To the chagrin of transportation advocates and state and local policymakers, Democratic Gov. Wes Moore and his cabinet plan to fill a multibillion-dollar hole in Maryland’s transportation fund by deferring plans for construction that hasn’t started, making cuts across all transportation-related agencies, and raising some fees.

“Here’s the truth,” Moore told a near-silent room during his speech at the Maryland Association of Counties winter conference in Cambridge on Thursday, “we’ve spread ourselves too thin.”

The total reduction of $3.3 billion in planned spending over the next six years would limit future funding for services like roadway litter collection and commuter buses, delay the electrification of the state’s bus fleet and put on hold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of highway and road projects, according to a plan released Tuesday by the Maryland Department of Transportation.

Paul Wiedefeld, the department’s secretary, called the changes necessary because officials are required to submit a balanced budget to lawmakers next month, when Moore is scheduled to propose his 2025 fiscal year spending plan.But not everyone, including many Democrats, is on board with the Moore administration’s transportation proposal.

In an interview Thursday, Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr., a Democrat, said he’s concerned with the impact this will have not only on people who rely on public transportation, like many of his constituents, but all Marylanders.

“Those are services that county and city residents rely on, alike, to get to work, attend school, for child care purposes,” Olszewski said. “I think deeply concerned is the way I’ll describe our approach.”

Olszewski said he can foresee a “loss” of construction dollars for prioritized projects in the county, such as a $33.9 million project for the Dolfield Boulevard interchange with Interstate 795.

Brian O’Malley, the president and CEO of the Central Maryland Transportation Alliance, said in an interview Friday morning that he’s “upset” with the proposal, noting that cuts in funding for public transit will contribute to air pollution, worsen public safety and reduce transportation equity.

“There’s pollution and crashes and injuries and deaths, as well as benefits of getting where you need to go. But those don’t impact all Marylanders equally,” O’Malley said of increased reliance on cars. “People of color, lower-income people suffer asthma, suffer complications with pregnancy, suffer deaths and injuries at higher rates, or disproportionately higher rates, connected with how much we drive.”

In his speech Thursday, Moore remained steadfast in his administration’s approach, calling the decision “the right one.”

The governor also did not waste an opportunity to jab his predecessor, Republican former Gov. Larry Hogan, for his handling of transportation projects, which Moore called “late, and over-budget and unfinished.”

However, Moore explained that his administration is “still gathering a deeper understanding of where structural gaps exist, and why we keep coming up short.”

“Look: Our administration did not create the budget gap,” the governor said. “But let me be very clear: We refuse to ignore it, and we refuse to push policies that will only make it worse.”

A six-year forecast of transportation projects released earlier this year estimated a $2.1 billion shortfall through the 2029 fiscal year. Revenue expectations, however, have continued to fall.

Between expenses outpacing revenues, the drying up of pandemic-era federal funding, and rising financial pressures within the state’s transportation funding system, Wiedefeld said steps are being taken to solve what the department currently estimates as a $3.3 billion shortfall.

Lawmakers have started a two-year process of finding alternative revenues, but the department “can’t assume some future revenue increase in the future,” Wiedefeld said.

Managers in each agency within the department have been asked to cut 8% of their operating budgets, which would lead to limited services and pauses on some repairs, he said.

The Motor Vehicle Administration will implement a hiring freeze and reduce hours of service. The Maryland Transit Administration will be forced to cut operations — targeting services with fewer users, like commuter buses that have not rebounded in use after the pandemic, Wiedefeld said.

A significant area of cuts will come from reducing highway maintenance and repairs. About 30% of funding for work that includes picking up highway trash, mowing grass, fixing guard rails and other “minor highway repairs” will be pulled, Wiedefeld said.

Any projects that have not been started by Jan. 1, or have not yet been advertised for construction, will have their funding pulled, Wiedefeld said. Those projects — about $500 million of which are slated for highways — made the most sense to defer while ongoing projects dealing with safety and system preservation remain a priority, he said.

Wiedefeld said the projects being deferred are not necessarily permanently shuttered.

Projects that already have received federal funds or other grants will not be affected. That includes the Frederick Douglass Tunnel project, which will replace a 4-mile section of Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor under West Baltimore. The Red Line, an east-west transit project in Baltimore that is in the planning process and is a top priority for Moore, also is unaffected, as funding has not been committed yet.

“If you look at the history of the department, there’s a lot of projects that at a certain stage you’re thinking, ‘There’s no way we’re ever building this.’ But yet, as time marches on, revenues change, projects change, things evolve,” Wiedefeld said.

On the revenue side, motor vehicle administration fees and airport parking fees will both be increased, generating about $80 million more per year, Wiedefeld said.

