Benjamin Kabak

In an effort to close an unexpected budget gap of nearly $400 million, the MTA this morning unveiled a plan to cut services across the city. While two subway lines and a few bus routes will be eliminated and service on others severely reduced, the city’s students and disabled are the hardest hit in the latest round of cuts.

As the Gary Dellaverson, MTA CFO, explained this morning, this new budget gap developed early last week when payroll tax totals came in at around $200 million below expectations. The state has since revised that number upward to $100 million below expectations, but that $100 million combined with lower expectations for 2010, a late-year cut of $143 million in appropriations to the MTA and a labor arbitration ruling that will add $91 million to the MTA’s bottom line next year has led to a deficit of $383 million. Since the agency has promised to avoid a fare hike until 2011, cuts are on the table.

“To present a balanced budget despite losing hundreds of millions of dollars in State funding over the past two weeks requires measures that are painful to the MTA, our employees and our customers,” Dellaverson said to the MTA’s finance committee. “Given the ongoing downturn in the broader economy and the resultant economic crisis facing the State, we have worked to balance the budget while maintaining our commitment to riders not to increase fares in 2010.”

And the cuts are severe. In addition to reviving the Doomsday service cuts, the MTA will rollback the student discount for MetroCards and will pare down services to the disabled until they meet the bare federal minimums under the Americans with Disabilities Act. At a time when the agency has few choices, it’s certainly taking the ones bound to attract the most political attention. The financial summary and board presentation, available here and here, respectively, as PDFs, tell a tale of reduced service across the board.

The MTA plans to:

• Discontinue W and Z subway routes; terminate G subway route at Court Street;
• Increase subway headways on weekends and early mornings; increase off-peak subway load guidelines;
• Adjust express bus service to reflect demand and eliminate low performing weekend express bus service;
• Discontinue and restructure local bus service on low-performing routes;
• Eliminate Rockaway-resident Cross Bay toll rebate program;
• Reduce car consists and increase load standards; and
• Reduce service, on Commuter Railroads.

Although everyone will suffer from reduced service, more crowded midday trains and fewer overall options, students and disabled passengers will see a drastic change of transportation quality. As I noted this morning, the MTA seemed ready to axe student MetroCards, and that plan is now official. With Gov. David Paterson starting the day by saying that his hands were tied and the Daily News reporting that state contributions to student transit costs were down to just $6 million, the MTA could no longer afford to fork over nearly $170 million in voluntary subsidies for student travel.

Under the new plan, the MTA will move to a half-price discount for students in September 2010 and phase out the Student MetroCard program entirely in September 2011. By delaying the elimination of these free rides, the MTA is giving Albany ample time to find money for the program. The MTA should not be expected to foot the bill for a program the city and state once promised to fund in full. “The MTA” the financial summary says, “can no longer afford to subsidize this free service and, therefore, is proposing a roll back of the discount for school transportation.”

As for paratransit service reductions, the MTA is vague on the specifics. Michael Grynbaum reports that the authority will provide paratransit service only to the nearest handicap-accessible subway station and that door-to-door service will be eliminated entirely. The agency’s documents call for cost savings of $40 million in 2010 and $80 million in 2011 through “improvements in scheduling efficiency, an increase in the use of vouchers and taxis, better coordination of feeder service with accessible fixed route service, improved eligibility screening, and the elimination of the most expensive carriers.” No matter the end result, the MTA’s services for the disabled will be simply, as I said, the bear minimum required by law.

I’ll have more on these catastrophic cuts over the next few, but I want to leave you for now again with Andrew Albert’s quote. This is a mess of Albany’s doing, and our elected representatives are trying to wash their hands of it. That injustice just cannot stand. As Albert said, “To have this situation in the most transit-dependent city in the country is a complete failure of government.”

Although the MTA will not officially unveil its plans to close a $200 million budget gap until Monday, the Daily News is reporting that the Doomsday cuts are back on the table. As I speculated on Wesdnesday, the MTA will be proposing the same sweeping service reductions the agency nearly implemented earlier this year before Albany’s half-hearted bailout came to be.

The sweeping reductions would include the deaths of the W and Z lines, the overnight shuttering of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn stations along the BMT Broadway (N/R) line and the elimination of numerous low-ridership bus lines in the city’s outer boroughs. Pete Donohue has more:

Facing a massive budget crisis, the cash-squeezed MTA is moving to implement sweeping service cuts – again – including shutting down dozens of bus routes. Two subway lines also would be wiped off the map and four stations would be shuttered overnight under the plan expected to go before a Metropolitan Transportation Authority committee on Monday. If it sounds familiar, it is. The lineup is the same roster of reductions threatened earlier this year when the MTA was lobbying for a state bailout. The cuts never happened.

But in recent weeks the MTA has been rocked by bad news. The state – struggling with its own budget mess – slashed transit funding by $143 million. And cash from state payroll taxes is coming in about $200 million short of what the state had planned for mass transit. Even with 2010 service cuts, the MTA will have to find other ways to plug the sudden budget gap, sources said.

“We’re not going to rely on anyone else to do anything for us. We’re going to rely on ourselves,” MTA board member Mitchell Pally said.

Transit watchdogs were quick to bemoan the latest news. Relying on its call to use stimulus funds to cover the budget gap, Gene Russianoff and the Straphangers Campaign came out swinging today: “For the MTA, reviving these cuts would shred their credibility. The riding public was told last May that there would be no service cuts when the legislature bailed out the MTA. Riders held up their part of the bargain with a fare hike last June, yet now they are threatened with getting substantially less while paying more. Riders have every right to be mad as hell.”

Russianoff acknowledged that the latest budget problems are a result of “actions by Governor Paterson and the state legislature.” He stressed, however, his opinion that the MTA should do anything possible to avoid cuts to service because those cuts are rarely restored lately when the financials improve. “The Straphangers Campaign,” he said, “believes the MTA has the resources to prevent the service cuts, especially if it uses available federal stimulus funds and capital funds now coming out of the operating budget.”

Meanwhile, in the Daily News article, new TWU head John Samuelsen urged the MTA to look inward. “Before the MTA takes any action that adversely affects riders or workers, they should look to cut their own wasteful spending,” Samuelsen said. Considering the public opinion of TWU workers these days, Samuelsen should be careful with his words. Most riders may not be big fans of the MTA, but they are hardly on the side of the employees either.

In the end, I want to toss the ball to another player. Michael Bloomberg campaigned heavily on a plan to fix the MTA and improve mass transit for all New Yorkers. He has been noticeably silent this week as the MTA’s financial picture has taken a huge hit. It’s time for the Mayor to step up to the plate for the MTA. He can use his political clout to gain some monetary concessions for the authority, and he can show to those who voted for him that they were not misguided in putting faith in his transit proposal. Now’s the time; next week just might be too late.