Jay Walder is the center of attention during an April ribbon-cutting ceremony. (Benjamin Kabak/Second Ave. Sagas)
Now that I’ve had an opportunity to run my complete interview with MTA CEO and Chair Jay Walder, I wanted to wrap up the series with my thoughts on the leadership at the MTA. The authority, routinely under fire by straphangers, politicians and everyone in between, has faced some rocky times, and the next legislative session could, as Streetsblog’s Noah Kazis detailed today, lead to more reappropriated and stolen transit funds. It’s not been an easy few years for the MTA.
Yet, despite tough economic times, the agency is currently growing its transit network. Within the next six to eight years, we’ll see part of a new subway line open along Second Ave. We’ll see Long Island Rail Road service into and out of Grand Central. We’ll see the 7 line reach the Far West Side and the Javits Center.
Beyond the expansion of service, we’ve also seen new customer-focused initiatives. Countdown clocks now tell riders exactly how long they must wait for trains, and commutes are less stressful because of it. A better website delivers real-time information about bus locations and service outages. New York City Transit even has its own Twitter account to amuse and inform its 10,000 followers. This is an MTA that has, sometimes kicking and screaming, entered a better era.
That isn’t to say that the authority is problem-free. As funds are tight, services have been eliminated even as capital spending is steady. We lost the V and W trains earlier this year and saw countless bus lines eliminated. We wait longer for off-hours trains and suffer through dirtier platforms that are in desperate need of rehab and renovation. For all of this, we’re getting a fare hike in four weeks. To make matters worse, even the major capital projects are hundreds of millions — if not billions — of dollars overbudget and years behind schedule.
All of which leads to two questions: How has Jay Walder performed as the first leader to act as both Chair and CEO of the MTA? Is he the right person for the job?
By and large, Walder has worked well with what he has, and what he has is not much. Walder came back from London with the promise of a fully funded MTA and a request or even a mandate to modernize the system. Only half of that vision has come to fruition, and his tenure is very much a work in progress. He is still, for instance, amidst an effort to overhaul and discard the MetroCard.
What drives many of Walder’s recent initiatives, even as service is scaled back and fares go up, is the need to, as he puts, make every dollar count. It’s important to replace the MetroCard with something more efficient because those are easy cost savings. By improving fare collection by just a few cents on the dollar, the MTA can generate upwards of a $100 million in added revenue every year. It shouldn’t take an economic crisis to address such an easily solvable problem, but change does not come easy to the MTA’s bureaucracy.
Where Walder has fallen short has been with labor. Right now, labor relations between the MTA and its workers are at a low point. The authority begrudgingly assented to an arbitration award for the TWU that required 11 percent in raises over three years, and Walder has overseen a drastic reduction in the number of personnel staffing stations. Even as modern technology can create a safer environment than a lone agent in his or her station, the appearance of a person can be a strong deterrent.
Soon the labor battle will rear its head again as the TWU’s contract comes due after 2011. Management at the MTA is expected to take a tough stance. It is there goal to maintain the labor spending levels, and that either means far fewer employees or no raises. No matter which path the authority chooses, Walder will have to convince a reluctant union to sacrifice, and if he cannot do that, then costs will continue to climb and climb and climb. Making friends with the workers will be of paramount importance.
Today, we know Walder, as we knew his predecessor Lee Sander, as a politically responsible choice to head a transit agency. His expertise lies in running a transit system and not in operating a real estate empire. He’s learned a lot during his first 14 months on the job, and he’ll be the first to tell you that. As we near the reign of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Walder’s job could be in danger, but if Cuomo were an astute politician, he would keep Walder on. Flaws and all, he’s one of the stronger allies the MTA has right now.
18 comments
i like walder
and he should be absolutely tough with the twu, letting them strike if it gets to that point. the public will be on his side
You can’t really be too tough with someone you need to maintain a working relationship with, even if the TWU leadership is clearly a bunch of children.
