MTA officials gathered last week to announc front-door boarding and fare collection on all local and SBS buses will resume Monday, August 31. (Photo: Jessie Mislavsky / MTA NYC Transit)
My friend Marcia Herold tends bar at the Greenwich Street Tavern in Tribeca, and as with so many of New York City’s service workers, 2020 has been a tough year. Her bar was closed for much of the spring, and it has reopened only as much as any of the city’s thousands of restaurants and bars have — with outdoor service only and hours scaled back to 11 p.m. For a place that used to serve food and drinks late into the night, the Greenwich Street Tavern is just trying to survive through the pandemic.
For years, Marcia, who lives in Boerum Hill, never had to think twice about getting home. Even on nights when the bar would close late, Marcia could easily jump onto the subway and be home quickly, but these days the trip is more complicated. By the time Marcia wraps up service and she and her co-workers finish cleaning, catching that last train back to Brooklyn is no sure thing. Sometimes she’s make it; more often, she doesn’t.
A few weeks ago, she waited on the platform for a train that wasn’t going to show up, and the MTA worker keeping an eye on things never told her the train wasn’t coming. More recently, she and a co-worker split a cab back to Brooklyn after missing the last train, but her co-worker, who couldn’t right now afford the cab fare all the way back home, had to get all the way to East New York. It’s usually just a 20-minute ride on the 3 or 4 train but can take 45 minutes or longer via a bus or two.
This is the current reality for around 15,000 New Yorkers who need late-night train service to get to and from their jobs but have found passenger service shutting down as early as 12:30. And yet, as New York City struggles to return to any semblance of normalcy, there is no end in sight to the MTA’s overnight passenger shutdown. Imposed in early May under the guise of “disinfecting,” by all accounts from multiple MTA and New York State sources, the shutdown was the brainchild of Gov. Andrew Cuomo in response to multiple news stories concerning homeless New Yorkers inundating an empty subway system. Instead of attempting to address the root causes of homelessness in New York, Cuomo ordered the state agency in charge of operating the city’s subways to shut down service, foisting the problem onto the city’s streets, and promoted the idea that the subways have to shut down for cleaning.
The MTA has added a few Night Bus-like buses on some key subway routes and had been paying for a handful of taxi rides every night. But their response to decreased overnight demand has been to tell essential workers trying to get home to just take local buses. For some, that’s a three-bus, multi-hour trip. For others, the trip home is a long walk or a nightly taxi ride few can afford. Meanwhile, the trains aren’t actually stopped. They run all night, on the same sparse schedule as before, but without passengers. The MTA’s disinfecting efforts — largely sanitation theater based on what we know about transmission paths for COVID-19 — continue with or without train service, and no one at the MTA has answered the two questions I have continued to post regarding the overnight shutdown:
Which elements of the overnight disinfecting would be impossible to accomplish if passengers were permitted on the trains that are still running?
And how would that impact the overall risk of COVID-19 transmission on subways?
Each time I think the issue could be coming to a head, the Governor puts a stop to any speculation. State Senator Brad Hoylman has proposed legislation requiring the MTA to provide 24/7 subway service but only “after a declared end to the COVID-19 pandemic,” as he said in his statement. With no end in sight to the pandemic, that bill is largely meaningless right now. We’re in a state of emergency, and the governor can do whatever he wants.
When pressed on the issue earlier this week, the governor punted. The MTA has recently announced that due to low usage and a high cost amidst an existential budget crisis, the Essential Connector cab service would be suspended. The agency had reported only around 1500 riders per night and a cost of $49 a ride on average. The last night of for-hire vehicle rides will be August 30, and on August 31st, the MTA will reinstitute fare collection on local buses. Since the early days of the pandemic, local buses had been free to protect bus drivers, but the MTA cannot afford to give away rides right now. The agency has built barriers to protect drivers and is upgrading filtration systems on all of its buses to go along with the fares the agency says it must collect.
But what about that overnight subway service? The MTA can’t afford anything right now, but it can continue to afford running empty trains all night. When asked about these recent moves, the governor this week said of 24/7 service, “You’ll have to ask the MTA.” The MTA bounced it back to another state agency. When pressed by reporters, Pat Foye, increasingly annoyed with the question, said, “As we’ve said, while the pandemic continues, the 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. closure will continue. The state commissioner of health will determine the continuation of the pandemic. We’re not in the public health business. The commissioner of health will opine on the continuation of the pandemic.” While Foye tried to claim the overnight shutdown allows the MTA to be more productive, when asked, Foye could not name a single project outside of the L train work on an accelerated schedule thanks to the pandemic shutdown. It all just rings hollow as it impacts the lives of thousands.
This is, of course, a classic case of political hot potato. The MTA, under orders from the governor, shut down the overnight service but won’t say when it will restart, and the governor, who controls the MTA, wants nothing to do with the question. So we’re stuck. We’re stuck with buses that cost the same as the subway but cannot provide the same long-distance service and relatively fast travel times the subway can generally guarantee. We’re stuck watching workers like Marcia struggle to get home after their jobs each night, and we’re stuck in limbo with businesses trying to hang on while the state and city stack the decks against them. Few local politicians are speaking out, and few are fighting for the transportation needs of a New York City just trying to hang on for a few more weeks and months. The pandemic continues, and that’s all the cover the MTA and Andrew Cuomo need right now.
As New York City enters Phase 1 of its reopening, the MTA wants every transit rider to wear masks.
Bill de Blasio is taking a page out of Marie Antoinette’s playbook as New York City loosens pandemic restrictions. While international peer cities have prioritized buses and rolled out hundreds of miles of temporary bike lanes to avert bumper-to-bumper traffic while accommodating commuters who may be hesitant to ride subways in light of social distancing guidelines, the mayor has simply said to his city, “Let them drive cars.” The MTA has a plan to make travel as safe as possible and has asked for rapid deployment of 60 miles of bus lanes, but with business opening in a few hours, the mayor hasn’t used the tools available to him to prioritize transit, leading many advocates to worry about crushing traffic that grinds surface transit — and NYC’s buses — to a halt.
New York City is nearly alone among is global peers in responding to the coronavirus lockdowns. While early studies indicate that subways are not major transmission risks, health officials have spent the past few months urging people to maintain distance from each other, and cities around the world have responded by taking away space from private automobiles. Rapid deployment of bus lanes and networks of bike-only corridors have sprung up in cities from Paris (which is adding hundreds of miles of bike lanes and has removed cars from Rue de Rivoli) to London to Washington, DC, and although the mayor pledged to create an expansive open streets network, the 40 miles we have are disjointed, largely near parks and leave large swaths of New York City without open space or better travel options. They do little to create a network for travel and seem oriented instead toward the block party model, the only way the mayor seems to believe New Yorkers outside of cars use streets. Our new bike lanes consist of a handful of barrels along Flatbush Ave. that peter out a few yards south of the Prospect Park Zoo. A revolution this is not.
In a few hours, after a tragic and frustrating spring that saw New York City largely paralyzed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the city will begin the slow process of reopening. Phase 1 of the New York Forward initiative doesn’t look all that different from the past few weeks, but as curbside retail pickup is officially condoned and construction and manufacturing work across all sectors gets the green light, the city anticipates approximately 400,000 New Yorkers will head back to work. The MTA has a comprehensive plan to get everyone moving, but as the subway’s reputation has taken a hit during the pandemic, bus ridership has outpaced subway travel. Meanwhile, the city isn’t doing its part to guard against an expected uptick in driving or create incentives for people to leave their cars at home while accommodating modes of travel, such as buses and bikes, that have seen an explosion of use in recent weeks. The MTA has a plan. So why doesn’t the mayor?
The MTA’s Plan: Mask, masks, masks, more service and regular cleaning
Generally unfairly in my view, the MTA has borne the brunt of blame for the scope of New York City’s coronavirus outbreak. An early report by an MIT economist that relied upon a typical causation/correlation error blamed the subway for spreading COVID-19 within New York City, and by the time the science settled around a different answer — that simply riding transit isn’t a major transmission risk and that ubiquitous mask-wearing can mitigate a significant portion of individual risk — the reputational damage was done. People were scared off transit; the MTA opted to shut down overnight service to address the city’s failure to respond to constant complaints regarding homeless New Yorkers taking up permanent residence on the trains; and all non-essential workers heard for weeks upon weeks while sitting at home was how “dangerous” the subways were.
Since then, we’ve learned that surfaces do not present a source of transmission for the novel coronavirus, and numerous other cities — Taipei, Seoul and Hong Kong among them — have welcomed back crowds on transit without increases in COVID-19 infection rates. The MTA has studied what these cities have done, but New Yorkers collectively are loathe to look to international cities for guidance. This is New York, dammit, and it’s our way or the highway. That level of New York Exceptionalism is one of the city’s shortcomings these days, and it’s led the de Blasio administration to continue to yell at the MTA over social distancing requirements. The subways, they claim, must have six feet of space for each New Yorker, a physical impossibility that would leave the system at around eight percent total capacity and a unscientific request at that.
But the MTA, to its credit, is trying, and on Friday, the agency unveiled a 13-point plan to welcome New Yorkers back to the subways and buses we were riding in droves earlier this year. The damage to the collective psyche caused by the ongoing pandemic cannot be discounted, and the MTA wants to make riding the trains as safe and as stress-free as possible. Some people, they recognize, won’t come back to transit quickly or until we have a vaccine and others won’t need to as white collar jobs will remain remote for the foreseeable future.
Floor markings at subway stations will help riders maintain distance from each other where possible.
