“These swaps have been around for a long time,’’ said Brian Shortsleeve, the authority’s chief administrator. “They’re costing the T tens of millions of dollars a year in interest.”

A key part of the plan would be to terminate some costly financial contracts the agency had entered into, called “swaps,” that were meant to hedge against rising interest rates, but instead have added to the expenses of the financially strained Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.

MBTA executives on Monday will recommend revamping the transit authority’s debt, a move officials said could save $235 million over the next decade.

Shortsleeve will present the plan to the MBTA’s fiscal control board Monday.


Swaps were popular before the financial crisis and were widely sold by Wall Street firms as a kind of insurance on large borrowings that did not have fixed interest rates. For many public agencies and institutions, they backfired when interest rates fell instead of rising.

For example, on one swap contract the T pays $8 million a year on $161.4 million in debt with UBS Securities Inc., or the equivalent of a 5 percent interest rate. If the authority were to terminate that swap, and pay just the current rate of 0.43 percent on the underlying debt, its interest cost would be just $700,000 a year.

Under the T’s proposal, a copy of which was reviewed by the Globe, the authority would seek to terminate the UBS swap plus four contracts with Deutsche Bank, on a combined $437 million of debt.

The T also is planning to use competitive bids to get more favorable terms on the debt — the first time the authority has done so in at least a dozen years, Shortsleeve said. In the recent past, the T has done “negotiated” deals with particular bankers, rather than issuing terms and putting the bonds out to bid. The Deutsche Bank swaps date back to 2008, when the New York investment bank took them over from the collapsed Lehman Brothers.


It’s not free to get out of the swaps. It could cost the T as much as $78 million to buy out those contracts, although executives hope to get a discount. The fiscal control board will have to decide, if it moves forward on the swaps, whether to use cash or borrow money to terminate them.

The T has a total of $5.2 billion in outstanding debt. Its consultant, PFM Group, is recommending overall that the authority allow a small portion of its bonds to float at variable rates, unhedged.

The risk is that if interest rates were to suddenly rise, the T’s costs would increase, too. In that scenario, the T could refinance into fixed-rate debt, Shortsleeve said, much like a homeowner’s moving to a fixed-rate mortgage.

Beth Healy can be reached at beth.healy@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @HealyBeth.