With state audit on the way, MTA’s spending under fire

Hot on the heels of last week’s fare hike brouhaha, New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli has announced an upcoming audit of the MTA’s books.

The audit, first reported on Sunday morning by The New York Post, should be completedwithin the next few months, and DiNapoli’s office plans to release a preliminary report in September, well before the MTA Board votes on the fate of the fare hike proposal. “Mass transit is crucially important to the economic well-being of the city, and the MTA has historically not done the best job of managing its resources,” Dennis Tompkins, a spokesperson from DiNapoli’s office, said to The Post “Now it’s more important than ever that they implement every possible way to save money and increase efficiencies in the system before they raise fares on the public.”

Meanwhile, over the weekend, two different stories highlighted the need for such an audit. First, Pete Donohue of the Daily News uncovered 19,000 hours of unnecessary overtime. Some bus drivers were getting paid overtime to complete their duties when other drivers were available but not tasked to the job. Bureaucratic inefficiencies like these have long been a hallmark of the MTA, and as the transit authority streamlines their operations, the agency hopes to eliminate redundant overtime.

Then, on Saturday, shortly before the debut of the new service expansions Donohue reported on the MTA’s staffing of closed stations. Clerks had been manning the booths at 145th and 148th Sts. on the 3 line even though the stations were shut for six and a half hours each night. NYC Transit said that the stations were staffed to prevent vandalism and to “unlock turnstiles if an emergency ever required a train be rerouted to one of the depots.” This doesn’t strike me as the best use of resources.

In the long run, these two stories highlight small issues within the overall scheme of the MTA. The station staffing has cost the authority a whopping $1 million since 2000, and with budget deficits of nearly $900 million a year, one million over seven and a half years hardly seems important. But it’s the idea of it. Time and time again, city and state comptrollers have looked at the MTA’s finances, and time and time again, they’ve recommended ways to bridge the deficit gap that don’t involve fare hikes.

Nearly a year ago, when we were discussing this year’s fare hike, City Comptroller William C. Thompson issued a report highlighting how the MTA, with an assist from Albany, could avoid a fare hike. Included in that report was a study of student MetroCards that found the MTA’s footing more of the bill than it should have been paying. But nothing changes.

DiNapoli can dig and tally up figures. But it always seems that once a fare hike is on the table, nothing can stop it. The MTA will go on spending wastefully in certain ares and not enough in others. That’s just the way it is.