by the administration because they said look we're gonna have to come up with sixty five million dollars to do the paying off of the previous years funding and six roughly sixty five million dollars for the next year so we have to come up with a hundred and thirty million dollars all at once well we try to convince them that they just had to bond as we did for the MBTA the previous years spending and use the operating budget money for going forward well too many complications in terms of a variety of financing problems with our bond cap and and other obligations that they had already made for transportation and felt they couldn't get it so they challenged us and they said well if you can find the money we'll work with you to figure out how to do the forward funding and so we did some research and we discovered the toll credit program at the federal level the toll credit program is actually tied to maintenance of toll roads that have both a state designation and a federal designation such as the mass turnpike so we put language into a transportation bond that the administration should do the homework necessary to join the toll credit program and then join it well two years later I'm happy to report it worked we now have membership in the toll credit program we've received two years retroactive payment for a total of about eighty five million dollars from the federal government this is money we would not otherwise have gotten into the Commonwealth and we're about to apply for next year's share of the money and we expect to get somewhere between 35 and 50 million dollars a year each year going forward for as long as this federal program exists so as a result of this the administration has redoubled their efforts and they're working with us to try to find a method for doing the forward funding for the RTAs unfortunately this federal money can't be used for this specific purpose because it can only be used for the turnpike and in relation to the turnpike but in the effort to find money to do forward funding we also found a new revenue source for transportation improvements in the Commonwealth and we will soon have our forward funding accomplished which will save money for our cities and towns on borrowing costs for the operations of and the operating budgets for our regional transportation authorities and we will soon have them funded in the same way as all of the state agencies submitting a budget in anticipation of a new fiscal year and then having that budget approved by the legislature and then receiving money as they go through the year so they do not have to borrow to do their operations so it's one of those unexpected benefits of having formed the regional transportation authority caucus and we soon hope to have our goal of forward funding accomplished but we also found a way of attracting more federal funds into Massachusetts to support transportation