MTA Politics

When Michael Bloomberg upending term limits and ran for a third four-year stint as Mayor of New York City, he did so on a platform of reforming mass transit in New York City. Less than six months after Election Day, voters are already indicted Bloomberg for his public transportation failures.

Bloomberg’s plan was a fairly straight-forward one. It included 33 points that ranged from subway expansion plans pushed by transit advocates – F express, for instance – to controversial calls to make all bus rides free to the amorphous “overhauling the MTA” and “trimming the fat” that have become transit buzzwords in New York City over the past 10-15 years. Generally, as I noted in August, because Bloomberg controls just 4 of the 14 votes on the MTA’s board, his plan was a populist appeal for votes from disgruntled New York City subway riders and not something he could actually implement.

Yet, despite this political reality, Bloomberg pushed the plan in TV spots and Internet ads. He railed against the state of transit, and despite a less-than-stellar transit record during his first two terms, he made his campaign about improving transit in the city. After earning his reelection, he quickly cooled talk on his transit promises, and since then, we’ve heard little from Bloomberg on his late-summer promises to help the cash-starved MTA.

Yesterday, a Marist revealed that New Yorkers aren’t keen with the Mayor’s transit record but that they also don’t care too much about it. The poll – available in full here – gave Bloomberg a 56 percent approval rating, and 38 percent of respondents called Bloomie the best mayor in New York City in three decades.

While voters say overall quality of life has improved, New Yorkers’ views of transportation have not. The poll asked voters if, in the past eight years since Bloomberg became better, public transit had gotten better, worse or stayed the same. While in 2006 voters thought transit had improved under Bloomberg’s watch, this time around 46 percent believed the subways and buses have gotten worse. Of the remaining 54 percent, 18 percent said the options are better, and 36 percent said transit has stayed the same.

In response, the Straphangers Campaign tried to spin as though New Yorkers are making a connection. “Not surprisingly,” Gene Russianoff said, “voters hold the Mayor accountable for the bad news about transit.”

The problem, however, is that voters do not hold the Mayor accountable for the bad news about transit. Voters don’t hold the mayor accountable; they don’t hold their State Senators accountable; they don’t hold the Assembly accountable; they don’t hold anyone accountable. New Yorkers prefer to complain about the MTA – offering similar services for a higher nominal-dollar but not inflation-adjusted dollar price today than they did eight years ago – than actually do something or vote someone into office who will do something about it.

Over the last six months, Mayor Bloomberg has been an abject failure on transit. In fact, since his congestion pricing plan failed to garner approval in Albany, Bloomberg has been a non-entity when it comes to helping the MTA. He hasn’t expressed support for a permanent funding plan based on bridge tolls or a renewed congestion pricing push. He hasn’t vowed to fund student transit as the municipality that schools children should. He hasn’t made noises in Albany to help rescue the MTA, and he hasn’t done much of anything in New York. Still, New Yorkers view him favorable, and they clearly do not hold him accountable for bad news about transit.

As the MTA falters, political apathy on the part of voters is just another force with which those who want transit investment must contend. New Yorkers recognize the importance of public transportation to New York City, and they recognize that it isn’t as good as it should be or once was. Yet, the fingers are pointed not at our elected officials but at an MTA too poor to do much about it. These poll results reflect badly on Bloomberg, but no one would hold him accountable.

In a shocking move last night, Senate Majority Leader Pedro Espada — and long-time foe of most things MTA — announced a plan to toll the East River Bridges in order to prevent the MTA’s service cuts. Last year, Espada was the leader of the Fare-Hike Four, a group dedicated to avoiding sensible MTA funding mechanisms at any cost, but with Student MetroCards on the chopping block, Espada has announced his support for the tolling plan.

“The MTA’s financial problems have not dissipated and it is evident that new funding is needed to prevent service cuts,” he said in a townhall meeting from the floor of the State Senate. “Last year I opposed a toll on the ‘free’ bridges because the revenue was destined for a general fund. I am proposing that revenue generated by a toll on the East River bridges be earmarked specifically for the restoration of the free student MetroCard program and other subway and bus services that are being targeted with cuts or elimination. The MTA must agree to the specific use of this revenue, or all bets are off.”

As for the details, Espada’s proposal is a start but doesn’t go as far as we had hoped last year. He has proposed a $2.00 toll on the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg and Queensboro bridges, and he believes this toll would generate $525 million in annual revenue, enough to fund Student MetroCards and potentially allow the MTA to expand service. This toll will not discourage drivers from taking unnecessary trips, and the Harlem River bridges — those that impact Espada’s constituents — are not included in this plan.

Streetsblog, however, questions Espada’s math. They believe the net gain would be approximately $240 million, just enough to fund Student MetroCards and avert the majority of city-based bus and subway cuts. After the state’s payroll tax calculation error, I tend to believe Streetsblog’s math over the numbers coming from Espada. Still, the money will help, but whether the Assembly and Senate will approve such a plan this time around remains to be seen.