The 13 points are of varying degrees of seriousness and practicality. They count a data dashboard showing day-by-day ridership trends, which I’m very much looking forward to, but serve little public purpose. Most New Yorkers don’t know how to translate ridership numbers to crowd conditions, and the dashboard is not going to present granular hour-by-hour numbers. Still, the top points are key: The MTA is going to restore all subway and non-Manhattan bus service to pre-pandemic levels though trains will still not run from 1 a.m. – 5 a.m.; the agency will install hand sanitizer throughout the system and floor markings to guide riders away from each other; the cleaning initiatives will continue; and most importantly, the MTA will be aggressive in pushing for all riders to wear masks while on buses and subways.
If you want to get a sense of the down-and-dirty of the cleanliness plan, you can peruse the presentation, but overall, it’s a solid one. The real key is of course the masks, and on Sunday, the MTA self-reported 92% mask compliance among its ridership. The agency surveyed 23 different subway stations in four boroughs and counted 43,709 out of 47,599 riders wearing masks. As the agency noted in its press release, public guidance suggests that 70% mask compliance is “impactful” and “essential protection” requires a 95% threshold. “The goal is to see 100% of our customers wearing face coverings,” New York City Transit Interim President Sarah Feinberg said. “It is the single most important thing that riders can do to protect themselves, their follow commuters and our employees.”
Have I mentioned you should wear a mask on transit? Anywhere, that’s where we are with buses and subways and anything the MTA itself can control. How, you may wonder, is the city responding? Not particularly well.
A fight over space and silence on bus lanes as the mayor suggests New Yorkers “use their cars more”
For months, city residents have asked the mayor for more space outside. We need space to walk, space to run, space to bike, space for businesses to open up, space to travel, space to ride buses, space to sit and spaces to simply be outside where COVID-19 transmission risks are significantly lower than they are indoors. The mayor has responded with next to nothing. We don’t know when or how restaurants will be able to expand into outdoor space, and as I mentioned, our open streets program has been subpar. But the mayor has truly dropped the ball with regards to transit.
The issue exploded in earnest last week when private negotiations between the MTA and city spilled into public view due largely in part to the mayor’s refusal to recognize scientific reality. The MTA put forward a request that the city contribute 1 million masks to the MTA to hand out to those riders who have “forgotten” their own masks and staff stations with social distancing volunteers. The mayor called upon the MTA to do a lot of things it was already going to do (such as restore service) and then suggested the MTA limit capacity on buses and trains to ensure social distancing, called upon the agency to “skip stops if over capacity” and close stations when needed. Each of this on its own is an impractical way to run a transit system, and together, betray a lack of scientific understanding. If everyone is wearing masks, the six-feet bubble — which isn’t a magic one — can be loosened, and skipping stops creates crowd conditions on platforms without allowing people off trains at an even pace to reduce onboard crowding.
The mayor’s ideas simply lend credence to the belief the subways are unsafe, and instead of welcoming people back to transit, the mayor seems intent on scaring them away. In fact, numerous times over the past ten days, Bill de Blasio has suggested that New Yorkers, most of whom do not own cars, simply drive. “In the short term, do I believe people will use their cars more or for hire vehicles more in the next few months of transition?” the mayor asked himself at a press conference last week. “Yes, I do, and we can handle that because we’re going in phases. Obviously, there are so many fewer people moving around than usual, there’s so many fewer people going to work, we can handle that in the short term.”
This is flawed logic and a fatal position for the mayor of New York to espouse as our streets simply can’t handle much more traffic. According to Apple’s tracking, requests for driving directions have returned to the pre-COVID-19 baseline, and while those numbers are an imperfect substitute for the number of people driving, anyone out on the streets recognizes that auto traffic is up substantially in recent weeks. If more people drive to work in the coming days, the streets will grind to a halt. We likely won’t end up with carmegeddon because people won’t drive if there isn’t a benefit to it, but because we haven’t prioritized transit, we will have a system where people who can drive have more flexibility and those who rely on the bus will find commute times lengthened and travel speeds slow.
Will ridership return as fast as the MTA projects? A city commitment to bus lanes would help.
It doesn’t have to be this way, and the MTA recognizes that potential reality. The agency, however, cannot act on its own, and to that end, they requested the city fast-track 60 miles of bus lanes. If the city implements the lanes, the MTA said it will handle enforcement and speed up signal prioritization efforts. It would be a win-win for the city, and as we learned last fall and as a bus-speed increase during the depths of the recent shutdown illustrated, just getting cars out of the way does wonders for NYC bus service. Specifically, the MTA requested the following bus corridors “as quickly as possible”:
Our priority corridors for new or upgraded bus lanes include:
In the Bronx: East 149th St.; the E.L. Grant Highway; Tremont Ave.; Fordham Rd.; University Ave.
In Brooklyn: Flatbush Ave. between Ave. H and Empire Blvd.
On Staten Island: Bay St. between the St George Ferry Terminal and Canal St.; Richmond Terrace between the St George Ferry Terminal and Jersey St.
Our priority corridors for busways include:
In Manhattan: 181st St. between Broadway and Amsterdam Ave.
In Queens: Main St. between Kissena Blvd. and Northern Blvd.; Archer Ave. between 146th St. and 168th St.
In Brooklyn: Livingston St. between Court St. and Flatbush Ave.
Feinberg had more to say:
In this difficult time, it’s more important than ever that we transport customers as quickly and effectively as possible. With city streets virtually empty in the last few months, we saw average bus speeds rise and commute times drop dramatically. Now with ridership steadily growing (from ~400,000 at our lowest point to 715,000 on June 2) and car congestion returning, we must act to maintain these improvements for our essential customers.
We have seen firsthand how dedicated bus lanes can dramatically improve the customer experience. Following the establishment of the 14th Street Busway and SBS service last year, ridership increased by 14 percent and travel times improved by 24 percent. We want to emulate that success on other lines wherever possible, as soon as possible.
We are all in agreement that New York and its world-class transit system will not only survive this unprecedented worldwide pandemic, but the rebound will make us smarter, better and more efficient. Creating more dedicated bus lanes is one way to make that happen.
The mayor’s response has been next to nothing. He earlier told New Yorkers to simply “improvise” how they get to work as though he doesn’t have the ability to make commutes faster and more spacious. A mayoral spokesperson told Politico New York that the city and MTA have chatted generally. “We have discussed bus lane expansion with the MTA, and we look forward to their commitment to increased service on bus lanes the City creates to safely serve more New Yorkers,” Mitch Schwartz said. But that’s not an answer that gives anyone comfort. The mayor has had months to prepare for Monday, and he simply hasn’t picked up the ball or ran with it. While the mayor has been preoccupied lately, a competent city executive could walk and chew gum, though lately the city has been left wondering if he can even walk, let alone chew gum or do both at the same time.
Setting aside how the city should be paved in bus lanes, these pop-up lanes will help de Blasio achieve his dreams of social distancing on transit. Buses are outside, and riders can pop open those windows for ventilation. Faster buses give New Yorkers more options and make it easier to spread potential riders across modes of transit, away from crowded subway, and away from cars that will choke city streets. But instead, we’re getting nothing. New York City opens in the morning without a network of new bike lanes and without any additional busways. It’s a failure of the de Blasio administration that compounds years of mayoral transportation policy failures.
A lot has been happening this week, to say the least. And we’re getting ready for a very big moment tomorrow as Phase One of the Re-Start begins. So I want to make life a little easier for all of us: Alternate Side Parking is cancelled tomorrow Mon June 8 thru Sun June 21.
Nothing summed up this failure better tonight, and a tweet from the mayor that seemed to equate living through the last week of protests with a parking giveaway and made the mistake of assuming everyone in the city owns a car they park on the street. The ration is currently climbing, but that’s little comfort for those of us who are facing a summer of travel discontent because the mayor couldn’t be bothered to prioritize bus service during a pandemic, as so many other cities have done instead. Let them drive cars indeed.
Andy Byford celebrated New Years Eve by thanking NYC Transit employees working to get everyone home safely. (Photo: Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit)
Over the summer, as he does from time to time, Gov. Andrew Cuomo sat down with the editorial board of The New York Post, and the conversation turned to the MTA. At the time, the Transformation Plan had recently been unveiled, and the governor had turned his attention to the signal system and complaints that the MTA had been addressing regarding slower train speeds. It was one of those moments when transit observers and advocates knew that the governor was stepping into a field Andy Byford had been mining, to great success, and concerns grew over fears that Cuomo and Byford would butt heads over a sensitive and important part of the MTA’s long road to recovery.
Over the weekend, Post reporter Nolan Hicks shared pieces of the transcript from that meeting, and it is a prime example of the relationship that had developed after nearly 20 months before Byford and Cuomo. The governor attempts to minimize Byford’s role in fixing the subways while promoting the Subway Action Plan and then he turns his attention to signal timers. The governor claimed that the union brought concerns with signal timers and the steep penalties for tripping red signals to him, and after months of a very public effort by Byford and his team to fix exactly these faulty signals and recalibrate timers, he was the one to fix the problem. Said Cuomo:
I met with the union, and I said, ‘How do we fix this issue where the trains are slower?’ And what we agreed to with the union is we would bring in an outside consultant, the unions would get on a train, the designers would get on a train, everyone would work together, come up with speed limits, fix the signals to calibrate to those new speed limits and the union would be comfortable with the speed limits, comfortable that the signals were actually calibrated. So if it said 20, it actually happened at 20 and that was the resolution.
If that sounds familiar, well, that’s because it is nearly exactly what Andy Byford’s speed unit and the Save Safe Seconds campaign was already doing, as Aaron Gordon subsequently pointed out, except, as Gordon said, “Cuomo wants to add an expensive consultant for reasons.” In a way, Cuomo already had his consultant in Byford. After all, that’s why the governor imported Andy from Toronto, but Cuomo and Byford could not co-exist. And the governor wanted to do things his way.
