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TRANSACTIONS NEWSLETTER ONLINE
April/May 2000
1999 Annual Report
A Message from the Editor

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission is pleased to present its 1999 annual report. Here you will find in summary fashion the record of MTC's funding activities and financial statements for the most recent fiscal year, as well as highlights of agency activities.

With this, our final financial filing of the 1990s, we close the books on what has been an extremely im-portant decade in the life of this agency. But we also open -- literally -- a new page in how we depict our activities. We have freshened the format of our financial reporting to better reflect the evolving structure and responsibilities of the agency.

As described in last year's annual report and high-lighted here in the headline acronyms that top each page -- MTC, BATA, SAFE -- the agency now wears three official hats to carry out its business in the region. Of the three bodies, MTC wears the biggest hat and has the broadest charge as the transportation planning, financing and coordinating agency for the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area. As part of its duties, MTC acts as the host agency for both the Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA) and the Service Authority for Freeways and Expressways (SAFE), supplying the staff and absorbing the overhead for the operation of these two entities. MTC also maintains separate books for BATA and SAFE, and we here display the financial record of their activities in support of toll-bridge improvements and rehabilitation (BATA) and the operation of the Freeway Service Patrol and regional call box system (SAFE).

At the same time, to better highlight the increased project selection authority MTC has come to exercise (primarily with respect to federal funds) -- and in recognition of the multiyear nature of these financing commitments -- we have separated the agency's fund programming activities from the MTC annual allocations table in this year's report. While the programming and allocation of funds are similar in that each is a way for MTC to assign financing to projects or sponsoring agencies, we believe that the distinctions between these two activities -- discussed in the "Focus on Funding" section -- warrant their individual reporting.

So what's the bottom line? With MTC allocations of almost $350 million last year, BATA and SAFE expen-ditures of $180 million and $3.6 billion in programming over a six-year period, the agency is clearly playing a major role in funding an impressive range of transportation services for the Bay Area. We hope this annual report's updated format presents this information in a clear and useful way.

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