Espada, meanwhile, doesn’t believe the MTA would balk at receiving this money even if it is earmarked for student travel. After all, MTA CEO and Chairman Jay Walder has repeatedly stressed his desire to maintain free student transit. “I am fully confident,” Espada said, “that Walder would agree to this if it means preventing cuts to vital services and the free student MetroCard program. I am encouraged by Mr. Walder’s comprehensive, long-term vision for the MTA, but he needs help now to get the agency back on track.”

Help, it seems, is going to come from the unlikeliest of unlikely allies.

Throughout this week, MTA Board members and division heads will sit through a series of public hearings on the Authority’s latest proposed service cuts. Generally, a vocal minority of bus riders, paratransit users and student groups will browbeat the board members over cuts that will decimate bus riders, pare down Access-a-Ride and eliminate free student travel on New York City Transit’s buses and subways. Most people will heap tons of blame upon the shoulders of MTA Board members who have few avenues other than service cuts and fare hikes, and some of the city’s elected representatives — those same representatives who won’t fund the MTA — will dare to speak out against the authority.

In a certain sense, these public hearings are a legally mandated charade. No matter how many people step up to the microphone to yell at the MTA Board and to urge the authority to save Student MetroCards — a program for which the MTA shouldn’t be carrying the bulk of the funding burden anyway — the MTA Board probably won’t listen. Maybe a few bus routes will get spared; maybe some of the cuts will be shuffled; but in the end, the Authority has to solve a $751 million budget deficit without raising the fares. That the Authority scheduled two hearings per night for four days this week tells me all I need to know about how the Board plans to respond.

None of this, however, is really the fault of the MTA Board members. It is the fault of New York’s elected representatives who continue to absolve themselves of any responsibility to a public transit that moves over seven million New Yorkers a day. It is the fault of residents and voters who are unwilling to educate themselves on public transit issues and listen to politicians who, through the MTA, isolate themselves for making proper and tough decisions on public transit. And it may even be the fault of those who formed the MTA in the first place and tried to isolate it from the political process.

Over this past weekend, I spent much of it working on a big paper I have to write for law school. The paper is going to focus on some theories of local government law and the way MTA funding highlights the tensions between urban and suburban transit interests. The first section of the paper explores the events that led up to the creation of the MTA, and it is a tale that has its origins in the founding of the subway. Without going too much in depth, the New York City Transit Authority was established in the mid-1950s after the subways had become so highly politicized that no one wanted to take responsibility for ensuring adequate funding levels through fare revenue.

The origins of this problem rest in the early 1900s when the city forced those who contracted to build and operate the subways to agree to a fare cap of sorts. Only through mutual agreement could the IRT and later the BRT raise the fare from a nickel, and even though these companies saw their profits turn to deficits, city officials and a whole slew of mayors knew that allowing a fare hike was the equivalent to political suicide. Even after Fiorello H. LaGuardia oversaw unification and improved the efficiencies of the subway system, the fares remained a nickel until 1948 when the city simply could not afford to shoulder the operating deficits.

By 1953, city leaders knew they had to remove responsibility for subway funding from the direct control of politicians and sought to establish a public authority that would, ideally, operate as efficiently as Robert Moses’ Triborough Bridge Authority. The NYCTA, though, was a conceptual disaster. It couldn’t raise revenue through means other than a fare hike, and it was, as Clifton Hood described in his book 722 Miles, largely unanswerable to the public. It become a bureaucratic scapegoat as municipal leaders failed to acknowledge the subways as a public good and, as Hood writes, failed to “overcome the deep-seated opposition to public investment in rapid transit.” Removed from the sphere of politics, no one took responsibility for the NYCTA.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because history is repeating itself. The MTA has become a far more transparent organization than ever before. It has laid its books open for all to see and has tried to reason with politicians. But a deep aversion to higher taxes and more user fees as well as the easy ability to scapegoat the MTA leads politicians to slam rather than help the authority. Sitting here today, it’s easy to see how we haven’t learned from history, and maybe the MTA — or the NYCTA — is an experiment in government that never really had a chance. It isn’t a failed one per se, but as the MTA tries to solve a massive deficit by cutting services the city needs, I have to wonder when, if ever, our politicians will wake up to reality.

Meet Felix Ortiz, Democrat and Assembly representative from New York City’s 51st District. A member of the Assembly since 1994, Ortiz represents an area of Brooklyn that encompasses Boerum Hill, Borough Park, Gowanus, Red Hook, South of Park Slope, Sunset Park, Windsor Terrace and Wyckoff. As a 16-year Assembly veteran, he keeps a rather low profile but was instrumental in getting the nation’s first ban on hand-held cell phone use while driving approved by the state.

This week, he entered the MTA fray when Gotham Gazette’s David King talked to him for an extensive piece on the state of the MTA’s finances. King’s thoroughly examination of the current financial crisis summarizes the various proposals and issues, and it covers ground I’ve been focusing on for the last few months. He did, however, get some choice quotes from Felix Ortiz on the Student MetroCard issue. Take a look:

“Our working and lower-income families will not be able to absorb these additional costs, especially in the current depressed economic state we are in,” said Assemblyman Felix Ortiz. “This cut is discriminatory in that it affects minority communities to a much higher degree. Everyone is entitled to an education; it should never become a privilege for those who can afford it.”

