Ben Barnes, Gov. Malloy’s OPM secretary was cryptic this afternoon when Capitol reporters asked him about fare increase on Metro-North. He noted that a hearing process is still in effect and that previous proposals for fare hikes by the Malloy administration were because of the then-pending negotiations with state unions. “We were facing a $700 million hole in our budget…Ultimately, the costs of operating a rail system continue to rise. Electricity and fuel costs continue to rise. We haven’t seen fare increases in six years, so it’s not unreasonable for us to evaluate that… The fares were rising in New York on Jan. 1 and to the extent that if we were not to raise our fares, the increase in fares there would result in us, under our contract with Metro-North, having to make several million dollars in payments to them to subsidize…in order to prevent people from skipping one town over to get lower fares, they would reduce the rates in Rye, or whatever the border towns are, in order to avoid that behavior and we would have to subsidize those fare reduction…”