Testimony of Revs. Fred Small and Leslie Sterling

MBTA Fare Proposal Public Hearing

State Transportation Building

February 27, 2019

 

I am the Reverend Fred Small, Minister for Climate Justice at Arlington Street Church in Boston.

And I am the Reverend Leslie Sterling, Rector of St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Cambridge.

We both serve on the Steering Committee of the Faith Science Alliance for Climate Leadership, which has endorsed Councilor Wu’s petition opposing an MBTA fare increase and calling for free mass transit.  We’re testifying as individuals, MBTA riders, and faith leaders.

Every religious tradition forbids theft.  Climate change is theft from our own children and the most vulnerable people on the planet—most of them poor and of color.

Mayor Walsh wants Boston to be a “climate champion.”  Governor Baker has named climate change as “the biggest” of the “big ideas” he wants to define his second term.  Secretary Pollack has said that the mindset of the state bureaucracy has to change to meet the climate challenge. “We’re not moving fast enough,” she says.

So how can it be that the MBTA is proposing a fare increase that will move us in precisely the wrong direction—that will drive more people into their cars if they have them and out of their jobs if they don’t?  To stop climate change we need more people riding the T, not fewer.  Raising fares punishes poor and working people who depend on public transportation the most.

How will we pay for free public transit?

That’s a fair question.  But the more important question is how will we pay the costs of runaway climate change, when flooding submerges not only the Boston waterfront, but also City Hall Plaza, when the Innovation District becomes the Inundation District, when millions of climate refugees worldwide desperately uproot themselves in order to survive, igniting the greatest humanitarian crisis in history?  Who’ll pay for that?

While we like to think of Massachusetts as a progressive state, we actually rank number 6 in the nation in income inequality.  Here, the top one percent of families take in 31 times the average income of the bottom 99 percent.  Our regressive income tax and sales tax favor the wealthy.  Our taxes build and maintain free roads for the private automobile.

If our taxes provide free roads to those who can afford to drive, why shouldn’t they provide free mass transit to those who can’t?

We have the money to pay for free transit—if everyone pays their fair share.

In sum, no fair hike—free the T.