As New Jersey Transit pays record fines and leads the nation on commuter rail breakdowns, the agency has squelched public scrutiny of how it spends hundreds of millions of dollars on day-to-day operations.

Unlike other transportation agencies, including the New Jersey Turnpike Authority and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency doesn’t publish annual budgets on its website. In the fiscal 2017 plan it released in response to a public-records request, the nation’s third-largest mass-transit provider failed to include year-to-date performance or key comparative detail from the prior year.

It’s unclear whether New Jersey Transit is shifting money to problem areas. At committee meetings, where trustees appointed by Governor Chris Christie discuss financial plans, the agency keeps decision-making documents on lockdown. Meanwhile, its board, which ordinarily convenes in public, in recent months has made some of its biggest decisions by telephone. This year it skipped two meetings, without explanation, as its budget was overdue.

“One of the underlying themes is transparency as it relates to budgets and who’s making those decisions,” said Assemblyman John McKeon, a 58-year-old Democrat from West Orange who is co-leading an inquiry into New Jersey Transit’s finances and operations.

Trenton Hearings

A panel of state lawmakers, empowered to issue subpoenas, are examining a string of fatal bus and train crashes, a pattern of unfilled job vacancies and years of declining commuter service punctuated by the nation’s most rail breakdowns and highest federal safety fines. A key question is whether budget detail, formerly available to the public and yet difficult to obtain in recent years, held clues to deteriorating operations before crisis set in.

McKeon said he will request complete spending plans for the past several years before the panel has its third hearing on Dec. 6.

New Jersey Transit, its state subsidy slashed under Christie, has raided $2.94 billion from capital funds since fiscal 2011 to cover costs. The infusion hasn’t been enough to prevent record mechanical breakdowns in 2015, or to cover the expenses of storing trains at night and stocking them all with fire extinguishers and emergency tools, shortcomings cited this year in a federal safety audit.

Instead of meeting publicly at its Newark headquarters, members dialed in to approve labor contracts for 4,200 workers in July, and again on Nov. 18 to appoint Richard Bagger, the governor’s former chief of staff, to help oversee the Hudson River rail tunnel project.

Three Pages

In October, when the board met four months late to approve the current operating budget, it said yes to $2.1 billion in outlays distilled to just three pages highlighting revenues, expenses and consolidated operations.

Those fiscal summaries have amounted to three pages since at least 2004. In the past, packets with hundreds of supporting pages also were made available for the asking to government watchdogs, transit advocates, policy groups and citizens curious about where their fares and tax dollars were going, according to former agency executives.

“We had to give it to them,” Jack Lettiere, board chairman from 2002-2006, said in an interview. “Even if you didn’t like the numbers, it’s a public document.”

The New York City-area Long Island and Metro-North rail systems, Chicago’s Metra and Philadelphia’s SEPTA all publish annual operating budgets, typically more than 200 pages, on their websites months before they are considered by their boards. They include department headcounts, 10-year cost projections, three-year spending comparisons and subsidy details.

Public Records

Though New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act states that government budgets should be available on demand, Bloomberg’s request for the entire fiscal 2017 plan was delayed for more than a week, without explanation. Other transportation agencies publish a comprehensive budget book; New Jersey Transit’s information was provided piecemeal and lacked details typically found in its peers’ spending plans.

The agency listed revenues and expenses for areas including fares, salaries and overtime, materials and supplies, fuel, fines, utilities and legal costs -- in all, 44 pages of budgets, by account, with total operating income projected at $886.2 million. Year-to-date performance, though, was omitted.

Data for fiscal 2016, the backbone of other agencies’ plans, weren’t supplied. Projections for 2015 may or may not have hit targets; the New Jersey Transit spreadsheet didn’t contain account-level detail.

Board chairman Rick Hammer, executive director Steve Santoro and agency spokeswoman Jennifer Nelson didn’t respond to e-mailed questions about why New Jersey Transit publishes its capital plan, though not its operating figures.

Records Access

Withholding such information is a pattern in New Jersey government, according to CJ Griffin, a Hackensack-based attorney who litigates public-records access full time. Some agencies request deadline extensions as a matter of course, delaying the release of public information for months, sometimes years, she said in an interview.

“If you really have to search this hard for the record, this tells me something horrible, because this is a record that should be easily accessible to you,” said Griffin, referring to agencies in general.

Confusion arose during a legislative hearing in Trenton on Nov. 4 when Santoro, appointed by the board in October, said a lack of money is at the root of many of the agency’s troubles. That contradicted Oct. 21 testimony by Hammer, the state’s transportation commissioner, who said New Jersey Transit has the resources it needs.

“Someone is either uninformed or is playing hide the ball,” McKeon said by telephone. “I think it’s the latter.” Neither Hammer nor Santoro returned e-mails seeking comment.

‘Another World’

Martin Robins, New Jersey Transit’s deputy executive director when the agency was founded in 1979, said the organization then was “another world” of public accountability.

“They documented everything with a reasonable amount of specificity, and the budgets weren’t just graphics and you had to figure out where the information is coming from,” Robins said in an interview. “It told the people leading the organization, and outsiders, what was needed and what needed to change.”

New Jersey Transit has raised fares five times since 2002, most recently by 9 percent a year ago, while riders increasingly have endured delays and crowded trains and buses. During rush hours, they light up social media with complaints.

McKeon, the assemblyman, said he found it “troubling, but not surprising” that New Jersey Transit keeps revenue and spending details from the public. The panel, he said, is asking other transit agencies for insight on day-to-day operations and will review New Jersey Transit transparency policy from its earlier days.

“We’re going to propose systemic reforms to improve, or to turn back to how it operated in the past,” McKeon said.