I chose to highlight this part of The Post’s transcript because the signals are reportedly one of the key issues that pushed Byford to resign for good this time. Even though the legislatively-mandated signals report, essentially demanded by Cuomo as part of the congestion pricing push, landed with a thud late in the day on New Year’s Eve, Cuomo recently sidelined Byford and his team from the discussions on recalibrating signals, and that was one of many last straws for New York City’s most prominent Plymouth Argyle FC fan. Now, Byford is out, and much to the chagrin of transit advocates around the city, Pete Tomlin, Byford’s signals man, is going with him.
The turf war over signals was but one issue among many that led Byford to leave, and I believe it’s accurate to consider him pushed out. After all, if your boss were to take your job and remove all of your responsibilities from it while indicating how unhappy he was with your public profile, how would you respond? And that’s exactly what happened with the MTA’s transformation effort, as Byford wrote in his resignation letter:
“The Alix Partners MTA Transformation plan called for the centralization of projects and an expanded HQ, leaving Agency Presidents to focus solely on the day-to-day of running service. I have built an excellent team and there are many capable individuals in Transit and others within the MTA family, who could perform this important, but reduced, service delivery role.”
Transformation was a clear-cut demotion, to a position beneath the stature and skills of Andy Byford, and he simply wasn’t going to take it any longer. Many at the MTA has said to me that the transformation plan seemed uniquely designed to minimize Byford and his role even as the New York City Transit President was enjoying success fixing the subways, and The Times also reported that Cuomo wanted Byford out. I have also been told that Byford (along with other internal MTA candidates) was not permitted to apply to the open COO role when Ronnie Hakim departed the MTA, and it was clear the writing was on the wall. The governor could not co-exist with someone of Byford’s popularity and success. As I think on this news, one week later, it all just seems so unnecessary.
I’ve struggled quite a bit with the reaction to Byford’s departure. There’s a lot to say about it, and none of it particularly optimistic. I’d like to think, as Eric Goldwyn argued for City & State, that Byford’s departure will accomplish exactly what we hope it will: that New Yorkers will wake up to the problems with a state-run transit agency and a state chief executive who won’t listen to anyone else and that local politicians will begin to support transit planning decisions rather than oppose them. But I am instead left pondering the question Nicole Gelinas asked: “Why would anyone take over after Andy Byford fled the MTA?” What qualified outsider will willing join a toxic work environment that Byford, a very competent and qualified and well-respected man within the industry, left so quickly? Who will save us from ourselves and the electoral decisions we have made? Railway Age took this one step further and unleashed a loud and angry takedown of the man who ousted Byford and his decisions.
Over the past week, as the dust from Byford’s resignation has settled, I’ve noticed the reticence with which politicians have approached this move and the rhetoric behind their statements. City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, who is very likely to run for mayor on a platform that calls for city control over its transit system, started a #BringBackByford campaign but transitioned that to a pledge to re-hire Byford if he can wrest control of the buses and subways from Albany. Countless other local pols chimed in with similar sentiments, and the mayor outright embarrassed himself all week calling on Byford to reconsider. “Why don’t we try and convince him to stay?” the mayor asked Brian Lehrer’s audience last Friday. This was a deeply surreal back-and-forth, ignorant of the larger political dynamics at play, and one that warrants a closer look:
Mayor: So, I think the State of New York should get to it to try and convince Andy Byford to stay. Look, Andy Byford has done an amazing job and he put forward a plan that really was transformative. I think his presence was a big part of why we were able, last April, to pass the first plan in memory to actually fully fund the MTA and fix it. And I think, you know, we need him, going forward, and why not try and keep him?
Lehrer: Have you launched some kind of effort to try and keep him? Have you appealed to him?
Mayor: No it’s just the first – I am talking about it now for the first time because it dawned on me this morning that when I thought about history a bit, there have been people who were getting ready to leave and changed their mind or were persuaded to come back. And I think this is a case where he’s a singular talent and he’s obviously getting a great outpouring of support from New Yorkers. Why don’t we try and convince him to stay?
Lehrer: This seemed to happen once already. He was going to resign in October and Governor Cuomo convinced him to stay, right?
Mayor: Well that seems to be the case. I wasn’t in those backroom discussions, but look, I think New Yorkers want him to say, I want him to say for sure. I think the City Council wants him to stay. My appeal to the State of New York is, get in a room with him, try and get him to stay, see what it’ll take to get them to stay. Maybe there are some changes that would be possible that would convince him he could continue on in a productive, positive manner. I don’t think guys like Andy Byford grow on trees. I think he’s a pretty special talent and he’s proven he can handle New York City. Let’s try and keep him.
Lehrer: When you say the State of New York should get in a room with them, you mean Governor Cuomo?
Mayor: Yeah, and whoever else from his team that has been working with Byford. I don’t know who are the people most active in dealing with the MTA, but unquestionably if he needs persuasion that a lot can be achieved – I mean, look again, anybody looking at the outpouring of support in the last 24 hours, he doesn’t have to wonder whether he has popular support or the support of the elected officials of New York City. We all want him to stay. So I think it comes down to the State trying to figure out what’s it going to take to get him to change his mind. I don’t think it’s an impossible equation. I’ve seen harder things done.
Besides laying bare the reality that the mayor has no idea what’s happening within the MTA, the transit system used by millions of his constituents on a daily basis, and that Brian Lehrer seems to have a far rosier view of the Byford-Cuomo dynamic that reality dictates, the mayor’s words and everyone else’s seem to willfully ignore the reality here. Andy Byford is leaving because Andrew Cuomo wanted him out of the way. Only Jumaane Williams and Council Member Antonio Reynoso directly named the governor, and everyone other politician tried to tip-toe around the powerful head of New York or pretend the problem was something else, as de Blasio did. Does this bode well for the future?
All hope shouldn’t be lost though. As a variety of transit activists told Curbed New York’s Amy Plitt, Byford laid a very strong foundation for future success, and while many within the MTA are rightly feeling discouraged right now, the agency should be able to continue to build on Byford’s successes if the right people are given the right support and the right opportunities. There is no way to sugarcoat Andy Byford’s departure. It was far too premature and represents a big blow to New York City. But the governor is allowed to make these decisions. It’s #CuomosMTA, after all, and if everyone is going to push him to take charge, that means accepted the good with the bad for as long as we can. Right now, New York City is worse off for it, but if this becomes a catalyst for increased attention on the politics of transit, perhaps Cuomo will have won a pyrrhic victory.
Ultimately, your commute won’t get worse tomorrow or next week or next month, but will it get as better as Byford had promised? That tantalizing reality now remains out of reach, and it didn’t have to be like this.
Veronica Vanterpool will be resigning from the MTA Board to join the Delaware Transit Corporation as its first Chief Innovation Officer.
When the MTA Board is at full strength, New York City enjoys four seats at the table. Although the Governor legally nominates every member to the MTA Board, he is required to defer to various stakeholders, and the mayor has the power to request four Board members. Yet, when the MTA Boards meets on Wednesday for its final meeting of 2019, it will be the last time the city has even three representatives as Veronica Vanterpool will be leaving new for Delaware. I can’t recall a time when the city had only half of its MTA Board seats filled, and at key juncture in the history of the MTA, the city’s voice is being silenced as the mayor seemingly refuses to pressure Albany to act.
In a sense, this saga began earlier this year in April when Carl Weisbrod left the MTA after only two years. The former city planning official was widely praised as a strong voice on the Board, and the mayor nominated Daniel Zarrilli to replace him. He is the mayor’s current chief climate policy adviser, as Trottenberg’s replacement, and with 15 years of experience in government and a few years in the transit, Zarrilli’s nomination seemed like a no-brainer.
A few weeks later, in June, Polly Trottenberg abruptly stepped down as well. We don’t know why Weisbrod quit, but as Streetsblogdetailed in June, the DOT Commissioner seemed fed up with Andrew Cuomo’s meddling and annoyed with the mayor’s refusal to stick up for the city in all matters MTA. The mayor nominated Bob Linn, a labor lawayer, to the MTA Board. Many thought it to be an honorary nomination as Linn has recently retired from his role as the city’s chief labor negotiator, and Zarrilli was expected to pick up the transit slack left over by Trottenberg’s departure.
But with Andrew Cuomo and the MTA, things that should be certain aren’t, and while Linn’s nomination sailed through the confirmation process, Zarrilli’s didn’t. Officially, as Mark Chiusano wrote five months ago, the hold-up concerned the background check. Despite a long career in government, Zarrilli seemed to in limbo, but of course, the state legislature, at the demand of Andrew Cuomo, found time to exempt Robert Mujica from the MTA Board residency requirements. The governor claimed they received Zarrilli’s nomination “late” without enough time to go through the background check process, but that seemed to be a load of bunk. As Dana Rubinstein reported, Zarrilli’s nomination arrived one business day after Linn’s, but what the governor wants, the governor gets. As the MTA Board debated the $51 billion five-year capital plan, the 2020 budget and the AlixPartners transformation plan, the city was down a voice during discussions that could reshape the city’s transit space for decades to come.
At any point since June, the legislature could have picked up and acted on Zarrilli’s nomination. That they have not suggests further reticence from Cuomo, and now the MTA Board will lose another forceful advocate for transit as Vanterpool reports for duty on Wednesday for the last time. Rubinstein broke the news of Vanterpool’s departure last month, noting that the board’s “most outspoken member” will be leaving, and the city will be worse off for it. Vanterpool was the only woman of color on the MTA Board, the youngest member at the time of her initial nomination, and as the one-time executive director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a long-time player in the transit space. Rachael Fauss of Reinvent Albany called Vanterpool’s departure a “huge loss” in comments to The Post.
