At its meeting this morning, the MTA Board voted to move forward on a plan to raise fares and tolls while slashing the number of station agents employed across the city. As the MTA has both the legal right and the economic need to raise fares in 2011, the vote was both expected and contested with transit advocates and labor officials protesting outside.
At the meeting, CEO and Chairman Jay Walder put forward the MTA’s four-year budget plan. The authority does not plan to cut services further. However, to ensure that the budget stays on pace, the MTA will enact significant fare hikes in both 2011 and 2013 and will ask for major concessions from its employees.
To move forward with the fare hikes, the authority will host a series of citywide public hearings in September before voting on a final package of fare hikes in October. The authority will decide, based upon public input, whether to limited the unlimiteds or simply raise the fares a few dollars more. Only around three percent of all subway riders exceed the proposed limit of 90 trips in a 30-day period.
As part of the comprehensive plan — and the MTA’s four-year budget outlook — the authority also hopes to rein in work rules and labor spending that it says are out of control. With major union contracts expiring over the next few years, the authority will attempt to institute a wage freeze while curtailing overtime spending and benefit costs. Although labor unions called this a “fantasy agenda,” MTA CEO and Chairman Jay Walder is set on exacting productivity gains or wage controls on the unions. The MTA will also eliminate more than 3400 administrative positions, and the Board voted to dismiss 200 station agents today as well after complying with a judicial order to hold new public hearings on the proposal.
“The foundation of this [Four-Year] Plan is the most aggressive and comprehensive overhaul in the history of the MTA,” Walder said. “These actions have allowed us to hold true to our commitment regarding fare increases while maintaining the quantity and quality of service that New Yorkers rely on every day. The State’s ongoing fiscal crisis is one of many risks to the Plan, but with continued hard work and the participation of our labor unions I believe that this Plan can be achieved.”
Already, battle lines are being drawn, and TWU President John Samuelsen made the first charge. He criticized Walder’s $350,000 salary. “It’s utterly ridiculous,” Transport Workers Union Local 100 Samuelsen said. “It’s hypocritical, and it has to end. “Go after your own paycheck. Go after your own benefits.”
Samuelsen is, in effect, ignoring the real issues. Instead of working with the MTA to identify cost savings and putting pressure on Albany to help reform public transit funding (and MTA oversight), Samuelsen is highlighting a red herring. The MTA is $800 million in debt, and Walder’s salary, relatively low for an organization the size of the MTA, is needed to attract talented transit planners — instead of politically appointed real estate cronies — to run the MTA. Additionally, Samuelsen’s salary far outstrips that of MTA workers as well.
I’ll delve more into the MTA’s financial outlook later tonight. But for now, we know what’s in store for the authority. It is saddled with debt and runaway spending costs. Its leaders have vowed to avoid service cuts for the next few years, but to ensure that service remains the same, both the riders and the MTA’s employees at all levels will have to pay. Until serious funding reform efforts are under way, year-by-year budgetary living will be the way of economic life at the MTA, and for that, the millions of New York straphangers will pay more and more at the turnstile.
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