Major Report on WMATA Dedicated Funding Released by ATU
ATU International and Local 689 Champion Land Value Taxation to Sustainably fund Metro
Today, after months of research, the ATU International and Local 689 are releasing a report outlining a proposal for finally giving WMATA dedicated funding. The Union believes that a land value tax around transit stations would be the most fair, viable, and sensible outcome and highly encourages policymakers to fully digest the report and to use it for upcoming DMVMoves discussions.
“There is a fundamental principle of fairness here,” noted Local 689 President Raymond Jackson in his foreword. “When our governments build and run transit, namely rail and bus rapid transit, they increase the land value around those systems. Instead of allowing for those increased values to be purely private windfall benefits, we believe that the systems that create and add that value should also reap some of the rewards.”
This research was conducted by Nick Allen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and outlined the mechanisms for raising $1 billion for WMATA around the region. The idea of a land-value tax is not new, and has been used across many transit-rich urban areas around the world, including most notably Singapore.
