The federal government says California is ineligible for about $12 billion in public transit funding due to a long-running dispute over changes to the states public pension law that the Biden administration as not set in stone are ill-advised.
Federal law says state and local agencies should secure the interests of their employees to be qualified for federal public transit grants. A state law that produced results in 2013 unveiled changes to Californias pension system, including making pensions less generous for new employees.
The Sacramento Bee reports the U.S. Department of Labor as still up in the air those progressions were ill-advised on the grounds that they were forced by law rather than aggregately bartered with public representative unions.
The federal governments most recent decision implies the state would be ineligible for about $9.5 billion in money set aside for California public transit agencies in the framework charge Congress endorsed a week ago. California would likewise relinquish about $2.5 billion in grants for public transit that were important for the latest federal Covid relief legislation.
This relief funding has filled in as a life saver for them, and without these federal dollars streaming to California transit agencies, we will totally see a decrease in help and misfortunes in our labor force, making it more hard for agencies to bounce back, said Michael Pimentel, chief overseer of the California Transit Association, a not-for-profit addressing public transit agencies in the state.
State and federal officials have been quarreling about this funding since the pension law was passed almost 10 years prior. After previous President Barack Obamas administration impeded award funding for two California transit agencies, the state sued and won. Yet, that decision simply applied to the Sacramento Regional Transit District and Monterey-Salinas Transit.
In 2019, former Republican President Donald Trump’s administration ruled the state’s pension law did not make it ineligible for public transit grants. But Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration reversed that decision on Oct. 28.