For her part, Vanterpool has played down the impact of her departure and defending the mayor to the bitter end. In comments on Gotham Gazette’s “What’s the [Data] Point” podcast, Vanterpool discussed record city investment in the MTA Capital Plan while attempting to parry with the claim that Bill de Blasio has not been invested in transit. (The mayor, you may recall, handed the MTA a blank check without ensuring the money would go only to city concerns, as Michael Bloomberg had done with money for the 7 line extension during his time in office.)
Still, it’s hard not to view Weisbrod’s and Trottenberg’s and Vanterpool’s departures as a lessening of city authority and say over transit governance concerns. We already know, as Vanterpool has said in her various exit interviews, that the MTA Board is Cuomo’s through and through and that, at best, city voices can be squeaky wheels gaining the attention of the press and public as part of the PR war. Practically and politically, the city’s four voices can never carry the day, and going through a prolonged period of time during which only two of the city seats are filled will leave New York City transit riders underrepresented on the MTA Board.
What comes next is tough to say. In her podcast appearance, Vanterpool excused de Blasio’s hands-off approach while also speaking wistfully of a governance model that empowers the Board, and not the governor, to name the MTA leadership. She appreciated the independence the mayor affords his board members and she talked about conversations with “city leadership” generally about transit while pointedly not mentioned the mayor’s involvement. It’s an enlightening conversation, and Vanterpool had similar things to say to Streetsblog as well.
But that independence, and the mayor’s very apparent hands off approach, also means that city voices have no real transit champion speaking up from City Hall. Early last week, I’ve asked the mayor’s team if they have any names ready to replace Vanterpool and if they plan to push Albany and the Governor to act quickly on these nominations and have yet to receive a reply. Most city-watchers and transit advocates I’ve spoken with this month feel the mayor just doesn’t care enough about the MTA to invest any political capital whatsoever in fighting for quick action on the two empty board seats.
Still, the jockeying has begun. In an ideal world, Zarrilli would be approved as soon as the governor passes his nomination to the State Senate, and TransitCenter’s Colin Wright urged the mayor to appoint a disabled New Yorker to the Board. But for now, the city’s voice in its transit affairs will be further diminished following Wednesday’s meeting. While our loss is Delaware’s gain, it’s time for the mayor to step up and fight for adequate NYC representation on the MTA Board. With MTA transformation in full swing and $51 billion in capital investment in the balance, New York City can ill afford to lose its transit voice.
Contractors have filed suit over the MTA’s debarment regulation as transit advocates worry about the short-sightedness of the new rule.
During last month’s MTA Board Meetings, a routine discussion on a procurement contract took an interesting turn. The agency is currently in the process of awarding a two-year, $38.8 million contract for elevator installation and other accessibility upgrades at the 4 train’s 170th Street station and had initially identified six potential qualified bidders for the project. In the end, only two companies opted to bid on the work while three of the others declined to propose offers, citing, as the MTA put it in Board materials, “excessive risk associated with terms and conditions contained in the contract.”
On its surface, a few companies dropping out due to “excessive risk” hardly seems newsworthy, but underlying that excessive risk was the MTA’s new debarment policy. At the direction of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the New York State legislature earlier this year passed a law mandating that the MTA institute a debarment (or disqualification) policy, ostensibly to maintain better oversight over project budgets and timelines. The MTA’s current emergency policy, designed to comply with law, mandates a five-year debarment for any contractor that delivers a project at least 10 percent late or at least 10 percent over budget.
Watching contractors drop out of the bidding process like flies following the implementation of the debarment rule was anticipated and feared by MTA executives and external watchdog organizations alike, and many have accused Gov. Cuomo of once again taking a wrecking ball to a problem that required a more delicate solution. Now, a group of contractors is fighting back, as they have filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that the MTA’s debarment rule, as enacted, is unconstitutional. Neither the state nor MTA will comment on pending litigation, but so far, debarment has been a predictable mess for the MTA.
A Recent History of Debarment: an Executive Order, a hastily-enacted law, and emergency rule-making
The recent history of debarment in New York State starts with an executive order issued by Gov. Cuomo in late January. EO 192 established a requirement that all state agencies “rely on the determination made by other state entities” regarding debarment of a contractor. Thus, if any state agencies or any public authority for which Cuomo appoints the chair or CEO, as he does with the MTA, determines a contractor must be debarred, every other state entity must adhere to that decision.
With this EO, the risk to contractors doing business with any New York state entity increased exponentially, and for months, the contractor industry has been buzzing with concern over this requirement. It’s compounded by the reality that debarment in one state often leads other states to disqualify contractors, and suddenly, a contractor can find itself out of government work entirely.
Then, in April, as part of the budget negotiations, the state legislature approved a debarment requirement applicable specifically to the MTA. The new requirement, Section 1279-h of the Public Authorities Law, became law with no public hearing or comment period and obligated the MTA to create a “debarment process for contractors of the authority that prohibits such contractors from bidding on future contracts, after a debarment determination” by the MTA. The state directed the MTA to create a debarment regulation applicable “in situations involving a contractor’s failure to substantially complete the work within the time frame set forth in the contract, or in any subsequent change order, by more than ten percent of the contract term; or where a contractor’s disputed work exceeds ten percent or more of the total contract cost where claimed costs are deemed to be invalid pursuant by the contractual dispute resolution process.”
And that’s just what the MTA did. In May, the MTA issued an emergency regulation, since twice extended, that did exactly what the state legislature and governor mandated, each time without any public hearing or comment period. If any contractor faces debarment, three MTA employees will hear the complaint, and while the contractor will be able to present defenses, the debarment panel is not permitted to employ discretion in determining whether to proceed with debarment. If the grounds for debarment are met — if the contractor misses the target completion date by 10 percent or if the project is over budget by 10 percent — the MTA must debar, and the MTA can also opt to disbar the contractor’s corporate parents, affiliates and subsidiaries. It is, to put it mildly, draconian.
Concern over debarment from within and outside the MTA
Even before the contractors filed suit a few weeks ago, debarment has faced criticism from agency insiders and watchdogs who have frosty relationships with Gov. Cuomo. The Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA raised concerns about the process that lead to the debarment regulation in a letter to MTA Chair Pat Foye earlier this year. Lisa Daglian wrote:
We are particularly troubled that this emergency action was taken during the Executive Session…Contractors must be held accountable, but so too must the MTA for the decisions it makes: undertaking such a sea change in secret sends a message that the authority is in a constant state of emergency, is above the law, and can make or bend the rules as it sees fit. The public has a right to know what the MTA’s Board members are voting on, and how. They have a right to review documents in advance of public meetings, and comment on proposed rule changes. They should not have to read about votes taken in secret for “emergency orders” that will ultimately affect them for many years to come.
Since debarment was approved, I’ve spoken with senior officials within the MTA who are extremely concerned with the chilling effects of debarment. Based on the challenges of working with the MTA, an organization known for being unable to manage project scope and budget, and the now-steep penalties, these MTA officials have routinely expressed their beliefs that debarment will lead to a decrease in the number of companies willing to work with the agency and a corresponding increase in project budgets. To combat the potential risk of debarment, those contractors willing to take on the risk will now be incentivized to submit bids with significantly inflated price tags and long construction timelines, thus further exacerbating the MTA’s cost crisis.
Good governance groups have picked up on this potential effect as well. “On debarment — which we strongly oppose — at Monday’s Transit Committee meeting, it was revealed that three vendors didn’t submit proposals on a design-build contract because of risks from debarment,” Reinvent Albany’s Rachael Fauss said to the MTA Board last month. “This risks includes factors beyond their control. Debarment is bad policy and a big mistake because it reduces competition. This means higher prices and a smaller pool of expertise to draw from.”
At a time when the MTA wants to increase the scope of its work and is on the verge of moving forward with a plan that calls for over $10 billion of construction spending every year for five years, imposing a five-year debarment penalty could whittle down the field of contractors to too few to complete the work. If only two out of six would bid on ADA work now, how can the MTA hope to fulfill its promises to deliver 70 fully accessible stations within five years?
And within the environment of the MTA, ADA work is considered relatively easy. I’ve spoken with MTA officials who are concerned that debarment could put Siemens and Bombardier at risk of losing their abilities to bid on MTA projects. If that were to happen, it would be functionally impossible for the MTA to complete most of the five-year capital plan at all. There simply aren’t enough companies able to do work within New York to ensure competitive bids and enough bodies to perform all of the work in the face of a debarment threat.
Contractors file suit to stop debarment regulations
In an effort to stop the MTA from enforcing its debarment rules, a group called the Alliance For Fair and Equitable Contracting Today, or AFFECT, filed suit shortly before Thanksgiving. The Alliance, represented by one-time Acting U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal, consists of the General Contractors Association of New York, the New York Building Congress, the Associated General Contractors of New York State LLC, the Building Trades Employers Association, and the American Council of Engineering Companies of New York. It is the über-lobbying group for the contracting industry, and in their lawsuit, they say, “Debarment is a death penalty for a public works contractor.”
