TB & T Essay

The Authority, much like the nation, faces an unprecedented set of challenges related to its core line of business – transportation. Nationwide and regionally, demographics continue to change as traffic patterns shift, vehicle ownership declines, transit use continues to rise, and individuals continue to move to the suburbs, further away from major airports and closer to smaller county airports. Supply chains continue to shift while e-commerce is increasingly becoming an industry standard. These practices potentially impact freight movements at air and marine ports as well as on bridges and tunnels. Finally, evolving new technologies, such as automated vehicles and 3-D printing, present positive and negative implications for TB&T business in

Under a ZBB, the Agency asks departments to identify core and non-core functions, justify each function, and build up from a “zero-base.” Included in this exercise, TB&T explored each function and, at the 2017 Business Plan Workshop (see photgraphs), staff discussed which functions the Agency may curtail. ZBB also specifically assesses how each core function operates in order to identify levels of service that TB&T may provide at a reduced cost. Although ultimately the Authority decided to adopt a Zero-growth budget, rather than Zero-based, the ZBB methodology provided a helpful framework for TB&T’s business plan update this year.

By focusing on TB&T’s core business functions and asking the difficult questions related to what the Agency must do, what it would like to do, and what perhaps it could do without, there exists an opportunity to essentially re-allocate, consolidate, or simply eliminate non-core functions that do not directly support the department’s mission, vision, and values. Further, by placing this discussion in a broader discussion related to risk, TB&T recasts its thinking to identify areas where the Agency can do things differently or not at all, in order to free up resources for other