Everything is a mess in Albany right now. Malcolm Smith has no control over his party, and Senators who once supported tolls are flip-flopping for no good reason.
The problem starts at the top, and nowhere is that more apparent in Malcolm Smith’s statements. “I haven’t yet put together a plan, nor have I (seen) a plan that I think is worthy of having that kind of discussion,” he said. Elizabeth Benjamin has more from Smith:
“We are going to try and put something together and hopefully we get there. I know they have this deadline; I just don’t think it’s appropriate for the MTA to sort of hold the public hostage and say, ‘Well if we don’t get to the deadline we’re going to charge you more.’
“The public didn’t cause their failures in terms of how they managed their budget. It’s the failure of their performance that has now asked the legislators to help. Yes, we can be there to help, but then we should have together have decided what the deadline was. Not them to impose their will on us and say ‘because we screwed up, that we now are going to tell you if you don’t help us we’re now going to have a problem or cause a problem for the public.'”
Smith is ignoring years of Pataki Era neglect and poor management to punt on the issue. But he’s not the only one. Hiram Monserrate, a Queens Senator who had once supported tolls, changed his mind. Criticizing what he terms the “so-called Ravitch plan,” Monserrate doesn’t want to institute tolls and the blames the MTA for “failing to explain ‘specifically’ how toll revenue would be used to pay for service and capital improvements.”
What does Monserrate want the MTA to tell him? It’s really quite simple. The East River bridges get tolled; the MTA collects the revenue — as it current does from its own Bridge & Tunnel division; the money goes into the budget; and out comes a better-funded transit agency. Is he really asking for a specific count of how the MTA plans to spend all of the few hundred million dollars it stands to earn if the East River bridges are tolled? Or is he just being dense and/or obstructionist?
Meanwhile, the man behind the so-called plan spoke out against the Albany ineptitude. “I understand it’s a tough environment and that our recommendations represent painful choices, but there is no way of avoiding a decision,” Richard Ravitch said to William Neuman of The Times. “Doing nothing has consequences.”
Indeed it would. As Ravitch noted and as I’ve said numerous times over the last few weeks, forcing the MTA to adopt its Doomsday budget would, in the words of Ravitch, be “disastrous to the economy and the people of the MTA region.” Neuman had more:
He warned that failing to enact a comprehensive rescue plan that includes new tolls and taxes this year would create a deficit next year larger than the $1.2 billion budget gap the authority is struggling to bridge this year. It would also force a fare increase in 2010 much larger than the 23 percent rise the authority has proposed for this year, he said…
In an interview, he said that if the Legislature ultimately offered the authority a one-time cash infusion, the authority should go ahead with the fare increase and use the state funds to pay for long-term maintenance, or perhaps hold onto it to help close the budget gap next year.
The authority’s board will meet on Friday in a special session to review its finances with and without a rescue plan. The board will meet again on March 25 to vote on the size of a fare increase, which would take effect in June. It will also vote then on whether to move ahead with planning for a series of deep service cuts, most of which would take place later this year.
The MTA Board meets this morning, and I’ll try to have an update up this afternoon. In twelve days, though, transit in New York City will never be the same, and those changes will not be for the better if the Senate continues to dilly-dally in Albany.
5 comments
At least the media has started to clue in that the problems aren’t the MTA, but actually the politicians in Albany. Though it would have been nice had they done so like 3 months ago before the public comment period, so we could have had some real dialog in those meetings, instead of the never ending silliness about additional audits. How many audits do we need to put the MTA under each year? If the MTA were audited as often as various politicians and other public figures called for, one audit would start before another even ended.
Living and working for the state here in Albany (I grew up in Croton-on-Hudson, home to the MTA’s massive Harmon Yards) one gets to see this same lack of leadership by Malcolm Smith on a daily basis. If the Democrats were serious about staying in power in the State Senate, they’d have a vote of no confidence in Smith NOW, get it over with and pick a new leader they can all rally around. If he can’t rally his forces and keep his party in lockstep like the Republicans did for decades, then they aren’t going to hold their position very long.
You have to hope that Malcolm Smith is posturing, and that he is not actually as stupid as these comments make him out to be. Surely he knows that the MTA is required by law to balance its budget. Who made that law? Why, it’s the very legislature of which Malcolm Smith was a member.
There are so many other things Smith seems to be unaware of — for instance, the fact that debt service is the major problem. I believe that Smith was in the legislature when it approved the very debts that are now causing the problem.
Beyond that, the MTA itself was created by the legislature. Smith wasn’t in the Senate when that happened, but surely he knows this. Therefore, the legislature ultimately owns the problem.
In twelve days, though, transit in New York City will never be the same, and those changes will not be for the better if the Senate continues to dilly-dally in Albany.
That’s a bit over-dramatic. The actual deadline is not in twelve days, and even if it were, there is nothing the MTA is proposing that could not be reversed if and when conditions change.
Okay an update to the Hassel-Thompson issue and to address this; What they are really trying to say and I’m totally surprised you aren’t mentioning is that these guys want to know about the MTA’s toll structure. NOT about how the money will be used within the MTA. They want to know if the toll will be $2 on paper now and thn $5 or even $7 or whatever later. Because the bill in front of the senate stated that there would be a toll but no amount was officially stated. The senators want a bill that would set a fare instead of signing a bill that sounded great and then explain to their constituents why they signed a bill that then tolled the bridges some crazy amount. I agree with the Times that no action is FAR WORSE than waiting on a bill with actual figures to work with. But anyway please make the entire case known.
I haven’t mentioned that because that’s not the information that I have or have received. As far as I can tell Monserrate is talking about toll revenue and not toll structure. Can you point me to a source or shoot me an e-mail with the concerns about toll structure as opposed to revenue?
[…] Ravitch, the architect behind an equitable tax-toll-fare hike plan that would have saved the MTA, warned Albany against temporary fixes, the State Senate has all but officially rejected tolls and is going its own […]