Rhetoric, but no MTA deal, from Albany

Right now, I’m really hoping for the Senate to wrap up its budget talks. As the New York State budget stews, the MTA has landed firmly on the backburner, and while Albany will soon put forth an MTA rescue plan, right now, all we’re getting in the news is rhetoric.

It is, of course, the same old rhetoric the State Senate and Malcolm Smith, its majority leader, have been spewing for months. While I am trying to find optimism in the words, it all rings a little hollow as this late date. “It’s an emergency situation,” Sheldon Silver, Assembly speaker and one of the few Ravtich supporters in Albany, said to The Times today. “I would hope to do it as quickly as possible.”

While Smith himself acknowledged that “everything is on the table,” those words are simply not true. At this point, the Senate has all but killed the Ravitch toll plan. Rumor has it that steep increases in driver registration fees could be levied against the counties serviced by the MTA. Even that, plan, though is facing some opposition.

According to The Times, David Paterson and his advisers were hoping to implement an increased driver registration fee plan to fund New York’s road and bridge construction project. The Senators whose support this plan would need tend to agree. They believe that funds from drivers should be reinvested in the roads the drivers need and not in mass transit. That is, after all, how we got into this toll mess in the first place.

Meanwhile, some upstate senators seem to be grumbling about the increased focus on the MTA. As William Neuman and Jeremy Peters report, “lawmakers say that in the past, the authority’s capital program and the state’s road and bridge program have usually been treated in tandem, to balance the needs of the city and the rest of the state.”

Right now, Senators are trying to find a New York City-centric way to address the MTA’s capital and operations budgets with little regard for upstate trade-offs. I firmly believe that upstate New York will just have to wait. The needs of the MTA and the millions of people who depend on it daily are far more important than a pork-laced project to repair and maintain roads outside of the city.

While Albany delays, it Sheldon Silver who has become the state cheerleader for the MTA. “We are going to examine the alternatives that are available to us and we will succeed, I believe, in overturning the draconian service cuts and the outrageous increases in fares that the board has proposed,” he said. I hope he’s right.