Asides

There’s no job security quite like working for the MTA. Take, for instance, this tale from today’s Daily News. Edward Meehan, an express bus driver on Staten Island who lives in New Jersey, just earned himself his 15th suspension for violating MTA rules. This time, the authority placed on leave without pay when he used his express bus as, in the words of Pete Donohue and Kerry Wills, “as a private lounge to meet a lady friend while on duty.” His previous suspensions were for speeding, running red lights and various other traffic infractions.

Meehan claims nothing illicit happened in the bus. He says he’s happily married and was just meeting his friend to talk. But he isn’t denying that he said his X22 was delayed an hour because of traffic. He also filed for overtime pay for the time he spent sitting in his bus with his lady friend. “He claims they were just talking,” one source said. “He said he was going through a hard time and she’s a friend.” According to a report by Barry Kluger, the MTA Inspector General, Meehan met with this woman in his bus at least three times in April.

The MTA will now try to fire Meehan, but they have gone down this road before. In 2008, after the MTA moved to fire him for “gross negligence” following numerous speeding incidents, an arbitrator reduced the penalty to 25 days without pay. That’s a slap on the wrists, and it certainly makes me think that there’s no job security quite like having a gig with the authority.

For years, the MTA has struggled with its escalators. At stations that are deep underground, the moving staircases — which operate for 24 hours and take quite a beating — break regularly, and when they do, repairs are often slow to come. Today, we arrive at 181st St. where one of the the lengthy escalators has been broken since February. Then earlier this week, the second escalator broke, and suddenly straphangers had to hike up and down the staircases.

For residents of the area, broken escalators in Washington Heights are, in fact, the norm. NY1 reports that the MTA says these escalators work less than half of the time. “I moved to this neighborhood in 2006, and it’s been going on since,” one subway rider said. The first escalator was repaired fairly quickly, but the one out since February remains entombed in a wooden box.

The MTA offered up an array of excuses. As Tina Redwine reports, “MTA officials said the problem with the 181st Street escalator is that workers needed to disassemble heavy equipment, one piece weighing up to 2500 pounds, in order to send the escalator out for repair. Then it has to be reinstalled and tested.” It will be another 10 weeks at least, and the authority said that this timeline is “not good enough.” Still, as we’ve seen at Lexington at 53rd St. and countless stations around the system, broken escalators are the norm far more often than they should be.

Did you hear the one about the chain-link fence company submitting bogus work claims? That’s the focus of Pete Donohue’s column today, and the story is an odd one. Apparently, the MTA contracted with Long Island-based the American Chain Link & Construction company in the “early 2000s” to provide fencing around various transit properties. The company submitted invoice “devoid of any backup documentation to explain what expenses the company had incurred for such things as materials, equipment rentals and labor, according to the inspector general’s office” and got paid anyway.

At some point, the MTA Inspector General got wind of the fraud and began investigating. Only 14 of 100 invoices had enough detail to allow the IG to examine the work, and all but one of those were deemed fraudulent. Suffolk County authorities claim the lack of documentation meant they could pinpoint only $31,000 in fraudulent charges while the case settled for a guilty plea and the forfeiture of $60,000 the MTA still owes American. Donohue even mentions that “bus managers in the same transit agency, meanwhile, routinely challenged American’s bills and paid less than what the company initially sought.” What a strange story.