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“It’s some form of relief, and it’s no cost [to employers]," said City Councilor Lydia Edwards, who plans to call this week for a hearing on the proposal.
New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles already have or will soon adopt transit benefit requirements for employers. Last year, New Jersey became the first state to require it.
But the idea may receive a cold welcome from business leaders here. James Rooney, chief executive of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, said he is reluctant to support any kind of mandate on employers, even though he has spent recent months calling on state leaders to consider pricing strategies to encourage drivers to take the T.
Rooney noted that many companies across the region already offer the pre-tax benefit, and others offer an even more attractive perk: generous subsidies to cover part or all of a transit pass. A Boston Globe Spotlight Team report last year found that most of the largest employers in the region offer such subsidies, though some undercut the effect of the benefit by also offering cheap parking that coaxes commuters to drive.
The Spotlight report also found that existing city and state programs meant to encourage companies to provide better transit benefits are inadequate.
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Some cities have been hesitant to adopt transit benefit mandates because of the perception that most companies already offer them, said Jason Pavluchuk, policy director for the Coalition for Smarter Transportation, a group that lobbies for commuter benefit programs across the country.
But it is difficult to know what commuting benefits are offered at the thousands of smaller and mid-size companies that employ most of a regional workforce, he said. In California’s Bay Area, which adopted a transit benefit ordinance in 2009, more than half of employers said they were not offering the benefit before the program began, according to a government survey from 2016.
It’s unclear how many companies offer pre-tax benefits in Greater Boston. The MBTA works directly with about 1,500 companies to offer the benefit, but many others use third-party companies to issue transit passes.
“The general assumption is that everyone does it, but the facts bear out that not everybody does it,” Pavluchuk said. He added that business organizations elsewhere have typically supported the benefit because employees like it and it helps fight traffic congestion.
It’s too soon to say how a Boston program would work, Edwards said. Among the questions to be sorted out: How would it be enforced, and how large must a company be to trigger the mandate?
Cities have handled these issues differently, though most require companies with 20 or more employees to provide the benefit.
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Pavluchuk said New York has the best enforcement mechanism: employees at companies that don’t provide the benefit can call a hotline, and the city will contact the employer. Usually, the employer claims to have been unaware of the rule and begins offering the benefit, Pavluchuk said.
Samantha Ormsby, a spokeswoman for Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh, said the administration would review any policy proposal from the council. She said the Walsh administration recently hired somebody to work with companies and developers to establish better transit benefits and other incentives to get workers out of cars, including more generous subsidies for CharlieCard passes paid by employers.
Edwards, who is cosponsoring the call for a hearing with City Councilor Michelle Wu, acknowledged that corporate subsidies for transit passes would do more to convince workers to take the T than the pre-tax benefit. But she said mandating the pre-tax benefit would at least set a uniform standard that may encourage more companies to offer even better benefits.
“I do want people to be thinking creatively about all the benefits you could be giving your employees,” she said. “So if this becomes the floor for benefits, then this could spark a lot of employers to offer more.”
Adam Vaccaro can be reached at adam.vaccaro@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter at @adamtvaccaro.
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Should companies be required to help workers save some money on MBTA passes? - The Boston Globe
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