Second Ave. Sagas

Category: MTA Economics

  • Many answers, but no real solutions, for MTA woes

    As the MTA struggles with the political fallout of the rampant service cuts the authority may need to implement to cover its budget, officials everywhere are looking for answers. We know that some advocates are pushing a move to cover the operating gap with capital funds — a misguided idea at best — but other officials are searching for ways to provide for a steadier stream of transit funding and not just a one-time fix. The answers are out there, but are any of these proposals a real solution?

    Right now, the MTA can look to three sources of potential revenue: the city, the state and the federal government. So far, Mayor Bloomberg has been quieter than most in this brouhaha. He campaigned on transit but has done nothing to support, let alone reform, the MTA since winning reelection next month. He hasn’t pledged to cover student transit costs; he hasn’t tried to renew his calls for congestion pricing or East River Bridge tolls; he hasn’t looked at ways to further fund the MTA. For now, at least, City Hall is a non-starter.

    Although the mayor’s silence is disappointing, the words spewing forth from the City Council are downright alarming. As Chris O’Leary detailed at On Transport, the City Council doesn’t have a clue about how the MTA works. After cutting funding for years, City Council members criticized the MTA for a legally required vote this week and claimed that a meeting in the works for months “ambushed” the city. Most of the Council members seem to support the quick fix of moving capital funds.

    Up in Albany, things are simply a mess. Sen. Pedro Espada wants the MTA to sell its real estate holdings. In a letter to Jay Walder, he wrote, “The MTA must prioritize fiscally prudent lease and sale of assets before deciding to leave children, seniors and hard-working citizens stranded without a safe, reliable and affordable means to get to and from work, school, grocery shopping and doctor’s appointments.” Selling assets in a down real estate market is a great way to minimize potential gains. I say pass.

    Meanwhile, Sen. Brian X Foley is so confident of the MTA’s fiscal state that he is already proposing to roll back the payroll tax. Because the tax provided the MTA less than expected, Foley wants to lower than tax by 68 percent in Suffolk County and 34 percent in Nassau County. Do I really need to tell you how dumb of an idea this is right now? Foley would leave the MTA with even less money than it current takes in.

    Sheldon Silver is still a hope, but he hasn’t endorsed tolls or congestion pricing yet. His district stands to lose the most from these service cuts, and I’ll look at him more in depth later today.

    For his part, Gov. Paterson, while not proposing any new ideas, seems to recognize the MTA’s limited options. Speaking yesterday with WOR’s John Gambling, Paterson questioned how much the MTA could really save by eliminating jobs and overtime. He echoed Jay Walder’s call to “take the place apart” and noted, in so many words, that reinstating the commuter tax could solve many of the agency’s financial woes. For now, that idea remains the Holy Grail of funding and a political non-starter. I wonder though if Walder and Paterson could succeed in overhauling the bureaucracy of the MTA. It would be a tall undertaking but a vital key to reforming transit in New York.

    In the end, for a temporary fix at least, the MTA might be able to turn to the feds. Speaking on New York 1 earlier this week, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood expressed the Obama Administration’s support for transit’s future in New York. “It is a priority for President Obama and those of us at the DOT to make sure that cities have good mass transportation,” he said. “We’re willing to work with the state of New York, with the governor with the mayor and others in the legislatures to make sure that New York has a first rate transit system and a transportation system.”

    LaHood’s comments suggest to me that the President and LaHood would prefer to see their money go toward expanding mass transit’s reach in New York and not just keeping a struggling authority afloat for a few more months. But if push comes to shove, the feds, with their deeper pockets, just might be, for now, the MTA’s best hope.

  • Walder eyes overtime, jobs as ways to save

    One of the strangest realities about the looming MTA financial crisis relates to wages. Non-union employees at the MTA — including everyone in a management position — is currently slated for a 10 percent wage reduction while all union members are going to enjoy three straight years of raises. Chew on that one as the MTA prepares to cut its student MetroCard program.

    Jay Walder, the authority’s CEO and Chairman, as well as the MTA Board representatives are well aware of this discrepancy between the MTA’s economic reality and the new labor contract. Their hands, for now, are mostly tied, but Walder is going to examine carefully the MTA’s payroll as he looks to avert potentially disastrous service cuts.

    According to The Post, Walder is going after overtime. Currently, the MTA spends more than $500 million a year on overtime, and Walder sees this, rightfully so, as wasteful spending. “We need to take the place apart,” he said, referring to the need to change the culture at the MTA from management on down to the rank-and-file. He expects to layoff approximately 700 employees, and rampant overtime will be curtailed.

