Maybe we should take care of budgeting for a reform before we announce it? (Photo: Image processing, Shutterstock)
In a closed meeting this morning, participants in the economy committee continued to discuss the budgeting of the reform of the public transport reform.
Last week, the committee met to approve the change clauses initiated by Transport Minister Miri Regev in the reform of her predecessor Merav Michaeli: discounted pricing for settlements in the periphery, low socio-economic clusters, free travel from age 62 for women and 67 for men instead of age 75, and increased discounts for people with limited mobility .
The discussion stopped at the stage of agreements on the source of the budget for the changes.
Regev demanded NIS 700 from the Treasury to finance the move, and stated that she received NIS 500 million.
However, in the discussion, it became clear that the treasury agreed to finance only NIS 360 million from the cost of the reform, and another NIS 140 million will come from internal deviations in the existing Ministry of Transportation budget, apparently at the expense of a planned increase in frequencies on some lines.
Minister Michaeli introduced an exemption from the age of 75 for passengers, Minister Regev wants to lower it to 67 for men and 62 for women (Photo: Government Press Office, Boaz Oppenheim)
The deputy in charge of budgets at the Treasury, Ilya Katz, said at the hearing that the subsidy budget for public transportation increases every year by approximately NIS 200-250 million, and this year Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Finance Minister Bezalel Smutritz and Transport Minister Regev agreed on a total increase of NIS 680 million. which is intended for the reform and for raising the wages of drivers to NIS 50 per hour on a regular basis. Michaeli agreed with the Treasury last year on raising wages to the same amount, but only for 2022. The Chairman of the Economy Committee, MK David Bitan (Likud) requested that the Treasury and the
ministry Transportation will each increase the funding of the reform by NIS 40 million from each side. The finance representative said that there is no budgetary source for this, and the Director General of the Ministry of Transportation Avner Flor asked for a week to examine the issue. Committee Chairman Bitan also requested that the National Insurance
fund Traveling disabled people in wheelchairs on the train, until the Ministry of Transportation fulfills its promises to also make the intercity public transportation lines accessible.
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The Chairman of the Economy Committee demands funding for transporting the disabled until the Ministry of Transportation fulfills its promise to make the buses accessible (Photo: Knesset Spokesperson, Noam Moshkowitz)
MK Eliyahu Baruchi (Torah Judaism) proposed to apply an exemption from paying for traveling by bus to more than one child up to the age of 5. According to him, families that travel by public transportation often have more than one child, and the situation that has actually arisen is that the additional children are "pinned together" to other passengers in order not to pay for them. Committee chairman Bitan commented that if there is an intention to make this change, a solution must also be found for him since his budgeting will come at the expense of something else.
The director of the National Authority for Public Transportation, Ran Shadami, rejected the proposal and said that this is both safety and guarantees that there will be someone to accompany each small child, and on the other hand, it will not allow the teacher to travel with an entire class for free.
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