New York City’s Borough Presidents don’t have much power within the city’s government. They have small discretionary budgets, can appoint Community Board members and are largely ceremonial. Because New Yorkers love a figurehead, though, serious politicians can use the BP spot as a spring board to greater ambitions. Many a former Manhattan Borough Presidents have moved into Gracie Mansion, and Scott Stringer is looking to do the same.
Armed with the support of his long-time family friend and native Manhattanite Scarlett Johansson, Stringer must overcome the presumptive front-runner Christine Quinn’s edge, but he is a vocal and tireless campaigner. As Borough Presidents go, he has also been a friend of transit — at least as much as he can be in his role. He hosted a conference late last year about the future of transportation in New York City and seems to recognize that our mass transit system powers Manhattan and the city’s economy.
Yesterday, at a speech before the Association for a Better New York, Stringer laid out his views on transit. We know he endorsed a commuter tax plan, but he had far more to say on the subway system. “We have a basic problem: The Metropolitan Transportation Authority—the central nervous system of our regional transit network– is a fiscal house of cards,” he said. “That’s not just bad for straphangers. Without a healthy MTA, our region’s 1.2 trillion dollar economy could come to a screeching halt. Without action, we risk becoming a first-class city with a second-rate transportation network. We cannot let that happen.”
In his speech, Stringer laid out what he called a “roadmap” for the MTA. This wasn’t about taking cheap shots at the beleaguered transit authority or flat-out ignoring transit as our current Governor has done. Rather, this was a speech about paying attention, making some hard choices and investing in our present and future. He issued a call for a New York City Transit Trust Fund with dedicated revenues from the mortgage recording fund; he urged Albany to embrace Sam Schwartz’s traffic plan; and he called upon the restoration of the commuter tax.
He said:
“Under my plan, the New York City Transit Trust will also leverage private dollars, but will do so responsibly, by tying the infrastructure bank to a dedicated revenue stream – our existing Mortgage Recording Tax. Now as many of you know, the Mortgage Recording Tax is a fee that gets paid every time property changes hands in the City and the 7-county MTA region. Today, those fees flow directly into the MTA’s operating budget.
Now, unfortunately, the MRT is a horrible source of operating funds – it swings wildly from year to year, making solid projections very tough. At the height of the housing bubble, the Mortgage Recording Tax and other transfer taxes generated $1.5 billion for the city and the MTA. But by last year, with a flat market, revenues dropped 75 percent to just $400 million.
Relying on a source of revenue that can plunge 75 percent over a five year span is no way to run a railroad, much less the nation’s largest transit system. Over the long haul, however, we know that the Mortgage Recording Tax brings in an average of $400 million a year. A dedicated revenue stream of that size can be used to leverage over $10 billion in capital that could be quickly put to work.”
What then would the city be able to do with this money? Spend it wisely, says Stringer. Echoing a point I’ve made before, he leveled his sights on current projects. “We can’t be throwing precious dollars at projects like the Fulton Street station in Lower Manhattan,” he said. “That station is costing taxpayers 1.4 billion dollars and will do nothing to add capacity when work finally ends in 2014.”
With the added dollars, we could reimagine the transit network, he said. Stringer would expand bus rapid transit. He wants to add light rail to 42nd St., and he wants to deliver an AirTrain to La Guardia. He even spoke of the Triboro RX line. “Here’s why it is not a pipe dream: The line is built entirely along existing rights of way,” he said. “That means no tunneling, which is the biggest hurdle in this day and age to building new subways.”
It’s unclear what Stringer’s political future is right now. The 2013 mayoral race is both a long ways off and very unsettled. But no New York politician has taken such a vocal and ardently pro-transit stance as Stringer did yesterday. For that, he deserves a good long look even as his ideas would face steep opposition in Albany. He might just be the city’s best hope for a better transit policy.
Stringer’s speech is available in full right here.
36 comments
OK, I have to admit that I feel bad attacking Stringer for the commuter tax yesterday, because the speech as a whole is not bad.
I don’t think it’s fair to say that Fulton Street will do nothing to add capacity, since it will make transfers easier. But the surface-level stuff is a waste.
Moving the mortgage recording tax from operational to capital funding seems like a good idea.
The context that he puts the commuter tax in – as one of several possibilities, putting it towards the MTA instead of the city’s general fund – makes it sound better. I think if you go a little further and dedicate it to MNR and LIRR it would not only be fair, but it might have a small chance of getting enacted. But still, I think this is pretty hopeless.
Light rail is not any faster than subways or buses; I don’t know why he would claim something like this. Putting it on 42nd Street could be advantageous, but only because it would have higher capacity, and be somewhat cheaper in the long run, than buses.
Anyway… I can’t say I’m excited about Stringer for mayor, but on transportation issues he is way ahead of everyone else running.