The problem with negotiating contracts with the labor unions is the mta is not on fair ground. State laws have been passed to boast labors negotiating rights at the detriment of the public. The TWU can say NO and let an arbitraitor, a single person (the three man thing is a crock, the twu rep votes for the twu, the mta rep vote for the the mta) This person as the legal eagles on this site know well draws on past rulings and those rulings have all be for labor. Most MTA workers are not rich in a state that taxes you to death and takes more than 50% of your income but they are paid 20% sometimes 30% more than the going mean market rate. The mta never can provide low cost customer focused service when it can not wrestle fair work rule changes. For instance why in the world are we sending si and College point based express buses empty back to depot after the morning rush, paying 2 hour plus per driver full pay and then half pay to sit and do nothing. Why do we make overnight riders wait 20 min for a train when a train can be there every 12 min (big deal if you need to transfer) at a lower cost. I hope Walder brings these fact out. He should use the small LCD’s in the train to run “THE FACTS” PR push
Unlike the last period of major financial struggles during the Rockefeller/Wilson/Carey era, Walder right now doesn’t seem to be focused on simply putting on cosmetic touches to try and convince people that the system’s doing great, as Bill Ronan did 40 years ago. The problem is since he’s not Andrew Cuomo’s selection he runs the risk of being Andrew Cuomo’s scapegoat, if the cuts really do start eating into the safety, cleanliness and preventive maintenance budgets and start making people recall the days of the 1970s and early 80s (and if Walder survives for another year, I’m not sure how Cuomo’s going to break when it comes to the contract fight between the MTA and TWU. Starve the system of capital in Albany and if you grant raises similar to the three-year 11 percent deal of last time, and the money’s going to come from cuts in the operating budget. But the major state unions in general are Cuomo supporters, so we’ll have to wait and see how he ends up playing the negotiations).
“if the cuts really do start eating into the safety, cleanliness and preventive maintenance budgets and start making people recall the days of the 1970s and early 80s”
Hate to tell you that most of today’s riders have no idea how it used to be. I do an as a child thought it was fun for the light to out in the train and the car shook like a roller coaster and made all kinds of interesting noises.
I hope Cuomo keeps Walder, he is the first leader that has real vision and the experience to make things happen. The union contract has to be rewritten from the ground up for the benefits of the riders. If the TWU wants to shut down the city let them. By in large most TWU workers are good people but having worked at city agencies i can honestly tell you that many workers have there heads in the clouds as to the real world and many have no idea about what the union does with their money and have no say in the unions position. Take a look at the police layoff situation in NEWARK. The unions executive committee would not let the rank and file vote. It is my guess that the rank and file would have voted for the furlough days in exchange for no layoffs. It makes it harder for the remaining officers. Union leadership just cares about keeping salaries up. After all they take dues as a percentage of your salary
Speaking of stealing funds from the MTA, what happens to the fines collected on SBS and other TAB money? Does it go back to the MTA or into the State’s general fund? I believe it is the latter. Shouldn’t that change? Shouldn’t the purpose of collecting SBS fines, in addition to discouraging farebeating, help the compensate the MTA for the loss of revenue caused by the farebeating? If it goes to the general fund, they are still out the money.
That is the question I have researched and have no answer. This can be a double edge sword. NYC should get a cut of the fines to encourage king Bloomberg to write more tickets but a good portion of the fine should go into the mta funds
Well, tuition paid to SUNY schools goes to the general fund, so I don’t see why they wouldn’t do the same with transit money…
Really? That’s completely surprising and unlike other states. I know my alma mater in Virginia pushed the Commonwealth to change its designation from state-supported to state-assisted. They were far more of their budget from fundraising and tuition that the Commonwealth’s meager allotment while having to deal with a host of state regulations was no longer worth it.
I didn’t know that, but it makes sense. I recently learned from a CUNY sustainability task force meeting I attended that the state pays most of the utilities for CUNY. (The idea is there’s little incentive for CUNY to save energy for that reason.)
The state seems to exercise pretty unitary control over SUNY tuition and finances. It’s possibly a little mellower with CUNY, which at least enjoys some local control from the city.
Any handouts like unlimited welfare or in the case at CUNY free electricity always leads to complacency. Want to increase recycling at schools and apartment buildings, set an amount of free garbage in pounds that they had have picked up free and a fee for anything over that. You will see a big push to recycle everything. The same can be done with electricity at CUNY. Luckily new technologies makes it actually cost effective to upgrade to LED lighting, computer controlled elevators and shut down cpu at night and the easiest low hanging fruit shutting down wifi at night and when the building is closed
Well, the problem appears to be more that:
– they don’t have a recycling budget
– they don’t have a budget to put in place a recycling infrastructure
Slowly, those things are coming to fruition. That said, they’ve done pretty good things with energy usage.
