For the MTA, an uncertain political and economic future

Governor-elect Andrew Cuomo speaks to his supporters on Election Day. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

While a political realignment swept the nation, New York State seemed largely immune from the incumbent anger and conservative shift so prevalent throughout America on Tuesday night. Andrew Cuomo handily won the governor’s race, and Thomas DiNapoli won reelection to the comptroller spot. The Assembly will remain in Sheldon Silver hands, but it appears as though Dean Skelos and the Republicans will take the State Senate. What does it all mean for the MTA?

For the authority, elections are always a time of uncertainty. While agency heads are nominated for six-year terms, new governors often prefer to remove the old and insert the new. We saw David Paterson replace Elliot Sander just a few months into his term, and Cuomo has yet to give any sort of opinion on Jay Walder. Meanwhile, state Republicans are eying the payroll tax, and the GOP in the House will try to tighten the Congressional purse strings. For an MTA in need of capital funding and trying to keep its operating budget afloat, these political changes could spell more tough times ahead.

At the national leve, Anthony Weiner warns of spending cutbacks in an interview today with the Daily News. By and large, Republicans in the House have little need for the urban voters. We generally don’t vote for them, and as Weiner said, “They seem to blame big cities for everything that goes wrong in the country.”

And so the early 2013 mayoral hopeful believes that transit funding may get the axe. It’s hard to say what he means by transit funding because so much of it it is either guaranteed or tied into pork-filled bills. The feds have already pledged money to the East Side Access and LIRR projects, but those funds came when the New York delegation of Democrats had power in the House and Senate. The key question here should focus around high-speed rail funding — which actually seems to be consolidating around the Northeast Corridor — and the ARC Tunnel money. The dollars New Jersey gave up should stay in the northeast and in transit, but will they?

On a local level, the final outcomes in the State Senate are still up in the air, but early indications are that the Republicans and Dean Skelos will be back in charge. Immediately, the state GOP will try to roll back the payroll tax as suburban Republicans find it an reprehensible funding plan, but they’ll have to overcome a Democratic Assembly and Andrew Cuomo. Perhaps they’ll offer a congestion pricing or tolling plan in exchange for a reduced tax. Even though Cuomo called congestion pricing a non-starter a few weeks ago, swapping in tolls for taxes as a transit revenue source should placate suburban businesses.

But the biggest impact will come from the Governor’s Mansion where Andrew Cuomo now sits, effectively in control of the MTA and its Board. As Gene Russianoff noted in a Streetsblog interview, Cuomo will have the opportunity to appoint three board members in short order. Doreen Frasca’s and Norman Seabrook’s spots have expired, and Nancy Shevell’s come due in June.

Cuomo could also choose to oust Jay Walder as agency CEO and Chair, but both Russianoff and the Regional Plan Association have come out against such a move. “We clearly have our differences with Jay over some issues,” Russianoff said, “but he’s a transit professional and it’s all on the merits.”

While we wait to hear from Cuomo about the fate of Walder, we’re also waiting on Cuomo to make any sort of announcement on transit policy. His campaign was noticeably lacking on ways to solve the MTA’s fiscal problems and his support for public transportation in general. Today, in an extensive article, Katharine Jose, writing for the upstart Capital New York Site, discusses how Cuomo has to get serious about public transportation. The whole piece is well worth a read. I’ll excerpt.

After rehashing the drama of Cuomo’s statements during the campaign — the MTA has “no leadership”; the authority needs “better management” — Jose speaks to the advocates who are cautiously optimistic. “I don’t think that Andrew is that drastic or dramatic,” Neysa Pranger of the RPA said. “I think he’ll maintain support for critical investment projects. I don’t know how much expansion will be put on the books going forward, but I get a sense he has a fundamental understanding of the need for East Side Access —particularly now that A.R.C. is dead, actually…I think he understands good repair, normal replacement—all of that stuff that has his father kind of lived through with the M.T.A. in the ’80s and early ’90s—that you really need to make that investment.”

She then dismisses and dissects the spurious claims about two sets of books and reaches the crux of what Cuomo has to do and how it relates to Walder:

In some ways, what commissioner Jay Walder is doing for the M.T.A. is what Cuomo wants to do for the state. Cuomo plans to consolidate some of the thousands of local government entities in the state to make them more efficient and less expensive; Walder has taken the authority’s numerous departments—a legacy of the fact that the agency was formed from a number of different agencies—and folded it into one. Cuomo wants to avoid more spending; Walder has found $500 million dollars in recurring savings, despite budget cuts imposed by Albany.

Cuomo’s office did not respond to the Jose’s interview requests, and the money quotes instead from Robert Paaswell, director emeritus of the University Transportation Research Center:

“The media sort of forgets that the M.T.A. has a major job in New York, and that’s to provide eight million trips a day, and to do it safely,” Paaswell said. “They think of it as this massive organization that’s in need of some kind of reform. And if I were to ask people the question, which I do because I’m a professor, ‘What do you mean by that? And what kind of reform?’ They’re sort of chanting what the politicians say.”

“You have an organization that’s fairly healthy,” he said. “It provides amazing transportation service every day. The city could not exist without a healthy M.T.A.”

Restructuring will be needed, he said, but because of changing circumstances that are much bigger than the agency itself.

“It’s beginning to show signs of strain, because the budget’s been cut dramatically and we’re having reductions in service,” Paaswell said. “I think the governor’s going to have to recognize that the M.T.A. was designed to solve specific problems back in the ’70s, and it’s done it fairly well, but it’s reached the point where it can no longer afford the programs that it needs to have in place based on the funding sources that it was originally thought to have, so he has to deal with that—he has to deal with the , What should an M.T.A. look like? Do we need this incredibly complex organization?”

The answer to that final question would appear to be no. As Walder has shown, the MTA has a lot of fat to trim, and he trimmed it quickly and efficiently. For now, we’ll wait for Cuomo to talk and Cuomo to act, but he should be aware that the fate of the MTA — and public transit in New York City — is now in his hands.