Transportation

RIPTA Gets Ready for Efficiency Study as it Faces More Than $30M Deficit

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PROVIDENCE — Per a stipulation placed on funding from Gov. Dan McKee’s fiscal 2025 budget, the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority is preparing to start an efficiency study this spring.

Last year, McKee’s $10 million cash infusion into the agency, which the administration sourced from federal pandemic relief, came with the requirement that RIPTA complete an “efficiency review” by March 2025.

RIPTA CEO Chris Durand admitted at a board meeting Thursday that the review wouldn’t be finished by that deadline, but board members recognized that it was their decisions that had led to the delay.

Director of the state Department of Transportation and RIPTA board chair Peter Aliviti noted that it was the board’s choice to delay the study until it had found and appointed a permanent CEO. (The board voted for Durand to take the helm of the agency in November after he had become interim CEO last spring.)

Aliviti said that caveat should be mentioned when RIPTA staff officially asked McKee’s administration for an extension on the study.

The review will be completed by an outside entity and include analysis of where the agency is succeeding and where it could do better. Part of the $10 million allocated to the agency last year will be used to pay for the review.

Durand said RIPTA will present the board options for whom to contract for the study in February or March.

“Whoever we hire, we need to emphasize that timing is critical,” board member Norman Benoit said during the Jan. 23 meeting.

Although the study won’t be completed by the original deadline, Durand said he hopes some of its key findings will be ready by May, around the time when the General Assembly and governor are beginning to solidify the state’s fiscal 2026 budget.

In McKee’s 2026 budget proposal, RIPTA faces a funding gap of more than $30 million.

Advocates for transit spoke out against the RIPTA budget deficit in McKee’s budget proposal after it was released, and a few came to the board’s recent meeting to urge the body to work toward plugging the gap.

It’s not clear what the review will conclude, but it could point to ways to save the authority money or find other revenue streams.

“We are carefully reviewing the budget plan and will assess its implications for our operations,” Durand said in a statement last week, responding to the governor’s budget and the RIPTA deficit. “As part of this process, we will also look into new ways that we can generate revenue and enhance operational efficiencies.”
 

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  1. of state agencies asked to do an efficiency study, RIPTA should be near the last as its operations have been looked at repeatedly at the legislature, and it is also subject to review by the Federal Transit Administration with comparisons to peer agencies, and RIPTA always compares favorably. If they wanted an efficiency study maybe they should have demanded it of RIDOT that messed up the Washington Bridge (and instituted an expensive cockamamie ferry in winter when the bridge first failed instead of promoting existing transit) plus allowing toxic waste to be dumped in Olneyville leading to lawsuits and prosecutions…
    I think the RIPTA efficiency study may be intended to justify cutting funding and routes because ridership has not yet recovered from the pandemic, and as they see transit as just a necessary service for the poor and not as tool that can help our environment, economy, and housing needs, they thus think it is just not worth fully funding. I hope I’m wrong about this

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