Fares and the funding fights

2008–2026 · FIVE CENTS TO A FISCAL CLIFF

The fare: The fare was five cents under the streetcars in 1913, a dollar under Citilink at the start of 2008, and $1.25 with a $3 day pass by 2012 — reduced fare sixty cents, monthly pass $45. The 2008 increase set the pattern of every fight since: a shortfall built of rising fuel costs (some $386,000 over budget) and $634,150 in expected revenue lost to the governor's property-tax reform produced a package pairing the fare rise with the elimination of free transfers and with service cuts — one route to be eliminated, service reduced on others, six full-time drivers laid off. The structural problem underneath never went away. By Citilink's own account the state's property-tax caps (the Circuit Breaker law) cost it more than $10 million after 2008, and in 2011 Indiana removed public transit from eligibility for the gas tax, leaving the state Public Mass Transportation Fund a discretionary line that grew 9 percent while the agency's operations expanded 54 percent.

Plans within flat money, then the cliff: The 2019 Comprehensive Operations Analysis and Transit Development Plan, prepared by SRF Consulting, was an exercise in allocating a fixed pie — better frequency on core routes against documented scenarios for five, ten or fifteen percent reductions if funding kept lagging costs. The pandemic first cut ridership, then inflated every cost. For 2025 the arithmetic went public: Citilink needed a budget of $20.8 million and stood about $2.5 million short — local taxes contributing about $8 million, the state PMTF $2.1 million, federal funds just under $5 million. In late 2024 the general manager asked City Council for a special tax levy; the council instead built a safety net — quarterly check-ins, with further funding only after the agency spent down its $1.6 million rainy-day fund (by April 2025 it had drawn $992,653 of it, leaving $625,538) toward a $500,000 cash floor. The alternative on the table was a 14 percent service cut that Citilink testified would eliminate 300,000 trips a year. A 20 percent fare increase took effect on 1 April 2025, and the agency entered its 2026 budget, by its president-of-the-state-association testimony, facing the same deficit again.

Sources: the Griswold-Phelps Handbook, 1913–14 (the five-cent fare); the Journal Gazette and News-Sentinel, May–June 2008, via AroundFortWayne (the 2008 shortfall, fare and cut proposals); NIRCC, Bus Fort Wayne plan (the $1.25 fare and $3 day pass); SRF Consulting, Fort Wayne Citilink COA/TDP, March 2019 (the reallocations and reduction scenarios); Input Fort Wayne, 2025 (the 2025 budget figures and the council safety net); Citilink testimony to the Indiana House Ways and Means Committee, February 2025 (the fiscal cliff, the 300,000-trip figure, the April 1 fare increase, the PMTF history); Citilink's published crisis statement, October 2024 (the Circuit Breaker and gas-tax history, as the agency states it).