    Still, other Board members took a more aggressive tone yesterday. Tom Namako reports on one:

    Board member Nancy Shevell set her sights on the transit union, saying this year’s fare hikes will end up funding TWU Local 100’s “unrealistic” 11 percent raises over the next three years. “Where did the fare increase go? Where did that money go?” she said. “So much of it is going to our union members and the unrealistic work rules and unrealistic increases they’ve received.

    “It is really unfair that one large group is not going to be affected by the economic downturn and another large group — for example, our youth and our disabled and working people — are having to pay the price,” she said.

    In response, John Samuelsen did what he seems to do best: He defended his union raises at the worst time possible. “It’s easy to talk about taking a pay cut when you’re making a few hundred thousand a year,” he said of the MTA’s looming non-union paycut. I wonder if Samuelsen is losing the war by winning this battle though. Now isn’t the time to be too vocal in support of a pay raise.

    In the end, though, the union raises fall at the feet of the MTA as much as they do the arbitrators who sided with the TWU. Norman Brown, a non-voting Board member who serves the MTA as one of labor’s representatives, chided the former MTA leaders — Lee Sander and Dale Hemmerdinger — for punting on the labor negotiations. He urged the MTA to keep negotiations in the future in-house and avoid arbitration. The union is willing to work with MTA leadership to reach solutions acceptable to both sides, and by involving outside parties, Brown argued, the MTA runs the risk of drawing arbitrators who are not familiar with the way the MTA’s finances work or the way the transit system is run.

    Brown, of course, is right. In the end, the arbitrators sided with the TWU in an all-or-nothing hearing because that’s what the city’s other unions have received lately. Never mind that the MTA is a state authority or that it financial ability to pay is not tied directly to tax rates as the city’s is. The arbitration was the death knell here.

    Now, though, it’s time for the two sides to work together to solve their differences. The MTA can’t afford increasing costs, and the union members can’t afford to see their employer, the people who sign the checks, stumble toward bankruptcy. Something, from both sides, has to give.

  • Against the use of capital funds to cover the gap

    At yesterday’s MTA Board meeting, two sides to an important policy battled emerged. On the one hand were those who supported the so-called Gene Russianoff plan, a call to shift 10 percent of the MTA’s available federal stimulus funds from its capital budget to cover its operating gap. On the other side were those who lived through New York City in the 1970s and experienced first-hand what capital neglect meant to the city’s subway system and what it led to.

    Doreen Frasca, a 2008 Paterson appointee, spoke out in favor of shifting the funds. She urged the agency to shift its pay-as-you-go funds to cover its operating gap and wanted to make the move to transfer nearly $90 million in stimulus funds, the maximum allowed by the feds, to the MTA’s operating balance sheet as well. “I will vociferously support transferring 10 percent of that money” to cover the gap,” she said.

    Others spoke out against the idea. “I have great difficulty in moving capital money to operating,” Mitchell Pally, the Suffolk County representative, said. “That’s the problem we had in the 70s when we did that and it took us a very very long time to change the negative consequences of that.”

    Norman Brown, one of the labor reps from the Metro-North Railroad Coalition, agreed. “The fear is that if capital is flexed to operating, that if federal funds are flexed to operating then the state and the city government will not be forthcoming with the funds they were previously forthcoming with,” he said. In fact, he continued, the state’s shifting of capital debts to the operating ledger is exactly why the MTA is saddled with excruciatingly large debts due to come due in a few years. To do the same in reverse would accomplish nothing.

    Despite this burgeoning ideological policy debate, these comments only scratch the surface of the why of it all. On Tuesday, the Regional Plan Association released a statement that explained the policies behind its opposition to the funding shift.

    First, the RPA says, there are two specific problems with “bleeding particular sources of capital dollars.” The pay-as-you-go fund allows the MTA to both keep the capital plan moving into the new year before the agency’s next five-year plan gets approved, and the capital budget faces a budget gap of 9.9 billion. To take money from capital today would drastically harm transit’s tomorrow.

    The release continues:

    2. Capital spending is good for long term economic recovery, which the MTA desperately needs given tax revenues are tied to the economic health of the region. Also, we’re in this operating mess because of past lack of investment. Moving these dollars to operating would undercut the system’s reliability and safety and jeopardize the progress that has been made since 1980 in restoring the system to a state of good repair. And by deferring required maintenance, it would actually increase future costs to sustain the system, requiring even larger investments – and putting more pressure on the fare – in the future. Similarly, halting or deferring projects like East Side Access or the Second Avenue Subway would undercut future economic growth and require returning federal funds that have already been committed.