In short, the suit alleges a variety of constitutional violations, including the Contract Clause, the Supremacy Clause, the Dormant Commerce Clause, procedural and substantive due process, and the First Amendment. The MTA’s debarment regulation applies retroactively and thus rewrites pre-existing contracts. It also affords the MTA with no leeway in determining fault. A few sections of AFFECT’s complaint struck me as particularly noteworthy. Calling New York’s approach to debarment “wildly out of step” with other debarment regimes around the country, AFFECT states:
The Debarment Statute and MTA Regulations do not require any wrongful conduct by the contractor or permit consideration of mitigating factors or allow inquiry into whether the contractor, engineer, or other vendor acted in good faith. MTA authorities must debar a contractor, consultant or supplier once a determination is made that the contractor exceeded the statute or regulation’s schedule or claim thresholds. No consideration is given to why a project went longer or whether a claim for a cost overrun was put forth in good faith. Nor is any consideration given to whether the contractor has taken steps to prevent schedule and cost overruns in the future.
As a result, the Debarment Statute and MTA Regulations create a draconian regime where a contractor operating in good faith may be debarred for merely exercising its express contractual rights to request additional time or costs due to changes necessitated by the MTA or a third party.
Whether this is a winning legal argument is, of course, another question and one premature to answer. The MTA has around two weeks to file a response to the lawsuit, and state and agency representatives have defended debarment all year. “The MTA is changing the way we do business to deliver for our customers and that means ensuring the historic $51 billion capital plan will be delivered on-time and on-budget,” Abbey Collins, an MTA spokesperson, said in a statement last week. “Beyond that, we don’t comment on pending litigation.”
I find the state’s approach to debarment far too limiting and am sympathetic to the arguments I’ve heard from MTA insiders and advocates that debarment will be harmful in the short-term to an agency looking to build fast. It’s not a solution to the MTA’s cost crisis and actually exacerbate it in the long run. Whether a court decides to invalidate the debarment regulations or not, New York state (and by extension the MTA) and its contractors should work out a better solution to the problem of cost overruns and missed deadlines. The debarment sledgehammer isn’t the answer.
One element of our political times that unfolds constantly involves chaos. By introducing chaos to a situation, it’s far, far easier to get away with sleights-of-hands and other backroom dealings while the public is consumed with talking away and working through the chaos. It’s easy, in other words, to offer up a myriad of distractions while shuffling pieces behind the scenes to accomplish other political ends.
This isn’t an approach that’s particularly novel nor is it unique to any single politician or political party. It’s both a feature and a bug of the way news is produced and consumed amidst a 24-hour constant cycle of everything always being on, and New Yorkers keenly into transit have lived through this phenomenon for years. It started long ago when Andrew Cuomo begin his lengthy diatribes alleging, falsely, that he wasn’t in charge of the MTA. These were so successful that the New York City subway system was allowed to collapse and he still coasted to reelection, garnering significant support in the five boroughs.
During that period, instead of focusing on the lack of investment and the lack of leadership caused by politically-inspired churn atop the MTA, activists and journalists had to parry with Cuomo’s ahistorical account of the MTA. It was an exhausting, time-consuming distraction, and as the recent MTA Transformation Plan, approved last week by the Board despite unanimous public opposition, shows, we’re not out of these woods yet.
It’s been hard to keep track of all the MTA news lately, and only some of that is by design. We’ve had Con Edison blackouts that stranded trains during a recent heat wave, ongoing computer problems that led to a recent Friday evening meltdown for the ages, MTA Inspector General investigations into everything and, of course, the Transformation/Reorganization/Whatever You Want To Call It Plan.
The story behind the Transformation Plan itself is a simple one with some interesting twists and turns. A bunch of months ago, Gov. Cuomo called upon the MTA to transform itself. This, in and of itself, is something of a distraction because since Cuomo controls the MTA, a state agency, he can just reorder the transformation without going through the charade of a costly consultant study and Board vote. But the Board vote offers him a layer of plausible deniability. Even though he controls the management and operations of the MTA, a Board vote gives him cover to point fingers at a largely powerless group of people, all of whom he appointed. He has fully exploited the structure of the MTA to his political benefit time and time again while exerting full and total control over an agency that he rightly fully and totally controls. It’s chaos; it’s distracting; and it’s almost impressively genius. If only we all stood to benefit.
Since I last had a chance to analyze AlixPartners’ $4 million Transformation Plan a few days after it was made public, this sweeping plan to reorganize the MTA and cut a few hundred million dollars per year out of the agency’s expenses faced universal condemnation by the public and then a quick approval by the Board with only Veronica Vanterpool voting against it. I’ve never seen a charade so blatantly executed in public as the vote last week, and it’s hard to wrap my head around what happened. For hours on Wednesday morning, speaker after speaker took the microphone to speak out against the plan. Advocates condemned it as a rush job, not subject to proper public vetting that disempowered key leaders (such as Andy Byford) and failed to reform the core of the MTA. Others, speaking in support of Byford and Alex Elegudin’s renewed focus on accessibility, railed against the plan for once again treating the city’s most vulnerable as second-class transit riders. Others voiced support for Fast Forward and recent improvements (recent isolated performance meltdowns notwithstanding).
Still, the vote went on because it had to. The vote went on because the MTA was left up a creek without a paddle. It was mandated, legally, that the MTA Board approve this Transformation Plan, and they had no real choice. The key was a change in the state’s public authorities laws orchestrated by Cuomo during budget negotiations in June. The law, which you can read here, required the MTA to produce a transformation plan and approve — not vote on, but approve — the plan by July 31. Had the MTA Board voted down the plan, the agency would have been in violation of law, and it’s clear from MTA Board member and State Budget Director Robert Mujica’s comments on Wednesday that had the Board voted down the plan, the state would have withheld money the MTA badly needs. It was a legislative mandate through fiscal pressure, and another way Cuomo used the MTA Board to enact his will.
As part of this charade, a week before the Board vote, Cuomo sent a letter that sources within the MTA said came as a big surprise. You can read the missive right here, and you’ll see why one MTA source referred to it as an “unhinged rant.” It’s a rant about homelessness, time-and-attendance matters, speeds and signals and a reorganization plan with a purpose. It is in fact the chaos we’ve come to expect, a blurring of issues that obscures the reality that Cuomo knew all about the reorganization plan. In fact, I’ve heard from many sources that most folks within the MTA believe the AlixPartners plan was written long before this process was made public and serves to give cover to moves Cuomo wanted to make.
But that’s neither here nor there. The Governor of New York can do what he so pleases with the MTA as it is his to control. Following approval last week, Cuomo issued simply a two-sentence statement. “The MTA’s reorganization plan is a good start, but now it comes down to execution and sound management. The timelines should provide hard dates to assess progress,” he said. So the question now is: Does any of this matter or is it just politics as usual?
It matters. It matters because of the political message the Transformation Plan sends to key cogs such as Andy Byford and Pete Tomlin. It matters because of the ongoing hiring freeze that is rapidly draining the MTA of any talent current serving in-house and ensuring that any young talent looking to enter the transit field is frozen out of the largest transit agency in the country. It matters because it disenfranchised the public, through advocates whose concerns were ignored. It matters too because we’ve heard deafening silence from anyone else in Albany tasked with MTA oversight, a lukewarm milquetoast throw-away statement from the mayor who hasn’t even read the full Transformation Plan and a vehement statement in opposition from Corey Johnson.
Here's the entirety of the Mayor's statements on the MTA Transformation Plan from the press conference today.
It's the "I haven't read the book but here's my book report" approach to governing and leadership on an issue that touches millions of New Yorkers every day. pic.twitter.com/7jVOXfzs5e
The plan creates new layers of bureaucracy and takes critical responsibilities away from Andy Byford. Byford is the one who is actually showing us that improvements in accessibility and on time performance are possible. 2/5
— NYC Council Speaker Corey Johnson (@NYCSpeakerCoJo) July 24, 2019
It’s just another reason why we need municipal control. We need real accountability, not another opaque power grab. We won’t really fix the MTA until NYC controls its own transit destiny. 4/5
— NYC Council Speaker Corey Johnson (@NYCSpeakerCoJo) July 24, 2019
The subways and buses are the lifeblood of New York. Massive changes to that system should not be made in 90 days, so the Council will hold a hearing on the MTA’s plan. New Yorkers deserve real answers and a chance to be heard. 5/5
— NYC Council Speaker Corey Johnson (@NYCSpeakerCoJo) July 24, 2019
Meanwhile, the Plan itself effectively disempowers all agency presidents, transfers key projects to MTA Capital Construction (the biggest source of MTA construction problems over the past decade and a half), borrows from Fast Forward while shunting aside Fast Forward’s main proponent, and erases progress spearheaded by people who aren’t Andrew Cuomo. The report talks too of “failure to attract talent” at a time when Byford has brought in a key accessibility proponent and a world-renowned signals expert. The former was not lost on accessibility advocates who raised such a stink last week that Cuomo enforcer Larry Schwartz had to promise additional accessible stations to save face.
Behind the plan, other efforts are at play to lessen the impact of those making a difference but conflicting with Cuomo. The new COO/Managing Director-type role proposed by the Transformation Plan is open only to outside candidates (so Cuomo can handpick the role and ensure Byford, for instance, can’t apply), and Transdev, a private transit operator, has been poking around the MTA of late. Remember that the initial versions of the plan initially called for subways and buses to be separated. That line was killed shortly before publication when advocates vehemently objected, but speculation is rife that Transdev will ultimately take over the city’s bus system. I’ll have more on that story in the coming weeks.
For now, Byford — and this is really about Byford — will serve on the new signals panel, another Cuomo attempt to step on feet. I’ll have more on that later too. But where this all leads is anyone’s guess. The MTA needs reform and reorganization, but it needs careful reform and reorganization. The people who are competent should be promoted and supported, but instead, we seem to be stuck in a chaotic process of reorganization spurred on to minimize the influence of those most competent who have been praised publicly. It’s petty politics, and it’s a whole bunch of chaos as we’re trying to cut through the noise toward a better commute. There’s no real way out here either, and the MTA’s millions of customers are simply pawns in an unnecessary political game of distraction, obfuscation and chaos.
