Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz responded to the commission's decision Wednesday with a missive to City Council members, who voted 12-8 in November's budget hearings to plan for a fare increase in Metro's budget. The response criticized the commission's vote for being based on "last-minute" information and only dealing with "half the equation" by not putting forth service cuts to deal with the budget gap.

"The mayor believes that the TPC needs to confront the consequences of their actions and take a look at what kind of service cuts they would make to fill the $680,000 hole that they created in the Metro budget," said mayoral spokeswoman Rachel Strauch-Nelson.

Raising the adult cash fares from $1.50 to $2 as well as other raising prices for multi-ride and discount passes accordingly would have made up for the $680,000 budget gap in the budget the City Council passed, according to Metro's model for predicting ridership and fare revenues. Commission members said, however, that the Metro model has never been proven because until recently it did not separate unlimited ride passes, which have consistently gone up, from cash fares.

Commission member Ald. Brian Solomon presented a chart at Tuesday's meeting that used a "highly regarded" study from the American Public Transit Association that indicated that far more riders could be lost than Metro staff predicted. If more riders were lost after the fare increase, Metro could still end up facing a budget deficit later in the year, which commission members called the "worst-case scenario."

Commission member Kevin Hoag said in a detailed response to the mayor that he was "troubled and disappointed" by the mayor's characterization of the national information presented at the commission as something "we randomly pulled off the web" and not studies done by a leading trade organization.

"There's always been some concern" about Metro's model, Hoag said. "I've been on TPC long enough to know that every time we try to any of this kind of analysis, when there's a discussion on a fare increase, this model has always been questioned. We've never felt comfortable that we can really rely on Madison having this lower elasticity than the national average."

Cieslewicz's response said he would ask Metro staff to present a list of service cuts for the commission's January meeting and look at the information offered on the APTA study. After presenting the information on service cuts, the mayor's response said he hoped to see the commission reconsider their vote, but there's one glitch -- reconsidering the bus fare vote will have to come from one of the people who voted in favor of keeping them the same, according to Robert's Rules of Order that govern city meetings.

"Eventually Robert's Rules figured out that if you let the losing side move reconsideration, you'd never get off the topic," said commission chair Carl Durocher. He said he would put the item on the agenda in case anyone wanted to move reconsideration and expected there would at least be another discussion.

Reconsidering and overturning a decision has happened before at the Transit and Parking Commission, such as three years ago when the commission reconsidered their vote against allowing advertising in parking structures, but Durocher and Hoag said it did not seem likely in this case.

"It would be really hard to speculate," Hoag said. "I would have to see some kind of new information." In particular, Hoag said he will be looking for Metro staff members to come up with not only service-related budget cuts, but cuts related to Metro operations.

"I worked in industry as a engineering manager, and we would regularly be told by our management, we need to cut the budget by 5 percent or something like that, and we weren't allowed to cut our services," he said.

In particular, one potential place to start would be training drivers on how to use driving techniques to reduce gas consumption, such as slower acceleration and deceleration, and offering incentives for those who succeed in doing it, Hoag said.

"I feel very strongly that all through the operating, you could probably find a bit here and a bit there, and I'd at least like to see that before we're confronted with either raise the fares or face these cuts," he said.

If the commission does not overturn their vote, the bus fare situation could get increasingly murky for the city. According to the ordinance that organized the Transit and Parking Commission, the commission is described as both a utility, meaning it would have some independence from the Council in making its fare decisions, and a regular committee that advises the City Council and which the Council could choose to override.

There's also a provision in the ordinance that allows anyone to appeal commission decisions to the Council, which city attorney Michael May said he would interpret loosely as making the TPC more of a committee than a utility.

"I think that's probably the way it's going to go, but we're still sorting out an ordinance that is unique from the ones I've seen," he said.

One thing that is clear, May said, is that the commission does not have significant control over Metro's budget, putting the commission's desire to maintain fares directly at odds with Metro's budget predictions. Some commission members have said the $680,000 deficit, which is only 1 percent of Metro's total budget, is not necessarily a big difference considering the fluidity of budgets, but Metro manager Chuck Kamp said it's not a number he's comfortable with.

"We have an approved budget and an approved fare structure that are in conflict, and we need to resolve that," Kamp said. "I respectfully disagree with those that believe that this decision does not put our budget in conflict. That is not just something that we can say, 'Well, let's just see what happens.' That is not a viable solution. We have to come up with a plan."

Strauch-Nelson said the mayor is not looking any further out than the next Transit and Parking Commission meeting, but that he would not support any service cuts to Madison Metro if the commission chose again to maintain fare prices.

"There's never been a political advantage for the mayor or the 12 alders that took a really hard vote and voted for the fare increase. They did because they sincerely believe that it's the best thing for the short-term and long-term viability of Metro," she said. "The mayor really believes that these elected officials, these policymakers, took that hard vote and will take the political heat for it and the TPC's role should be to follow that direction that the policymakers gave them."
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