    3. The MTA’s riders and taxpayers are already paying a heavy price for past financing practices brought on by underinvestment (lack of capital spending). As a result of the disastrous system of “borrow now, pay-during-the-next-person’s-term-of-office” used to finance capital programs in the late 1990s and the first half of the current decade, starting in 2012, almost one in five dollars of the MTA’s operating budget is expected to be devoted to paying debt service. Cutting capital expenditures is the same as cutting service, just in the future rather than the present.

    It’s important to underscore the interconnectedness of the future with the capital budget. It’s vital to recognize that the capital budget is a separate beast so that the MTA can continue to modernize and grow its capacity through a fund more secure than the operating budget. It’s also important to highlight how the MTA would actually have to return federal funds and how thousands of workers in New York’s fragile construction economy would lose jobs if the capital budget were to dry up. That is an immediate future scary to contemplate.

    In the end, the MTA will have to escape from this capital mess by the best means on hand. It could raise fares; it could cut services; it could shift funds; it could ask Albany to institute real, permanent, reliable gap-closing measures such as congestion pricing or East River Bridge tolls. Robbing from the capital future — or even from the capital present — is no way to cover an operating debt. The two budgets are separate for good reasons gleaned from recent history and should stay that way, financial crisis or not.

  • Non-union employees to face 10 percent pay cut

    As the MTA looks to seal an unexpected $343 million gap in its budget, we know that last year’s Doomsday cuts proposal is back on the table. Today, Sewell Chan of The Times reports that the MTA’s non-union employees will take a pay cut as part of the gap-closing measures. The authority’s 6000 non-workers workers will see their salaries slashed by 10 percent across the board. The agency says these pay cuts could last indefinitely and will either take the form of mandatory furloughs or an indefinite payroll lag.

    For the MTA, this announcement comes at a time of labor unrest as its unionized workers fight for a four-percent raise. Although these pay cuts are a necessary component of any gap-closing proposal, it certainly helps the MTA’s arbitration appeal if the authority can point to problems covering payroll. TWU officials have already warned against any efforts to cut unionized workers’ salaries.

    In the end, Chan also confirms that the service cuts but no fare hikes will remain on the table, and I have to question the wisdom of that decision. With these payroll cuts — and perhaps some management trimming — the MTA will still face a gap of $250 million. A fare hike of around 5 percent across the board will cover that, and for me, at least, that’s a more palatable solution than service cuts. Unfortunately, the MTA promised not to raise fares in 2010, and the state legislature appears more than willing to hold the authority to its word.

  • Avoiding service cuts through stimulus funds or tolls

    RecoveryLogo As the MTA financial staff is hard at work readying its budget proposal for Monday’s Finance Committee meeting, transit advocates are trying to come to terms with the latest MTA budget deficit. Although politicians are wrongly blaming the MTA, this latest gap is due to problems in Albany, problems the MTA shouldn’t have been facing if more sensible funding solutions had been implemented in the first place.

    To that end, two groups — the Straphangers Campaign and Streetsblog — have proposed two different mechanisms for covering the gap. The Straphangers’ suggestion is a stop-gap aimed at filling this year’s hole while the Streetsblog plan is one with which we are familiar. There’s would be a more long-term solution.

    First, the Straphangers plan: In an e-mail yesterday to the MTA Board members, Gene Russianoff expressed his concerns about the looming threat of service cuts. Citing “the harm to riders of service cuts in an already overcrowded system; the new blow to the MTA’s credibility if the agency institutes cuts that the riding public (paying a higher fare since June) were told would not happen; and cuts undermining MTA Chairman Jay Walder’s sensible plans to improve bus service,” he urged the MTA to take some of the uncommitted stimulus money at its disposal to cover the current gap. He wrote:

    Use $91 million in federal stimulus funds for service in 2010. The money is there. “The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) received $915 million in stimulus funds. Contracts have been signed for work covering 89 percent of the total,” according to a December 2009 report issued by Gov. Paterson. Federal law permits 10% of the stimulus funds to be spent on operations. Transit systems like the one in St. Louis pressed for this option to maintain service and jobs.