The highly-anticipated MTA Transformation Plan was released to the public on Friday afternoon. Did it live up to the hype?
While I was away on vacation, the lead-up to Friday’s unveiling of AlixPartners’ much-ballyhooed MTA Transformation Plan seemed to reinforce the political nature of the plan. Amidst ever-louder rumors that the recommendations had been written long ago by someone other than the consultants with the $4 million contract, Gov. Andrew Cuomo warned that not everyone would be happy with the plan, and early reporting indicated that Andy Byford could be stripped of some responsibilities and power (largely, it was theoried, as a short-sighted move in Cuomo’s ongoing one-sided grudge match against the popular and highly competent NYC Transit President). Palace intrigue stories ruled the roost.
Late in the day on Friday, the actual report landed, and it landed with both a thud and a hint at things to come. It promises the bare minimum of transformation while failing to explore true efficiencies such as combining the two commuter rail agencies into one with streamlined service and operations. Despite early word to the contrary, it ultimately didn’t end up recommending an immediate split of New York City Transit’s buses and subways into separate divisions, though contemplated such a split down the line, and it recommended that many MTA functions, particularly with respect to construction, be centralized under Capital Construction, without acknowledging the cost and performance issues that have plagued Capital Construction seemingly since its inception. As I’ll explore, transit advocates are particularly concerned with this proposal.
And of course there is the $40 billion plan: How does this transformation plan affect Andy Byford and his Fast Forward plan that, if allowed to proceed, would fix and modernize the subways? On that front, the plan isn’t particularly clear. It includes recommendations for a series of improvements — centers of excellence for customer communications, an accessibility guru, and a focus on maintenance and safety — that Byford has spent months implementing both as part of Fast Forward and as part of his job in repairing the transit network, but it also calls for removing all construction work, implicitly including signalling, the backbone of Fast Forward, from agency head purview to the Capital Construction group.
But here’s where things get murky: Despite the actual words in the report, multiple MTA officials have told me Byford will retain control and oversight of the bulk of Fast Forward, including the key resignalling initiatives. It’s possible that when the dust settles, Cuomo may find a way to push Byford out of that role as well or attempt to step on the NYC Transit president’s toes as he is trying to do with Save Safe Seconds. But for now, a report that simply should have embraced Fast Forward as the best practices model for reforming the key parts of the MTA seems to muddy the waters. It’s ultimately a superficial report without clear indication as to which, if any, international best practices it was modeled after, and sources tell me AlixPartners have struggled to defend even some of the more basic recommendations (such as splitting up buses and subways). It seems more akin to political cover for Cuomo’s ongoing attempts at controlling the minutiae of the multi-billion-dollar MTA, but that would just be par for course.
Inside the Plan: The Seven Recommendations
So with that in mind, let’s take a quick look at what this thing, available here as a pdf, actually says. Here are the seven recommendations:
Recommendation: The MTA should refocus agencies on service delivery, core safety, operations and maintenance activities, and centralize all support functions. In the new organization, the agencies should focus exclusively on service delivery, safety, day-to-day operations and maintenance, rather than general support functions. The agencies will have reporting lines to a Chief Operating Officer. All other services will be merged and coordinated centrally with a goal of driving a higher level of services at lower costs. This would result in consolidation of more than 40 functional groups within the existing MTA Agencies to six departments in the new MTA organization. Furthermore, the Transformation Plan calls for changes to the fundamental ways the MTA does business in order to achieve more effective and efficient performance.
Recommendation: MTA should centralize all capital-related functions across MTA into a new central group responsible for planning, development, and delivery of a Capital Program that improves service, the customer experience and accountability. To address slow, costly, and bureaucratic processes and to create accountability, all Capital-related functions across the MTA should be merged into a central group. This new capital group will be accountable for planning, development, and delivery of the Capital Program. This group would identify optimal project delivery (groupings, timing, delivery), increase competition in a historically constrained supplier market, and complete important capital projects that improve service and customer experience quicker.
Recommendation: MTA should create a new central engineering function reporting to a new Chief Engineering Officer to set standards, ensure quality and sustainability of infrastructure. To address inconsistent engineering methods across agencies and eliminate the duplication of processes and standards and ensure quality and sustainability of infrastructure, a new central Engineering group reporting to a Chief Engineering Officer will establish clear engineering and maintenance standards to be executed consistently across all agencies. This will provide consistent standards and specifications and eliminate unnecessary complexity and duplication.
Recommendation: MTA should create a new central customer communication function to provide high quality and consistent customer engagement led by communications specialists. To address many existing differing communication types (i.e., service updates, timetables, customer feedback, etc.) from several different agencies, MTA should centralize communications to clearly and consistently manage the message, medium and content.
Recommendation: MTA should centralize all operating support functions (i.e., operating standards and service design) focusing agencies on service delivery. To eliminate silos and enable multimodal network design optimization, the MTA should centralize operating standards and service design. Currently each MTA agency has its own internal operations standards and service design capabilities, which would be better managed under one integrated function serving all agencies.
Recommendation: MTA should centralize all human resource functions to reduce redundancies (such as differing organizational structures and too many layers across agencies) and drive clearer lines of accountability. The MTA should create a centralized human resources department focused on attracting, developing, and retaining the talent required to improve MTA performance and service delivery. This new entity will be tasked with clearly articulating a new talent strategy. This will help to resolve issues of duplication and improve analytics, data consistency, and data integrity.
Recommendation: To drive the transformation, the MTA will require a selection of new leadership roles and capabilities [including a Chief Operating Office reporting to the CEO and the MTA Board, if the Board chooses; a Chief Transformation Officer reporting directly to the Board; and an MTA Accessibility Officer reporting directly to the CEO].
As you can see, these so-called transformations are hardly that transforming. Consolidating true back-office functions such as human resources, legal and communications are true efficiencies that should have been realized decades ago but speak of the siloed nature of the MTA’s sub-agencies. The rest of the recommendations are either covered by plans put forward by current leadership or seem flimsy. Why, for instance, should a transit agency not be in charge of operating standards and service design for its own service delivery? It doesn’t make sense, operationally or otherwise, to, say, remove oversight of operating standards and service design for buses and subways from the auspices of New York City Transit and place these responsibilities under a centralized agency. There is no inherent benefit to placing service design for commuter rail with service design for local buses and subways, and it works instead to create communications and inter-agency pain points. The report itself fails to argue why this type of consolidation would be useful and doesn’t name a signal transit agency that has implemented such an approach to ops planning and ops execution.
With respect to the personnel recommendations, in addition to the accessibility overlap, it’s also worth questioning the call for a COO. Ronnie Hakim is currently the Managing Director of the MTA, reporting to the agency’s CEO and Chair. If she isn’t already fulfilling the COO role AlixPartners identified, what exactly is her job at the MTA and how could it be reformed so that she is essentially this COO? Questions such as these — ones probing the role certain Cuomo allies play at the agency — were seemingly ignored.
Reactions to a ‘Rush Job’
Ultimately, this $4 million plan reads more like a basic PowerPoint presentation of bare concepts that aren’t truly transformational and contain wrong information about the MTA’s structure and history. It reads very much like a rush job thrown together to support the political buried within. One MTA source acknowledged the conceptual nature of the report, indicating that the Board expects more detailed plans in the final report due in September. But this is what the Board will vote on later this month, and advocates aren’t impressed. Nick Sifuentes, the executive director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, did not mince words:
“A rushed, three-month process with no public input is a lesson in how not to do reform of the nation’s largest transit system. This brief report would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious for the millions of New Yorkers who rely on subways, buses, and commuter rail every single day. Especially with service improving, the governor should commit to an actual democratic process for MTA reform, not something done in, basically the dead of night.
The AlixPartners ‘plan’ relies heavily on the purposed ‘success’ of the governor’s Subway Action Plan, which has been wildly overstated by its proponents. Analysis by Aaron Gordon and others have shown that the SAP has actually not significantly improved service. If this plan relies on the SAP process as justification for wholesale change at the MTA, that foundation is pretty thin. The report’s revisionist history and factual inaccuracies just further the conclusion that this is not the way to handle sweeping reform of the single largest public entity in the state.”
Transit Center, too, released a strident statement objecting to the central tenet of the reorganization report. That transit watchdogs are so opposed to empowering capital construction, one of the more problematic elements of the MTA, with key modernization initiatives should be telling.
And so we’re left with an expensive report, an uncertain future for Andy Byford, the key leader with loads of public support, the most riding on the report and seemingly the touchiest relationship with the governor, and haziness around the recommendations. Will this transform the MTA or simply shuffle the deck chairs of this Titantic as Captain Cuomo steers the ship toward an iceberg? You can probably guess my answer.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo, seen here with a bridge, has been making a flurry of MTA moves lately to further cement his grip on the organization he controls, but the why of it all remains murky.
Over the past few weeks, thanks to Reinvent Albany’s lengthy report on MTA reform [pdf], I’ve been thinking a lot about the structure and role the MTA Board plays in agency governance. When you really drill down on it, you can easily reach the conclusion that the MTA Board is a meaningless entity designed for one thing and one thing only — giving the Governor of New York apparent cover for all matters MTA and serving as a convenient whipping boy when things go wrong.