I don’t see why Fulton St is such a waste, I think that it will be a revenue raiser provided they’re able to get top shelf tenants, that’s the biggest question. The MTA has Apple in GCT so, it may not be such a far fetched idea to get one downtown.
As to the MTA being in the commercial real estate, that’s another problem. They risk of becoming like the PANY/NJ, too many projects and not concentrating on the core.
Surface-level “stuff” is almost never where the bulk of the money goes anyway for these types of projects. Most of the money on Fulton Street went to underground “stuff”, that’s where most of the complicated engineering take place.
The head house, as mentioned, actually adds a revenue stream for the MTA. And it benefits the neighborhood too. The Fulton/Broadway intersection used to be old and dingy, and it looks like this will change that.
And they (Apple) do not yet have a presence Downtown.
SoHo…
Exactly…
Fulton Street adds limited convenience and ADA compliance. It doesn’t add track miles or allow for higher passenger loads on trains. Better things could have been done with that money.
It’s certainly faster than buses, even BRT, and depending on the type of trip being made, might speed the trip up more than a subway. Actually being able to board and alight at street level means not having to descend into subway stations, especially when you’re making really local trips and carrying things. This is all the more useful when you consider the stiffy planners now have for deep cavern stations in place of traditional cut and cover.
And Light Rail requires exclusive ROW, if it shares lanes, it will be much slower than a bus.
Uh, why? LRT still accelerates faster and boards people more quickly, mixed traffic or not.
Though I think we’re kind of past the point where mixed traffic is a good idea for either mode, at least anywhere in Midtown Manhattan.
Unlike a bus it can’t maneuver at all around obstacles.
This is not a feature that has helped buses achieve punctuality or retain ridership. Hell, that argument is akin to supporting FRA buff strength regulations; avoiding obstacles/problems is preferable to having to slow everyone down to deal with them, and buses aren’t exactly good at going around obstacles either.
On-street light rail isn’t really faster than buses, if they provide the exact same service level. The advantage is that it can run more punctually and frequently, and has higher capacity per vehicle. Buses bunch below a headway of 3-4 minutes; LRT can go down to 2 minutes or less.
I don’t feel bad. We can’t allow politicians to keep promising things they say we don’t have to pay for, when their past actions have created the reverse. If they were honest, they would be giving “blood and tears” speeches.
Those don’t get you elected? Fine, then stick to principles and leave out the hypocritical details. I’d rather hear them say that many people benefitted from creating the predicament we are in, and wel’ll all have to pitch in to get out of it, without specifying who or how and promise something for nothing.
“Moving the mortgage recording tax from operational to capital funding seems like a good idea.”
The actual idea is borrowing against it; the rest is mis-direction.
Yes it could be better to use variable revenues such as MRT for potentially variable costs like ongoing capital maintenence. But that isn’t what is proposed. More borrowing, more spending future revenues now, is proposed.
When you borrow against it and spend all the future revenues, the correlative expenditures cease to be variable. You have a fixed income payment instead. Where does that come from in recession?
The best course of action is returning control of the city’s subways and buses to the city, and establishing an agency that is way more planning oriented and customer focused. As long our subways and buses are subject to the whims of Upstate & LI politicians (particularly Republicans, but no one is really exempt here), they will always be second class.
Along with MTA Bridge and Tunnels.
In the old days, we had the Board of Estimate. The Borough Presidents sat on the Board of Estimate, and collectively they had five votes, equal to the voting power of the Mayor in the weighted voting system of the Board. When the new City Charter went into effect in the 1970’s, the Board of Estimate was abolished, and the job of Borough President became mostly ceremonial. It’s a job with a powerful-sounding TITLE, but little actual power.
The BP positions lost their power when a court decided the power share was unconstitutional. That’s what started the shift to a largely ceremonial function.
I seem to remember well when the new City Charter was put on the Election Day ballot sometime in the mid-70’s.
Do you mean that the charter revision was made necessary by that court decision?
Yep. Board of Estimate of City of New York v. Morris was in 1989, not the 1970s, actually.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N.....f_Estimate
You were right, I was mixed up about the time frame.
Now, how about the United States Senate?
Underpopulated states like Nevada and Alaska have the same two votes as do New York and California.
Imagine if some day the Supreme Court decides that that’s unfair, just like they decided that it was unfair for Brooklyn and Staten Island to have the same power on the Board of Estimate?
The Supreme Court could not declare the Senate unconstitutional because the Senate is explicitly written into the Constitution.
If you ask me, that’s strong evidence that something like the Board of Estimate isn’t unconstitutional actually. Not that I think the BoE was a good idea for philosophical reasons….
And the Beeps were originally to be eliminated, but subsequent negotiations retained them as well as creating the Public Advocate.
Let’s add here that the existing job of City Council President was RENAMED Public Advocate.
