As the injunction stopping the dismissal of 475 station agents will last through the weekend, the MTA says the restraining order will cost it $100,000 per day. A hearing is set for Monday morning, and even if a Manhattan Supreme Court judge on Monday sides with the MTA, as the authority expects, Thursday’s injunction will have cost half a million dollars, adding to the agency’s sizable deficit. The TWU claims the MTA is obligated to hold hearings concerning the impact the firings will have on neighborhood safety, but I see neither a law mandating those hearings nor signs of any impact whatsoever.
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“I see neither a law mandating those hearings….”
Oh no… please don’t give the legislature any ideas.
Hey Ben, just curious, I don’t read you every day but,,,did you ever run a piece on how much the MTA spent on legal fees to repeatedly appeal the TWU arbitration decision? Seems like it was a sort of stimulus plan for white-shoe Manhattan law firms.
I ran a piece highlighting the $1.2 million cost in October, and I’m sure that cost went up. The agency never announced the final tally. While I don’t know the hourlies, it certainly seemed to be an unnecessarily high figure. If it’s work they could have done in-house or for less money, they obviously were flushing dollars down the toilet.
MTA has an in-house staff, but they are busy appealing cases that shouldn’t even be litigated. See, e.g. New York Civ. Liberties Union v. New York City Transit Auth., 675 F. Supp. 2d 411 (S.D.N.Y. 2009). In the “TAB” case, it wasn’t even so much that NYCLU had a slam-dunk legal claim (though, if I say so myself, I think it was fairly strong), but that MTA could have easily/cheaply settled. Would love to hear from Walder on their legal strategy in general.
[…] nothing more than a procedural and fiscal thorn in the MTA’s side, and it will probably cost $100,000 a day plus the expenses for the public hearings for the MTA to comply with […]