Ortiz said he can’t see providing the MTA with more funding until the agency makes its accounting more transparent. “Until they reveal their two sets of books and say here is book A and book B, we can’t listen to the MTA. We need to fire everyone, restructure and reorganize,” Ortiz said. “The MTA needs to get rid of the fat at the top.”

The emphasis in there — highlight to show the sheer ignorance in Ortiz’s statement — is mine. Here is a man elected every two years to represent New Yorkers in the state Assembly, and he is not versed in the issue of the day. He is dragging up a seven-year-old charge, one levied at the MTA by a corrupt state comptroller and eventually disprove in a court of law, as indication that the MTA is not to be trusted or even funded. He wants to break labor contracts and break down the city’s transit system before he would even deign to fund the agency.

If only Ortiz were a lone insane voice amidst a sea of MTA sanity, I wouldn’t be so concerned with him. But he joins a long list of elected representatives — including current city comptroller John Liu, Peter Vallone and Aileen Gunther — who bring up trumped up charges as a way to eschew responsibility over the need to fund the MTA and student travel in New York City. This is a failure of government to an extreme.

At the end of the day, Ortiz’s statements aren’t completely about the alleged corruption at the MTA. No one is saying it’s a well run organization, but they don’t have two books and have vastly improved the transparency of their finances. Instead, it’s about an Assembly representative who won’t find money for student transit foisting the state’s problems onto an easy scapegoat. As the MTA said in a statement to me last week, “We agree that school children should not have to pay to get to school, but funding this service is the responsibility of the State and City. The MTA has been called the yellow school bus for New York City, and that’s a good analogy. All over the state school kids get picked up by yellow school buses, and they don’t pay to ride. But the bus doesn’t show up unless state or local government pays the bus company.”

If Ortiz or Liu or Gunther or Vallone want to waste his or her time blaming the victim, so be it. The MTA will turn to its last recourse and cut the services that matter to these officials’ constituents.

When Eliot Spitzer won the governship in 2006, David Paterson, then Lieutenant Governor, never expected to wind up as the state’s chief executive for the better part of Spitzer’s term. Felled by a sex scandal in early 2008, Spitzer had to give way to Paterson, and since then, Paterson’s approval ratings have plummeted. Late last week, The Times, in a well-reported piece, accused him of being aloof, disinterested and simply bad at his job. It was, in my eyes, a worse indictment of his ability to govern than any uncovered scandal could have been.

Yet, Paterson will truck on. He announced this weekend that, despite rumors of a primary challenge from fellow Democrat Andrew Cuomo, Paterson will take his 26-percent approval rating on the road from Niagra to New York and Nassau in an effort to win the governorship in his own right. In his announcement speech on Saturday, he appealed to the MTA’s political and economic woes as a sign of the need for his leadership.

Claiming, in a positive light, that he has “done more in my two years of governor than most governors have done in two terms,” Paterson jumped into the fray. “So,” he said, “if you want a candidate that’s always telling the special interest what they want to hear but has never told the people of New York what they’re going to do about the problems of our time, balancing the budget, balancing the M.T.A. budget, rebuilding Ground Zero, stopping the violence among teenagers, then, don’t pick me as governor.”

Explicit in that statement is the claim that Paterson has told us what he plans to do about the problems of balancing the MTA budget. Implicit in that statement is the claim that Paterson is on the side of the MTA and will help balance the budget. As far as I can tell, neither of those statements are true.

So what, then, has David Paterson done for the MTA since taking over for Eliot Spitzer on March 17, 2008? He started his tenure off on the right foot when he announced support for congestion pricing. That, unfortunately, went nowhere. Paterson didn’t offer up much leadership on congestion pricing, and although congestion pricing remains one of the better solutions to the MTA’s woes, Paterson has not raised the issue since he endorsed the Ravitch Plan in early December 2008.

Since then, Paterson hasn’t offered up much of anything for the MTA. He dithered as the State Senate bickered and provided little leadership as the MTA faced its Doomsday last spring. His great compromise was one that simply promised schools a tax rebate. More problematic though are his recent positions and moves that have actively eliminated funding for MTA programs. He rescinded $140 million in state appropriations and has cut state Student MetroCard contributions from $45 million annually to just $6 million. His representative to the state’s capital review board torpedoed the MTA’s latest five-year plan.

Paterson is a born and bred New Yorker. He grew up in Brooklyn, went to Columbia and studied law at Hofstra before working in Queens and representing the Borough of Kings in the State Senate. He knows how valuable the MTA is to the city, the metropolitan area and the state at large. Yet, his record on the MTA is one that should not inspire the belief that he can, as he claims, balance the MTA budget.

As he gears up his run for governor, David Paterson is asking us to trust him on issues of transit while his record speaks to two years of last chances and lower state contributions. With Election Day nearly eight months away, Paterson can change his record on the MTA with one strike of the pen and some good old politicking. Right now, though, as the MTA moves into the political forefront of what promises to become a tedious race for the governship, Paterson has a long way to go.