The department also will propose pausing a scheduled increase in revenue going to local governments for road projects. That plan, which would require legislative action from the Maryland General Assembly, would keep a 15.6% share of highway user revenues going to local governments instead of the roughly 18% to 20% that legislators approved for future years.

The largest share of locally allocated highway user revenues is for Baltimore City. Under the 2022 law increasing the local share, the city would collect $78 million and $108 million more in the 2025 and 2026 fiscal years, respectively, as its share of the statewide fund will increase to 12.2% in 2026, according to a legislative fiscal analysis.

The updated transportation plan argues for keeping the current funding level, saving $245 million.

Some lawmakers — many of whom are Democrats who have pushed for expanding transportation funding — also expressed frustration.

Sen. Cory McCray, a Baltimore Democrat who worked on the bill to increase the local highway revenue share, said the plans “would undermine the Baltimore region’s economic recovery and economic growth for years to come.”

“The current proposal risks undoing that work and throws the MTA system back into the chaos of long delays, broken down vehicles, and unsafe, unreliable operations. Our transit system is the primary mode of transportation for [a] large number of residents — as they travel to school and work, get child care, and access to food. We simply cannot cancel Baltimore’s transit future for the second time in less than a decade.”

Democrats who chair the Maryland Transit Caucus, Sen. Karen Lewis Young, of Frederick County, and Del. Jared Solomon, of Montgomery County, said in a statement they were “extremely disappointed in the dramatic cuts,” including what they said was nearly $1 billion for transit, bicycle and pedestrian investments.

Capital budget cuts, including changes to highway expansion funding, span the state, according to the plans.

U.S. Rep. David Trone, a Montgomery County Democrat who represents Western Maryland and is a candidate in the race to succeed U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin, wrote in a letter to Wiedefeld that reducing funding for projects in his district that had plans to receive federal funds is “unacceptable, and inconsistent with the intent of the law.”

Moore warned in September about potential budget constraints across state government, well before he and Democratic lawmakers who control both chambers of the Maryland General Assembly begin budget negotiations in the annual 90-day session that begins Jan. 10.

Aside from the transportation shortfall, budget officials have estimated a roughly $400 million hole in other general funds for the next fiscal year. Without cuts or other sources of revenue, that figure will grow to $1.8 billion in the 2028 fiscal year.

Anticipating the need for a long-term transportation funding solution — especially as gas tax revenues wane with the expected growth of electric vehicles — lawmakers established a commission during the 2023 legislative session to evaluate the transportation trust fund.

The commission’s initial report is due by the end of the month, but final recommendations aren’t due Jan. 1, 2025, so it’s unlikely lawmakers will pursue changes in the next session.

Wiedefeld did not say how revenue sources should be changed to increase collections for the system. A longtime transportation official, he said the “traditional” method of raising the gas tax by a few cents is no longer sustainable. An 8-cent increase to the fuel tax, for instance, would raise about $250 million — enough only to cover Maryland’s $250 million share of the $750 million Washington Metro shortfall in 2025, he said.

“The scale of the issue, the growth of the system [and] the desire of the public for what the system can do are just far outpacing what the trust fund structurally can handle,” Wiedefeld said.

Senate President Bill Ferguson said before the release of the plans Tuesday that he wasn’t surprised with the cuts because of the shortfall announced previously and because of the “huge looming revenue problem” that’s been evident for years as state policy and consumers have shifted toward electric vehicles.

He said tough choices will have to be made, and “the sooner we can do that, the better.” Still, he said he does not anticipate passing laws for a new funding system this coming session because of the timeline of the Maryland Commission on Transportation Revenue and Infrastructure Needs, or TRAIN Commission.

“If we want to expand the system’s roads and bridges, transit systems, the port, the airport, we have to pay for it,” said Ferguson, a Baltimore Democrat. “We’ve not had that hard conversation yet of, ‘Do we want to expand and, if so, how do we pay for it?’”

While Moore has said he would like lawmakers to reevaluate the state’s annual automatic gas tax increases — it rose 5 cents, to 47 cents per gallon over the summer — Ferguson said that’s not a priority for him in the next year.

“No one likes paying the gas tax rate. But it’s a user fee, and it’s how we fund our transportation, our roads and our bridges and our transit systems. So, we’ve got to pay for it somehow,” he said.

“It’s pretty clear that this has been a longstanding challenge,” Olszewski said Thursday. “I think we can acknowledge that this administration inherited some of those challenges from the prior administration, and I appreciate the willingness — to date — that the Moore administration has been open to at least having conversations about our concerns, but, certainly, I’m deeply, deeply concerned about these cuts being finalized.”