Think about it: What exactly does the MTA Board do? It doesn’t hire or fire any part of the MTA management. The governor does, through his appointment of the MTA Chair and CEO (and approval of any agency president or other high-profile hires). It doesn’t negotiate contracts. It doesn’t set policy. It doesn’t develop a budget. It simply votes — up or down — on initiatives prepared by MTA staffers, who are all under the purview of gubernatorial appointees. Sometimes, the MTA Board raises a question or two and delays a vote for want of information, but the Board doesn’t and can’t shape policy. Ultimately, the Board just rubber-stamps major procurements and other initiatives put in front of it by the governor or those acting on his behalf.
Take, for example, the recent hullabaloo over overtime spending. It seems likely that some of the LIRR overtime accrual is the result of fraud that should be prosecuted, but most of the overtime spending at non-LIRR agencies and at New York City Transit in particular is a direct result of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Subway Action Plan and ongoing emergency order. As I detailed in a post on this subject in May, the Subway Action Plan and the Governor’s insistence on pushing through everything as fast as possible led to a huge spike in overtime spending.
By itself, that’s fine. The subways needed to be blitzed by repair work, and while I still believe Save Safe Seconds has had more of an impact on improved subway performance than the action plan, the action plan has helped (for example, by focusing on basics such as clearing out clogged drains). But Cuomo has been so obsessed with overtime spending that he can’t or won’t focus on the good overtime vs. the bad overtime. It’s all just a negative to him, and so he’s pushing through his own plan to combat overtime, exposing the MTA Board for the empty vessel it is.
During last month’s contentious meeting, most of the board members overruled the objections of Larry Schwartz, Cuomo’s enforcer on the MTA Board, to turn down a request for the agency to hire a prosecutor to investigate fraud. These board members instead recommended a consultant to help the MTA reform its time-and-attendance practice while relying upon the new MTA Inspector General (appointed by Cuomo) and the proper state or county Attorneys General to prosecute the fraud. But that led to one disgruntled governor, and so he went to work.
As Dana Rubinstein reported for Politico New York last week, Cuomo simply overruled the MTA Board and decided that the agency will hire a former prosector to investigate overtime abuses anyway. As Rubinstein notes, Carrie Cohen, the Morrison & Foerster partner who will be approved next week, will cover similar ground as the new MTA IG, and those who opposed the appointment initially weren’t happy. “This was all debated once and defeated,” John Samuelsen, TWU International president and MTA Board member, said to Rubinstein. “This has now become an example of, ‘If I don’t get my way the first time, we’re going to ram it down throats anyway.’”
Cuomo is a master at this type of exploitation, and he’s using the overtime scandal to dubious ends. Following the appointment of the new MTA IG and a subsequent tampering of a time-tracker at an LIRR office, another time clock was damaged, this time at a New York City Transit facility. Cuomo lumped the incidents together, but I’ve since been told by multiple MTA sources that the second incident was an accident. Furthermore, it impacted a time clock used by managers and not rank-and-file who are accused of running the overtime fraud. Cuomo, in public statements, claimed they were all related, and this may be another part of his unnecessary and one-sided battle with Andy Byford. I’ll come back to motive shortly.
Meanwhile, Cuomo is barely even trying to hide the way he’s manipulating the MTA. Take the makeup of the Board. We know Cuomo controls the plurality of Board seats, for what that’s worth when discussing a rubber-stamp organization, and lately, he’s taken to making the most of it. Word recently emerged that Cuomo was looking to name Albany-based state budget director Robert Mujica and Linda Lacewell, the current nominee for Superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services, to the Board, but the governor doesn’t currently have two seats to fill.
The Post got to the bottom of things: Reportedly, Michael Lynton, confirmed to the MTA just this spring, will be (or has been) booted from the Board, allegedly for being too independent. Fernando Ferrer will also be leaving his post. Replacing Lynton with Mujica will require the state legislature to waive residency requirements, and it’s not at first clear why they should. Is Mujica that important to the MTA Board for the legislature to waive these requirements in a last-minute hearing this week or next? If they do waive these requirements, what’s stopping Cuomo from naming upstate allies to a downstate board anyway?
Cuomo, in a radio appearance on Alan Chartock’s show last week, claimed Lynton’s independence had nothing to do with the move. Said the governor to his pal on WAMC:
Michael Lynton, when I put him on, the need was to bring new tech firms into the MTA sphere because the MTA keeps contracting with these bad contractors who I believe they have an incestuous relationship with. And the new issue became these, over the past couple of weeks, the US attorney’s investigation the Queens DA in vandalism of time and attendance systems. So, the way a coach will shift players depending on what’s happening on the court, basketball, and the need Michael Lynton, who’s great, and is from the tech world and I think that bringing new tech vendors. Today the need is financial expertise, anti-fraud systems. So I switched for the state budget director, who is a financial wizard, in my opinion, and can safeguard the state money and the Department of Financial Services commissioner who is a former federal prosecutor and is very good on financial fraud. It had nothing to do with Fernando Ferrer or Michael Lynton, who are both great, I’m going to put them on other boards.
But this move isn’t an innocent one. In a long and rambling statement released during the height of the L train debate in January, Mujica called for full gubernatorial control of the MTA Board. It was a bit of a sleight of hand since, as I’ve detailed above, the governor already controls the management and operations of the MTA, but you can see why and how Cuomo is stacking the board with third-term loyalists. These appointees play fast and loose with their own financial disclosure requirements and may not even live in the MTA service area. This doesn’t strike me as a shift toward better governance.
So back to the question of motive. For all of these machinations, maneuvers and public misdirections, I’m hard-pressed to figure out what Cuomo is after and why. He may, as has been loudly discussed in transit circles over the past few weeks, be looking to push out those who are outside of his circle and who get credit for good work they do. He may be leaning on the MTA, a prominent organization and one that plays a large role in the city and state, as a way to reward those still loyal to him after nearly nine years in office. He may simply have it in his head that he can fix things. But as with many areas, his moves seem to be responsive and reactive rather than proactive, and he’s not attacking the roots of the MTA’s many problems (or allowing those who can free rein to operate).
The MTA sits on the edge of a cliff, and one push in the wrong direction can send everyone and everything tumbling off it yet again. Is Cuomo chipping away at the foundation or building a stronger one? I lean toward the former but wish for the latter, and I don’t know why or where it all goes from here.
Andy Byford, seen here on an L train, needs the Governor to support, rather than fight, him to be able to see through his plan to fix the subways. (Photo: Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit)
A few weeks ago, when the Emma Fitzsimmons’ story on Andrew Cuomo’s inability to coexist with Andy Byford first broke in April, the governor took exception to the story. In an appearance on Alan Chartock’s show on WAMC, Cuomo slammed the paper over the story.
“I think they have to sell newspapers. I think that is the way of the world. I think it’s symptomatic of our political system now. You have less public trust in newspapers, in politicians,” he said to Chartock, who just chuckled along with his friend the Governor. Cuomo continued, “There’s a chairman who runs the authority. In this case it’s Pat Foye. And I deal with the chairman. It’s very rare for me to deal with a division head directly.”
To Cuomo, in his public statements at least, Andy Byford, the president of New York City Transit and a globally respected leader in his fielder, was simply a division head, and the Governor of New York couldn’t be bothered with those.
Unsurprisingly, Cuomo’s statement was mere hyperbole. As two MTA sources have since told me, Cuomo regularly talks to actual division heads and even lower-ranking MTA employees. A few days before his appearance on Chartock, Cuomo was on the phone with managers in Transit’s Division of Operations Planning discussing signal timers and speed restrictions, my sources have told me, and in the intervening weeks, Cuomo and his MTA loyalists have continued to involve themselves in Byford’s Save Safe Seconds campaign to speed up the subways and repair faulty signals and recalibrate unnecessarily slow speed limits.
Cuomo, according to a senior MTA official, has tried to implement his own version of moving fast and breaking things, Mark Zuckerberg’s now infamous motto that hasn’t aged too well. The governor, I’ve been told only talks to certain members of the signals team (but not, according to my sources, Byford) and has repeatedly asked why the MTA cannot simply implement a blanket increase in speed and be done with it. The same senior source explained that Transit is implementing the speed increases in a methodical way to ensure passenger safety is paramount, and Cuomo’s approach would be both inefficient and not nearly as safe.
But signals are just one area where the governor has resisted Transit’s — and by extension, Byford’s — authority. As Larry Schwartz and Andy Byford discussed at last week’s MTA Board meeting, the ongoing Grand Central 4/5/6 rehabilitation project is another source of conflict. Byford’s and Schwartz’s exchange was the first the public had heard of any issues with this project, and while it’s a lengthy and messy one, Transit has kept most of the second busiest subway station in NYC open and accessible during a comprehensive rebuild of the station.
Still, as one MTA source relayed to me, a few weeks ago, Melissa DeRosa, a top Cuomo aide, arrived at Grand Central during the height of rush hour and amidst a delay in service on the Lexington Ave. line. She witnessed capacity crowd conditions and promptly raised concerns about the project. Now, Cuomo and his allies on the MTA Board are making noises about the project. One source told me they objected to the replacement of a staircase rather than a repair, and Cuomo’s allies are making noises about removing the project from Transit’s purview and placing it under the auspices of Capital Construction. There’s no real need to do this, and in fact, the complexity of the project and the need to ensure it doesn’t interfere with Lexington Ave. subway service would generally dictate that Transit oversees it. But that’s the nature of the impasse. Cuomo is in charge, and he wants what he wants whether it makes sense.
The back-and-forth between Cuomo and the professional staff at Transit doesn’t end here. One MTA official told me that nearly $1 billion worth of procurement orders are awaiting Cuomo’s signoff and are simply sitting on his desk waiting for action. Since the design-build threshold sits at $25 million, anything over must be design-build or receive a waiver, and Cuomo hasn’t moved on approving these projects. MTA insiders feel this stall tactic by Cuomo is another way for the governor to avoid doling out promised state capital funds to the MTA, on the one hand, while accusing the agency of spending too slowly on the other. Dave Colon explored this issue in a Gotham Gazette piece last month.
