N.J. Transit’s Spending Tough to Track as Details Kept Hidden
- More than $2 billion operating budget distilled to three pages
- As bus and rail service declined, so did openness on finances
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 and the 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.