WASHINGTON — Metro finance officials say the transit agency may technically be in default on some of its debt, but that it is not a money problem.
At a Metro Board Finance and Administration Committee Meeting Thursday, deputy chief financial officer Blair Fishburn said that the transit agency has defaulted on some loan agreements.
“We haven’t published our financial statements by the dates due with our bondholders and some of our tax advantage leases, but we have notified them appropriately of our condition and that we are working hard to try and finish the audited financial statements for fiscal year 2014,” Fishburn said.
None of those creditors have tried to recover the funds, he said.
Metro has been limited in accessing federal grant money since early 2014 because of issues with oversight of those funds — a problem Metro has said it is trying to correct. A separate board committee Thursday approved the posting of an audit that also questioned Metro’s oversight of local jurisdictions’ tax dollars, but which also points out that the jurisdictions have not completed their own audits.
In an interview after the meeting, Metro Chief Financial Officer Dennis Anosike said many problems are being addressed.
Since May 1, Metro says it has cut its short-term debt by 40 percent ($503 million to $302 million) by paying some debts down and working to negotiate extensions of lines of credit.
“There are several provisions in these agreements that we have with financial institutions that require us to provide documentation, obviously to the extent there’s been a delay in some of those documentations being available, yeah, technically, that’s a technical default. But … there’s been no demand on us to pay. There’s been no question as to our financial capacity to meet our obligations on a daily basis,” he says.
Anosike says Metro had about $500 million in unreimbursed federal expenses a year ago, but the agency has now cut that amount by about $200 million.
Metro must apply for reimbursement rather than getting the cash upfront because of federal limits the transit agency has been operating under for more than a year.