What was created from scratch was the job of Speaker of the City Council (who is elected from within, just like the Speaker of the House).
No, the Supreme Court ruled explicitly that everything has to be done proportionally to population, except the US Senate. State legislatures with two houses need to have both houses proportional to population. It’s one of the rulings for desegregation: the issue was that at the time, in the 1960s, district boundaries often reflected an older, less urban population distribution, and this was used to give rural whites more power and urban blacks less power.
Yes, yes, I know what the ruling was and the background. I don’t entirely agree with it, though I agree with the outcome it was trying to accomplish. It’s not exactly something I’d bang tables over, especially given the backdrop.
This is political pandering at its worse. The only thing Stringer cares about advancing is his own political career. Wasn’t he originally in favor of Fulton Street?
Fulton Street may not be the best use of money, but it is federal 9/11 recovery money that could not be used for another purpose.
Of course I’m sure all the cost over-runs sucked money out of the rest of the plan. In which case the problem is the MTA getting robbed by contractors, not the project.
The best part of Stringer’s speech was that he was looking at finding dedicated lines of funding for mass transit – both for capital construction and for ongoing operating costs. That has been lost on politicians whose decisions affect NYC metro commutes.
Would splitting out NYC bus/subway/bridges/tunnels from the commuter rail give NYC greater control over its own mass transit? Quite possibly, but it would potentially lose economies of scale resulting from the original merging of those disparate entities.
NYC should have greater leeway in home rule to decide its own tax burden, but those decisions are made in Albany, not NYC. If Albany punts on the issue, NYC has little recourse, unless it decides to take its own existing tax revenues and divert them to other purposes. There’s little room for NYC to do that, and it would necessarily result in hikes.
With an already highest-in-the-nation tax burden, NYC residents would likely oppose yet another tax hike.
If someone wanted to rationalize bridge/tunnel tolls in NYC metro so that someone coming from Staten Island isn’t forced to pay an arm/leg, but someone coming from Brooklyn to Manhattan can get into the City for free, I’m all ears.
If the Brooklyn Bridge gets 125,000 cars a day and was tolled $3 each way, that could generate $273.8 million annually. Dedicate that funding to bridge upkeep? Consider that the total daily bridge traffic for the four East river bridges is close to 500,000 daily (2009 figure is 477k) the allure of a toll on those bridges is not inconsiderable. We’re talking about more than a billion dollars annually. That could leverage considerably more for upkeep, expansion, and or replacement of existing structures.
Offset that with reductions in tolls at the other inter-city bridges and tunnels and you could still see a net uptick in revenues dedicated for bridges and tunnels plus bus and subway.
However, there might be a way to get the revenues without forcing tax hikes on residents? Just as the Port Authority imposed user fees on airport users to fund AirTrain, the City could likely target hotels/conventioneers with another tax to fund subway/tunnel/bus service improvements. With travelers reaching record levels last year (50+ million), hotel/convention fees would go towards long range transit projects but not directly harm residents.
It’s a strategy used the world over by travel destinations (think SF, Vegas, etc.) to fund various improvements by taxing car rentals, airport access fees, user fees, etc., that residents wouldn’t ordinarily encounter but which tourists would get for the privilege of coming to the city. In some places, car rental fees/taxes exceed 30% the costs of the actual rental.
NYC already has those excess taxes on car rentals and hotels. They were increased to pay for the renovation of the Convention Center the Governor wants to tear down. And they were bonded against.
What economy of scale do you see from merging them? They scarcely share resources as is, and MTA Capital Construction can do capital construction regardless of who it’s for. The MTA is more a conglomerate than a vertically integrated whole.
They’re in the process of trying to integrate now – spending hundreds of millions on a GSA cum CityTime monstrosity known as the BSC.
Yesterday’s AM New York highlighted the fact that Stringer singled out Triboro Rx – or “the X Train” – as a project he would favor and try to advance. After a hundred years of Manhattan-centric rail emphasis – including SAS, ESA and the 7 to Javits, isn’t it time we built a beltway or two? The advantages to building a couple of beltways are too numerous to mention, both for the commuter, and for the MTA, and with the subway arteries as clogged as they are, a bypass operation would be in order.
He can make all the promises he wants. In the state legislature, he promised to increase debts and retroactively enrich pensions, setting the priorities for public funding for the next two decades.
He’s trying to tell us he would give us things he has already made an irrevocable decision to take away. Next he’ll promise tax cuts and 12 kids in a class.
Why doesn’t he promise that the City will pay a fair share to the MTA to help subsidize the MTA for all the extra school bus service it provides saving the DOE tons of money that it doesn’t have to shell out to provide that service instead? That would be a promise that he could keep as mayor.
[…] Manhattan Borough President and 2013 mayoral hopeful issued his call for a commuter tax as part of a comprehensive overhaul of MTA financing earlier this week, suburban interests from […]