    Reprogram for service $50 million in 2010 in “pay-as-you-go” funds. The MTA is planning to spend $50 million in 2010 in operating funds on capital projects. Pay-as-you-go for capital needs is a good goal, but it should not come at the expense of service cuts.

    These two sources total $141 million and would be enough to cover all the subway, bus and commuter cuts originally proposed by the MTA earlier this year.

    As short-term solutions go, it’s hard to disagree with Russianoff’s plan. I hate to see money used to maintain and expand the system be taken away from that end, but the MTA is legally allowed to use stimulus funds for operating deficits. Right now, avoiding service cuts should be a paramount concern.

    For a long-term fix, Streetsblog’s John Kaehny turned his attention to East River Bridge tolls. His warnings are dire:

    The net result is that without a new source of funding, the MTA will soon run out of money and options. Let’s take it for granted the MTA will be forced by Albany to engage in desperate new financial sleight-of-hand and “seed corn eating” (capital money going to operating expenses, borrowing against future fare hikes). Let’s further assume the MTA will have to accelerate the fare hikes planned for 2011. If this comes to pass, in about a year the MTA will be out of options and have to cut service so harshly that even Albany will be forced to care.

    It will be a political slug fest worth watching. How deep will service have to be cut before the East and Harlem River bridges are tolled? Are tolls dead, or are they actually inevitable?

    I’ve long supported tolling the bridges as the most equitable and environmentally friendly approach to MTA funding. The tolls would provide the agency with a dedicated source of revenue and would cut down on driving through areas choked with cars and pollution. I fear the answer to Kaehny’s question. Only when the MTA is on the brink of a financial disaster would New York’s politicians begin to debate bridge tolls. Then, it might be too late to truly save the system.

  • Kruger blames the MTA for Albany’s mistake

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    Top: A view of the IRT Flushing Line in Queens around the time service began in the 1920s. Bottom: The same view only 20 years later.

    Pop quiz: What mode of transportation moved New York City away from a lower Manhattan tenement-based city into the current sprawling metropolis it is today?

    A. Our feet. People just loved to walk and discovered that Flushing isn’t actually that far from Manhattan.
    B. Automobiles.
    C. Public transportation.

    Considering the picture atop this pot, is it really a surprise that the answer is C? Although the automobile played a role in driving people away from the overcrowded conditions of Lower Manhattan, the subway — and the five-cent fare — made a dispersal of people to points north and east possible. Without the subway, New York’s eight million residents wouldn’t be able to live in Canarsie and work near Canal St. They wouldn’t commute from Forest Hills to the Financial District or from Midwood to Midtown.

    This reality is lost on many in New York and not least upon our city’s elected representatives and politicians who control the purse strings. As the MTA has come to grips this week with a state calculation error of $200 million that will leave a hole in the MTA’s budget, politicians have tried to avoid taking any responsibility whatsoever for this Albany-inspired problem. Take, for example, Brooklyn’s own Carl Kruger.

    His statement, in part blames the MTA for Albany’s inability to calculate revenue streams:

    Our ability to budget is only as good as our ability to forecast. We were dependent upon data supplied by the Office of Management and Budget with the understanding that it was verified by the MTA’s own fiscal staff.

    Furthermore, our projections were based on the fiscal year rather than the calendar year. This critical point should have been taken into account when the MTA fiscal staff developed its parameters.

    It is my shared belief that the payroll tax will ‘kick in’ when the dust settles and smaller employers start making their mandatory contributions. It may not happen in the calendar year, but it will happen in the fiscal year. Since our cuts were calculated on a pro rata basis for the fiscal year and not the calendar year, for the MTA to charge its books with a cut of $143 million in the calendar year obviously has a more severe impact than spreading it out over the fiscal year.

    Kruger goes on to warn the MTA against creating “an atmosphere of confusion or a needless sense of unrest over what appears to be self-adjusting bookkeeping issues.” I’m not quite sure with what he can threaten the agency though; Albany can’t take away more money.

    Anyway, the idea that this is somehow the MTA’s fault due to a calendar year/fiscal year mix-up is absurd. The state legislature has long been aware that the MTA’s fiscal year is a calendar year, and when they passed the bailout package earlier this year, they do so with an eye toward filling a smaller calendar year gap this year and a larger 12-month gap next year. Kruger’s so-called “share belief” that the money will “kick in” next year is nothing but a pipedream by a politician who isn’t fulfilling his duties as a member of the State Senate. (Or perhaps he just fits it with that august body all too well.)