It’s one thing for Cuomo to be responsible for the MTA and in charge of the agency (which he is). It’s another for him to be openly or quietly antagonistic toward the men and women he’s tasked with fixing the subway because he either doesn’t like the attention they’ve gotten or worse. This saga came to a head again on Tuesday when WNYC and Gothamist ran a piece questioning the Byford-Cuomo relationship. Despite constant on-the-record denials by Byford to numerous reporters (including me) in recent weeks and one in the piece, WNYC claimed rumors about Byford’s departure were resurfacing. They’re not, but later in the day, Brian Lehrer asked the governor about his relationship with Cuomo, and Reinvent Albany transcribed the exchange.
Cuomo, you’ll note, referred again to the agency presidents as “division heads” and filibustered by talking about the LIRR overtime issues, a problem in which Andy Byford and New York City Transit have no role. After claiming that the MTA “needs to make major reforms” and that the MTA Board will decide Byford’s fate (it won’t; Cuomo will), the governor offered a lukewarm endorsement for Byford and the other agency presidents. The talk on fare hikes to fund Fast Forward, a plan Cuomo should endorse and embrace but won’t, and the claim that he’s on the side of the riders doesn’t ring true at all. Supporting the riders would mean throwing the full weight of his office behind a fully funded Fast Forward plan.
Later in the day, when I asked the governor’s office about his involvement in management and operations decision and his relationship with Byford, his office offered a statement: “The Governor supports Andy Byford; he said it himself on the radio this morning. We’ll leave the conspiracies and gossip to others.”
So as the relationship between the governor and the agency he controls seems to teeter along in some state of unrest — where the governor doesn’t appear to trust the experts he brought in and should trust to get the job done — where does that leave things? Based on the current status quo, Andy Byford isn’t leaving tomorrow or next week. That could change if Cuomo forces him out, and the looming MTA reorganization should be telling one way or another. Will Cuomo try to remove Save Safe Seconds or even the Fast Forward plan from Transit? Could that be a tipping point? We’ll find out soon.
Ultimately, as I wrote in April, I viewed Fitzsimmons’ original story that brought these simmering tensions into the open as a message from Byford’s proponents. Transit allies were trying to get the point across to the governor, in a suitably subtle way, that Cuomo needs Byford to fix the MTA more than Byford needs Cuomo. The governor, if he lets his NYC Transit president do his job, can take credit for being the chief executive of New York State who oversaw the revival of the MTA. Never mind that Cuomo’s neglect got the city into this position; Cuomo’s acceptance of an expert’s plan can get the city out of that position will earn him plaudits. It’s been a rocky few weeks since then, and Cuomo may not be able to step back and let the repair work proceed apace. But if Cuomo pushes out Byford, would anyone qualified and competent even want to take the job next? And where would that leave all of us?
For the sake of the city, this tension should subside, and the MTA funding should flow so repair and modernization work can continue. There’s no real need, other than ego, for any other outcome.
When Andrew Cuomo wants results, things in New York tend to happen quickly. Case in point: MTA overtime spending and, in particular, the LIRR.
The Long Island Rail Road’s overtime spending issues have been a low-level concern for quite a well. Due to various work rules and pension calculations, overtime accrual can benefit workers in retirement, and Gov. Cuomo, who has pressured the MTA to sign off on labor agreements without management-suggested reforms that would combat high overtime costs, has grown tired of bad headlines about overtime payments. The Post recently reported on one LIRR worker who earned over $300,000 last year due, in part by logging over 3800 overtime hours, and the LIRR’s overtime costs have outpaced inflation over the past six years.
And so, Larry Schwartz, Cuomo’s right-hand man and the chair of the MTA Board’s Finance Committee since September of 2016, suggested an emergency meeting. Since Schwartz is Cuomo’s direct proxy, when he says jump, the MTA asks, “How high?” The emergency meeting will be at held at 4 p.m. this Friday afternoon. MTA CEO and Chairman Pat Foye issued a statement on the meeting when it was announced late Wednesday: “The issues of excessive overtime and the inadequacy of the MTA time and attendance systems must be addressed, which is why last week I ordered an immediate investigation into these matters and why I am convening a special Board meeting on this issue this coming Friday. Overtime is an important and useful tool as we urgently seek to modernize our entire system but we must be sure it is being used effectively, accurately and appropriately.”
Now, general overtime spending and the LIRR time-and-attendance concerns are two separate issues. The LIRR issues The Post was willing to put firmly on Cuomo’s shoulders:
Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who controls the MTA, helped renegotiate the [LIRR labor] deal in 2014, averting a looming strike. That contract was renewed in 2016 with minimal changes, delaying any talks of serious reforms until last week, when that agreement expired, sources say. In 2014, Cuomo was happy to accept praise for stepping in to help hash out the contract over a seafood lunch in Midtown, with a subsequent MTA press release celebrating his role in the deal…But when asked on Thursday how he would ensure the next contract curbed overtime costs, Cuomo claimed he had no power to slam the brakes on the off-the-rails spending in a new deal…
In the 2014 contract, LIRR brass were seeking reforms to curtail payroll and overtime costs…Among them: scrapping the system that gives people with the most seniority first dibs on overtime and instead equalizing it among all employees based on attendance and overtime already worked, according to a federal report into the contract dispute. Other proposed measures included changing some double-time payments to time-and-a-half and eliminating extra pay given to conductors when they work on both a passenger and freight train in the same shift. None of the reforms was made, according to an MTA source.
If this sounds like a leader attempting to have his cake and eat it too, that’s because it is, and it’s a prime example of why good governance groups are skeptical of Cuomo’s faux-reform efforts. More on that shortly. Melissa DeRosa, a top Cuomo aide, also sent a strident letter to MTA officials, bemoaning how “abuses in the attendance system demonstrate again that basic management control is lacking.” She has not — and will not — acknowledge how these “abuses” were essentially baked into the system when Cuomo approved the 2014 labor deals.
In the lead-up to today’s “emergency” Board meeting, the MTA first sicced its police force on LIRR workers, alleging that cops would enforce time-and-attendance practices. This drew an immediate backlash from the TWU, and the MTA hastily retreated on this Pinkerton-esque approach. Never mind that the MTA’s cops are among the most egregious abusers of overtime. We’ll see where enforcement goes after today’s meeting.
Meanwhile, back to “normal” overtime spending, a separate issue from LIRR bookkeeping. Here’s a quick snapshot of the MTA’s planned overtime spending and actuals with the total adjusted for inflation set to 2018 dollars during Andrew Cuomo’s entire tenure as governor (which coincides with his entire tenure as being responsible for the MTA). Figures are in “millions.”
As you can see, the MTA is consistently blowing past its overtime budgets, but the problem has seemingly increased significantly in 2017 and 2018. Last year, in fact, that MTA blew past its initial overtime estimates by $400 million. Why? Well, MTA Board materials point the biggest fingers at overtime spending due to Andrew Cuomo’s very own Subway Action Plan. His Emergency Order sets the stage for the MTA to spend without certain budget controls, and the governor’s demands that the MTA realize the goals of his Subway Action Plan have led to a steep increase in overtime spending. In both 2017 and 2019, the Subway Action Plan was one of the key drivers. Here’s what New York City Transit had to say in its Board materials: “Higher overtime expenses of $218.9 million (47.0 percent) were essentially driven by track, signals infrastructure, station maintenance and car equipment requirements, including Subway Action Plan (SAP) initiatives.” (The reports on 2017 expenditures said essentially the same thing regarding overtime and the Subway Action Plan.)
Will today’s emergency Board meeting focus on how Cuomo’s own initiatives are forcing the MTA to rely on increased overtime spending? I wouldn’t hold my breath. After all, Schwartz, the Cuomo confidante who called for this Board meeting, has been in charge of the Finance Committee since 2016 and has been receiving these OT reports monthly since then. Is he blaming the MTA for his own oversight failures? Why hasn’t Schwartz been aggressive in attacking overtime since he began serving on the Board when, as the chart shows, it was already clear the MTA couldn’t project or control overtime costs? It’s hard sometimes to look in the mirror.
Good governance group Reinvent Albany is equally skeptical. They called today’s meeting “political theater” and pointed to three key facts about overtime spending:
1. The Governor controls the day to day operations of the MTA via his ability to hire and fire the CEO of the MTA Patrick Foye. The CEO hires and fires the MTA agency presidents, including the president of the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR).
2. The MTA Board has no say over the day-to-day operations of the MTA and no involvement in day-to-day authorization or tracking of overtime.
3. There is no sudden overtime “emergency.” MTA management asks employees to perform overtime, all overtime is either at behest of management or approved in advance, and is carefully tracked. The MTA board and senior staff have frequently discussed overtime at MTA board meetings. There is no new information about overtime, just public embarrassment to the Governor and MTA caused by press coverage. Further, no public materials or agenda have been released for today’s meeting, showing that this response is being rushed and will not be a serious review.
I’ll give the final words to Reinvent Albany Executive Director John Kaehny: “The public will not trust the MTA until the Governor and his appointees acknowledge simple truths and stop with the political theater. The Governor controls the MTA through the CEO he hires and fires. Today’s ’emergency’ board meeting about overtime is a reaction to press coverage, not new information. MTA and LIRR management completely control the overtime process and know exactly what is going on. They ask employees to do overtime and track it carefully. What’s really going on is that the MTA hiring freeze and management pay freeze are creating dysfunction and shortages of skilled workers that are aggravated by work rules.”
