Robert D. Batting chairs the meeting of the RIPTA board yesterday after he is elected as the new chairman. Batting succeeds Thomas Deller.

The Providence Journal Mary Murphy

PROVIDENCE — The state transit authority board, now dominated by Governor Carcieri’s appointees, yesterday elected retired business executive Robert D. Batting as chairman.

Batting’s election, which ousted former chairman Thomas Deller, reflected Carcieri’s success this year in getting a voting majority on the board after a years-long impasse while the state Senate refused to act on his nominations.

Carcieri had appointed Batting, a former president and CEO of Kenney Manufacturing Co., in Warwick, a group vice president of Textron, and vice president and general manager of Brown & Sharpe in North Kingstown, to the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority board in 2003. He was elected chairman but was later voted out of the office.

As a board member, Batting had regularly questioned the RIPTA management’s assumptions, but he had lacked the support on the board to press his case. Transit advocates, meanwhile, have questioned whether he really supports what they view as RIPTA’s purpose, supporting and enhancing the state’s transit system.

Batting, however, said yesterday that his goal is to provide “a truly first-class transit system” and to deal with an unprecedented financial crunch, the loss of as much as $14 million in revenue. (For comparison, RIPTA’s budget is projected at $93 million for next year.)

That financial threat is an indirect effect of federal officials’ partial disallowance of transportation benefits for the state’s RIte Care health insurance program for the poor, where the state Department of Human Services used federal Medicaid money to buy bus passes for the program’s members.

The effect on RIPTA, and the timing, aren’t clear yet. But there’s no obvious source of money to make up such a loss, and Batting said it will certainly be “a huge hole” in RIPTA’s finances.

As for what to do, he said, RIPTA is on its own. “There’s certainly no direction coming off of Smith Hill as to how it’s going to be resolved.”

The RIPTA board has already endorsed a fare increase, its first since February 2005, that would take effect July 1. It would raise the basic cash fare to $1.75 from $1.50 and the cost of a monthly pass to $55 from $45.

“Our fares are still very modest compared with other jurisdictions,” Batting said.

But Batting said he wants to reconsider the transit system at a basic level: who’s paying for what with what money. In a telephone interview last week, he focused on a fact he elicited from the agency staff at the board’s previous meeting: Only about 10 percent of RIPTA’s riders pay the full fare with their own money, a figure Batting called “appalling” and “incredible.”

He acknowledged that fares will never pay for all of RIPTA’s services, but he rattled off groups that get discounted or free service and said, “The list goes on and on.” He said he wants to see who pays for what “in a simple, clearly understandable way.”

The structure of fares, negotiated agreements and assorted subsidies is complex, with several government agencies and other institutions buying transit services for their clients under different terms and with different funding sources. Just who pays for service for which group of riders hasn’t been spelled out clearly.

For example, monthly passes brought in $231,000 in January. But Mark Therrien, the agency’s assistant general manager for development and planning, said that while those passes are generally bought by regular bus riders with their own money, the Providence School Board pays RIPTA for some of them to transport high school students. To get the level of detail Batting wants, Therrien said, he needs to separate the passes for the students from the ones ordinary passengers buy.

Batting has repeatedly questioned, if not opposed outright, the agency’s biggest capital project, its plan to build a $30-million-plus maintenance, bus-storage and administrative headquarters on Elmwood Avenue for its para-transit operations.

The minutes of the board’s April 7 meeting, meanwhile, show him challenging one of RIPTA’s major current strategies for attracting riders and revenue. Under its Upass program, the agency negotiates discounted fares with colleges and universities and lets their students and employees use their identification cards as bus passes. That amounts to about 10 percent of the system’s ridership.

Batting questioned the arrangement’s fairness. Why, he wondered, should an ordinary rider pay full fare while a Brown University professor who boards the bus behind him gets a discount?

Yesterday’s vote followed a sometimes-bitter wrangle as Deller, who was ousted from the chairmanship, accused Batting and his allies of ignoring the agency’s bylaws to ram through the vote. Batting and his supporters had put off a vote from April 7, when one of Batting’s supporters, Edward J. Field, couldn’t attend, until yesterday, when Field was present but one of Deller’s supporters, William Kennedy, couldn’t attend.

That dispute saw Batting’s supporters arguing that the meeting the board held on April 7 was actually its March meeting, because it was postponed from then, and that yesterday’s meeting was the April meeting when the board is supposed to elect its officers because it was on the board’s annual meeting schedule.

To do that, the minutes of the board’s April 7 meeting say, the governor’s appointees had to ignore the board’s own lawyers, including former Lt. Gov. Richard Licht, who said that by putting off the vote, they weren’t following the bylaws. Licht argued unsuccessfully that the meeting being held in April was an April meeting, not a March meeting.

blandis@projo.com