    Kruger’s statement is barely news-worthy anymore. We know Albany doesn’t understand how to govern, and we know politicians don’t understand the importance of mass transit in New York’s economy. When they wake up to that reality, it will be too late.

  • Bloomberg: It’s like taking candy from a baby

    During a Q-and-A with reporters yesterday, Michael Bloomberg, who has overseen reductions in city contributions to the MTA during his eight years as mayor, got to talking about the latest MTA financial crisis. His comments showed that he understands the source of the MTA’s pain but doesn’t know what to do about it. “I don’t know why anybody is surprised at what is happening to the MTA,” he said. “It’s a piggy bank that keeps getting raided.”

    Bloomberg also understands the overall economic effect the transportation network has on our a region, a topic I explored yesterday. “It’s going to make it very difficult for people who rely on mass transit,” the mayor said. “That hurts our overall economy.” So what, Mr. Mayor, will you do about it? Will you lobby Albany for some accountability? Will you find some way to deliver on congestion pricing? Will you renew a push for East River Bridge tolls? Right now, Bloomberg is all talk and no action.

    In the end, the agency is moving ahead with its budget preparations, an authority spokesman said that the MTA will not raid its capital budget. It could try to shift some capital funds to its operating costs or use up to 10 percent of the federal stimulus funds for the same purpose. Maintenance and construction, though, are too integral to the future of the city to be neglected. “We are not using rebuilding funds,” MTA spokesman Jeremy Soffin said to the Daily News. “We can’t afford to compromise our maintenance and rebuilding program.”

  • Moving the region’s economy but driven into the ground

    Early yesterday evening, news broke of a state error concerning revenue generated from the payroll tax that was supposed to bailout the MTA. Although up until last week, the state had been maintaining its initial figures, collection totals were $200 million off pace, and with a state appropriations cutback of $143 million going into effect, the MTA will end the year with $343 million less than expected.

    Even though the state accountants are to blame for this large gap, for many New Yorkers, it will just be another arrow in the quiver of barbs to launch at the MTA. The agency, they say, cannot be trusted with any money because it all just disappears. Here, that’s not true, and as an agency spokesman said to me, Monday’s revelations represented “significant unraveling of the rescue package passed by the Legislature in the spring.” Twenty percent of the money promised by the state to the MTA just simply is not there.

    The MTA and the state will now have to battle it out for funds, and the MTA will probably end up losing. Although they say they will do everything within their powers to avoid an unplanned 2010 fare hike, they might have to cut services across the board and will have to engage in serious internal belt-tightenin”

    On the flip side, the MTA will be asked to do more. The agency will be asked to shuttle more people around New York City while relying on infrastructure that is badly in need of some major capital investments. The agency will be asked to provide more service to underserved areas, and more reliable and frequent service to those transit-rich neighborhoods. More, more, more is squaring off against less, less, less.

    It is undeniable that the MTA is the engine that drives much of New York’s economy. The city is entirely dependent upon the subways for its transportation needs. Over seven million New Yorkers ride the subways each week day while Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road each carry approximately 300,000. The MTA’s bridges and tunnels see just 800,000 toll trips per day. It is clear that the city’s road network and geographical reach make the subway the prime people mover in this urban area.

    Outside of the city, the MTA’s economic reach extends throughout the state. As the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA noted during its statement last week on the MTA’s capital plan, “more than 60 municipalities through out the state of New York benefit from the MTA’s Capital Program through subcontractors for subway, bus and rail cars.” The 2005-2009 capital plan, they say, leveraged around $42.1 billion in economic activity from an original investment of $24 billion. The state, though, will not pledge to cover a $10 billion capital gap just as they can’t put together a proper bailout package to fund the MTA’s operations budget gap.

    Still, forces conspire against a financially strapped MTA. As the agency’s fiscal picture heads further south, a group angling for TWU leadership posts is threatening “direct action” if the authority does not honor the arbitration award. The union leaders are simply upholding their duties to protect and defend their workers, but it is but another demand on money the MTA does not have. Somehow, the MTA is expected to find $300 million more every year for employee salary and benefits raises.

    In the end, where will a looming financial Armageddon take us? The MTA is too important to fail, and it’s too important to roll back services. Maybe we’ll have skyrocketing fares, but more likely, we’ll have sensible funding mechanisms such as congestion pricing and East River Bridge tolls. For now, though, the MTA continually has to make do with less and less from the state while providing more and more for its workers and the millions of customers each day who rely on it for basic transportation needs. Something has to give.

