Much of my coverage of the MTA’s labor costs have focused around union raises and generous pension plans. I would be remiss to neglect to mention the high costs and redundancies found within the agency’s management structure as well. These problems — triple-staffing in some circumstances — are just as problematic.
Today, Newsday’s James Bernstein highlights a problem with the agency’s public relations department. He reports that the agency employs a staff of 400 to meet its marketing and public relations needs. Says Bernstein:
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority still maintains a staff of 400 to work in its marketing and public relations division, at a time when the agency has drawn up plans to slash service, forcing students to pay for their travel to school.
MTA spokesman Jeremy Soffin earlier this week acknowledged that about 400 people work in media, government and community relations and corporate and customer communications – departments that have not felt the budget ax being wielded by new agency chairman Jay Walder to close an unexpected deficit of nearly $400 million.
But, Soffin said, Walder and the MTA board plan to closely examine costs for public relations and marketing. “I would expect any review would certainly look at things that are not service-related, and that would include communications,” Soffin said.
Bernstein reports that the MTA’s corporate communications department features 16 people who work with transit reporters and bloggers. By comparison, Amtrak has just five. He notes, however, that the MTA’s daily ridership is over 100 times that of Amtrak’s. Perhaps then some of these myriad staff members aren’t redundant.
We’ve known for a long time that the MTA is not a lean bureaucracy. Because the authority consists of seven different agencies and a centralized headquarters that have not been integrated properly and were thrown together at the start, numerous people do, in effect, the same job as others. Cutting through the red tape to streamline operations though has never come easy.
To save money, the MTA must restructure itself internally. It can’t ask its workers to consider wage freezes or reduced staffing levels if the desk jockeys aren’t doing the same thing. The cost savings here aren’t estimated to be great enough to cover that $400 million gap, but as riders are expected to suffer through service cuts, so must the MTA’s corporate structure.
Leave a Reply