On campus recycling should not cost anymore than regular trash collection except for the purchase of separate containers. The problem lies more in that traditionally trash pickup has been free.
The city should sit down with each institution and say, Hey it costs us X number of dollars to pick up and dispose of your trash. We are willing to share a portion of the savings of putting in a recycling and other waste reduction measures in exchange for your support. If the city needs to put up seed money then so be it. As someone who took courses at Brooklyn College at the begining of the 2000’s , I can attest to the fact that although recycling containers existed in offices and classrooms, people rarely recycled. In one office you would see coffee cups and food waste thrown in the paper recycling containers day after day. The cleaning staff just dumped all the so call recycling together spoiling the whole lot. To work someone(the cleaning staff) needs to keep track of the people who blatantly violate the recycling regulations and notify their immediate supervisor. In the late 1990’s I interned at the Bank of NY at 101 barclay street in lower Manhattan . Bank of NY being the penny pinchers that they are had signs in every elevator reminding workers on the need to recycle paper and actually kept track of the amount of paper recycled in each department vs the amount of trash. they gave out rewards to departments that exceeded the goal. They did not just apply lip service to the idea. As a junior employee I was told the first day I started about the recycling effort and was ask to explain why there was a coffee cup in my recycling paper bin.
Sharon, I’d believe what you say more if the guaranteed minimum income in Sweden didn’t coexist with high employment-to-population ratio, higher than in the US and nearly all European countries. Programs like that tend to work much better than the humiliation fest that is US welfare.
I work in the private sector in one of those service jobs in which, as Sharon points out above, employees are paid far less in both wages and benefits and enjoy much less security than their unionized municipal counterparts. And yet, even when city workers take the most egregiously vicious action toward the rest of the city’s residents, as with the transit strike of 2006, imposing, as I observed personally in dozens of cases, the most time-consuming inconvenience for people who already had little spare time in their lives, or when there’s news of ridiculous abuses, like the pension multipliers, or they just routinely underperform, my co-workers hesitate to be critical of those government agency employees. At the time of the strike, I was so angry I wanted Mayor Bloomberg to break the TWU. I wanted him to fire every striking TWU employee, dump rock salt and quicklime on the TWU’s headquarters, and reassemble NYT’s workforce from scratch. I never heard this sentiment expressed by co-workers. Not ever. They would declare the workers should get more money; a year later they were angry over fare increases.
I don’t think my opinion makes me anti-union. I favor unions in the private sector, even though it’s a fuggedaboutit cause at this point. Might as well believe in the tooth fairy.
But it puzzled me why my co-workers were not more resentful and why there’s absolutely no general city-wide support for “the rest of us” vs the civil service unions. I think I understand why now. “The rest of us” is really a very small number of people. Almost every one of my co-workers has a family connection to someone in a municipal job. Mother, brother, sister, etc. Immediate family. And those breadwinners often have large families themselves, or part of the paycheck goes to helping support a member of the extended family.
It would take a very gutsy politician to take a militant stand against the unions. He or she would have to be prepared to take a lot of anger and heat in the short run and figure out a way to ensure it produces a real city-wide benefit over time. I actually favor this, but it wouldn’t be easy.
Two problems with that suggestion. First, they don’t work for the city, so the city can’t fire them. Second, it takes months to hire and train new train operators and conductors-would you have preferred a three-month (or more) shutdown instead of a three-day shutdown?
Yes, I understand now, and did at the time, that Bloomberg could not have literally done this by himself. And I knew that portions of the system might not come back online for awhile as a reorganized workforce was assembled. (I would not have supported what Reagan did with the air traffic controllers and ban employees from ever working in their jobs again.)
I do not like seeing working guys humiliated. I don’t say there would not have been difficulties for the agency and hardships for residents in this strategy. But I thought and still think that breaking the union’s power would have been the best thing for the whole city, even though what I was trying to say, in my original post, is I see how the interests of the union members extend so far beyond just those immediate employees.
Do you really think this city could have functioned without its transit system for several months straight?