We already know that Carl Kruger will take no responsibility for his own bad bailout plan. Now another Senator — Martin Malave Dilan — is pointing fingers at the MTA in a way that just doesn’t make sense.
In an open letter to MTA CEO and Chairman Jay Walder, Dilan sounds personally offended that Walder did not tell Dilan about the agnecy’s financial woes before word leaked to the press. Never mind the fact that Dilan is one of the Senators who passed a reduced state budget with $143 million in appropriations taken away from the MTA. Never mind that the MTA is more important to the state than Dilan. It is all about him.
The full letter is embedded below the jump. I’ll excerpt the best parts right here:
Specifically, I find it disappointing that members of your staff would notify the media, while excluding my colleagues and I in the Legislature.
To be clear, my sentiments are not rooted within the action of notifying the press, I simply believe your organization should provide the Legislature with the same consideration we have provided you. Both, prior to your arrival, with the new revenue package advanced in May, and throughout your nomination process, we have continually relied and agreed upon the importance of an open dialogue. I am disappointed that your commitment to an openness within the MTA and initiating a new era of accountability and transparency has not begun to take shape.
It is an affront to our burgeoning partnership, often discussed in previous months, to exclude us from this critical information. Additionally, it is difficult to think that our exclusion was not simply a matter of being overlooked. One can only conclude that by going to the press first, your organization was in fact using the media to once again stir the bees’ nest, rallying fears of insufficient funding and potential fare increases and service cuts.
This is, without a doubt, the most self-important letter a State Senator has ever written to another in charge of the MTA. Elizabeth Benjamin at the Daily News believes that this letter “does not bode well” for future relations between Walder and Albany. Somehow, the MTA head is responsible for one of the recipients of Gary Dellaverson’s letter leaking it to the press.
In my opinion, though, this letter just reinforces my belief that Albany doesn’t know what to do with the MTA and is intent on choking off New York City’s transportation lifeline. Dilan is a Democrat from District 17, an area in Brooklyn in which approximately 65 percent of those who commute do so via public transit. If he wants to form an adversarial relationship with the agency, let him.
In a sweeping piece on the MTA’s financial crisis, Nicole Gelinas urges the authority to target its cuts to areas represented by those who oppose the agency. She wants Transit to penalize Sheldon Silver’s inability to deliver congestion pricing by slicing up Lower Manhattan; she urges the agency to cut services to Carl Kruger’s and Pedro Espada’s transit-dependent districts. I would add Dilan to this list, and when they foolishly allow the MTA to fail, we can send them packing.
For the full text of Sen. Dilan’s letter, click through.
Open Letter From Senator Dilan to MTA CEO-Chairman Walder
13 comments
Notify the legislature? The Assembly adjourned on December 2nd, 2009 and the Senate not long thereafter. Has he lost his marbles? Did he intend for the MTA to send couriers throughout this great state to force the Speaker and the Temporary President to call the Legislature back into session?! There is no formal notification process in place when both houses stand in adjournment pending the new legislative year.
I am unbelievably sad that the two states I call home, California and New York, have the most dysfunctional state governments in the country (well, Texas being up there, but screw Texas). What an embarrassment.
I’m with Gelinas. Screw the regions represented by these people, try to force a primary challenge. And my God, is there any realistic chance for MTA to achieve home rule? I remain baffled that the MTA’s fate is controlled by a city 160 miles away.
I’d have to disagree with the idea of targeting cuts to the areas represented by these senators. Fire + fire = more fire. These senators would simply spin the MTA’s cuts as yet another reason to hate the MTA–it wouldn’t force their support of MTA funding in the least. The senators would just say that the MTA was punishing the good people in their districts because they were the few brave souls who spoke out against the MTA’s fiscal irresponsibility. Although it would definitely feel good to get revenge through service cuts, I hope the MTA can find a better way to respond to these irrational accusations.
What’s the point of penalizing the Lower East Side? Silver supported CP, and helped usher a decent bailout through the Assembly. Blame the State Senate’s Republicans and a couple of its Democrats – the Assembly’s pretty decent.
I’d like to have a job that pays $79,500 where I don’t have to worry about the people that I’m working for, or have a brain, for that matter.
“…I simply believe your organization should provide the Legislature with the same consideration we have provided you…”
So… Jay Walder should accuse the Senate of keeping two sets of books? Or just individual Senators?
I usually like Gelinas’ no-nonsense explanations of these matters, but I too think that targeting certain neighborhoods for cuts is a horrible idea. I’d like to think she’s being tongue-in-cheek.
She’s absolutely right about the real problem, though: out-of-control pension and health care costs. And with government out-to-lunch, the only person who could possibly address the problem is Walder. Let’s see what he does.
Remember that the more radical unions supported universal pension and health care back in the 1940s and 50s. It was the more moderate AFL types that decided that because GM and Bethlehem Steel would last forever, a better solution would be to have each corporation responsible to its own employees.
^
Agreed, vengefully targeted service cuts, while a nice revenge fantasy, would only lionize the crooked Senators to the status of Saint George or Judah Maccabee in the eyes of their constituents.
I say keep the same level of service and raise the fares. The goal is to get straphangers to ring the phones in Albany off the hooks. Service cuts here and there (not vengefully targeted of course) would angry-up some of the people some of the time, but a system-wide fare hike will have them howling en masse.
With Albany in an fiscal bind, they’d have to address the issue of unions and pensions. After all these Albany politicos care about two things: their salaries and their perks. They’d sell their grandmother in order to placate their constituents and keep their salaries and perks.
Only a huge (say, 50%) fare hike would anger enough people to make a difference. Sure, they’d complain, but in the end, a majority of New Yorkers can swallow it.
Better would be $200M or so in service cuts (not the token cuts that are proposed). THAT would get people’s attention.
“Effective 2010, there will be no L train service between Eighth Avenue and Rockaway Parkway. Please use replacement shuttle bus service. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Buses cost a lot more to run (per rider) than trains. Especially on busy lines like the L.
“Metropolitan Transportation Agency”? Senator Dilan doesn’t even know what MTA stands for?
[…] fare hikes, and some of the city’s elected representatives — those same representatives who won’t fund the MTA — will dare to speak out against the […]