  • After $200M state error, a $343M MTA shortfall

    The Metropolitan Transportation Authority will end 2009 where it begin: amidst a financial crisis that could lead to service cuts — but hopefully no fare hikes — in 2010.

    In an e-mail to the MTA Board members this afternoon, MTA CFO Gary Dellaverson said that, in addition to the $143 million in state appropriations cuts, the MTA is now facing the reality of a shortfall in the payroll tax collections that will reach approximately $200 million. In total, the MTA’s 2009 revenue totals will miss expectations by $343 million, and although the agency can roll this cuts over into 2010, the MTA faces, in the words of Dellaverson, some “very difficult choices” as it prepares its balanced budget for next year.

    “Receipts from the recently enacted mobility tax now appear to be under-running projections by about $200 million for this calendar year,” Dellaverson said. “This is a shocking development both because of the magnitude of the under-run (about 20%) and the late date of its discovery. As recently as last week, the State was continuing to advise us of their comfort with the forecast. We do not yet know what is causing these disappointing results. While compliance and timing may be a part of the answer, there is a substantial disconnect from the current performance of other similar tax sources.”

    MTA officials were prepared for the original $143 million in state cuts, but this new shortfall caught them by surprise. “It’s the extra $200 million that’s really painful,” MTA spokesperson Jeremy Soffin said.

    Although the MTA has long borne the brunt of a public skeptical of its ability to manage its own finances, officials at the agency and outside transit watchdogs stressed the state’s role in this new found gap. Jeremy Soffin called it, a “significant unraveling of the rescue package passed by the Legislature in the spring.”

    Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign was more pointed in his ire toward Albany. “The Campaign,” he said in a statement, “calls on Governor Paterson to investigate whether New York State Department of Taxation and Finance has adequately administered and enforced the new payroll tax and on the MTA to redouble its efforts to find new administrative savings and financial actions that will maintain current fare and service levels in 2010. In 2010, both the governor’s office and the State Legislature are up for election. Hundreds of thousands of riders will not take kindly to broken promises on decent and affordable transit.”

    While we await a state response to this Albany accounting error, the MTA is springing into action. The agency’s fiscal year ends at the end of the calendar year, and the Board is under a legal obligation to approve a balanced budget before the end of the month. Furthermore, the agency has committed to avoid a fare hike in 2010 but has plans to raise fares in 2011 and 2013. “It remains our intentions to stick with that understanding on the fare schedule,” Soffin said.

    So the agency will look to roll this budget problem into 2010, and as Dellaverson turns his gaze internally, agency spokespeople could not say how the MTA would cover a gap. Service cuts remain on the table, and Jay Walder, the new CEO and Chairman, will continue his initiative to “overhaul with how the MTA does business.”

    Furthermore, the MTA is now putting a $350 million bond issuance on hold until the agency board has a chance to review the budget.

    All in all, this news caps a turbulent fiscal year for the MTA, and it is news we all could have done without. The agency has promised to “be as transparent as possible about where we were, what caused the situation and what we’re trying to do,” and Dellaverson will have an updated budget proposal when the Board’s Finance Committee meets next Monday.

    Still as the authority looks for guaranteed revenue sources, as state calculations continue to fail, the East River Bridges remain free, and congestion pricing is but a glimmer in the eyes of transit advocates. As 2009 nears its end, this story is far from over.

  • So who hates the new Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Mobility Tax?

    Why, everyone! The Mid-Hudson News says Dutchess County lawmakers want to repeal the tax, and the Times Herald-Record notes how Orange County business owners ripped into MTA CEO and Chair Jay Walder over the financial impact of the tax. The Poughkeepsie Journal, meanwhile, urges the state to overturn the tax because it overburdens businesses outside of the city who don’t enjoy nearly the same levels of public transit as the city does. At the same time, the paper urges the city to adopt either congestion pricing or East River Bridge tolls as more equitable funding routes.

    In a nutshell, these folks outside of the city are both right and wrong. Businesses and counties outside of the city benefit from having a fully-funded MTA and would probably lose more than they give up in taxes if the MTA’s transportation network failed. But at the same time, congestion pricing and East River Bridge tolls are both more equitable and better for the environment than a payroll tax. Those ideas will one day be implemented, and as more representatives out of the city witness the pains of the payroll tax, they can begin to put pressure on the state’s legislative leaders to adopt congestion pricing in the city.