After spending the early part of this week highlighting politicians who do not seem to care enough about transit to educate themselves, we find ourselves faced with a high-ranking New York official who nearly gets it. Christine Quinn, speaker of the City Council, has engaged in a very public campaign to support the student MetroCard program and to speak out against the MTA’s proposed service cuts. She’s nearly on the right track with some of her words, but I am wary of fully supporting her plan.

At a rally on Tuesday to protest cuts to the student MetroCard program, Quinn spoke about throwing Council support behind the student rides. More importantly, she stressed how the City Council would consider more funding for student transportation during the spring budgeting sessions and how she would prioritize this item. “I recognize there is a city responsibility in this funding, and we are willing to have that conversation and see what can be done,” Quinn said.

For this, I applaud Speaker Quinn. She is doing what a politician should be doing. She is promising to explore how the city can fulfill its funding obligations to the both the MTA and the New York’s students, many of whom rely upon free transit to get to and from school. She recognizes that these cuts aren’t something the MTA would choose to do but that years of financial neglect from the city and state have backed the MTA into a corner.

But beyond this proposal, Quinn’s actions get a little murky. In addition to her vow to find more money for student rides, she calls upon the MTA to take four actions immediately to stave off the cuts. Those are, according to her action center, as follows:

• Reallocating 10 percent of direct stimulus aid to MTA operating expenses ($91.5 million);
• Using budgeted PAYGO capital funds for operating ($50 million); and
• Reallocating 10 percent of additional stimulus transit aid to State to operating ($30 million).
• Do not implement any actions without a full set of public hearings.

First, let’s dispose of the last item. Numerous politicians have tried to criticize the MTA for passing a budget a week after it was unveiled and with no input for the public. This ignores the reality that the MTA Board was, by law, required to pass a balanced budget before the end of the 2009 calendar year and had just three weeks from the time the budget crisis was announced to do so. The agency has pledged to hold hearings this year and will reevaluate the proposed cuts before they need to be implemented in June.

The other three are, in effect, the Gene Russianoff Plan, and I’ve already voiced my reticence over using capital funds for operating deficits. In a nutshell, my fears concern the precedent such a financial move would set and the MTA’s dire need to continue investing in system maintenance and expansion even in the face of a short-term operating deficit.

If the agency is to reshuffle its budgets to cover its operating gap with capital funds, such a move will become the lazy legislature’s fallback every time a hole opens up in the MTA budget. Albany will begin reducing capital expenditures in order to meet operating budget projections, and the agency’s capital budget will empty faster than a raided piggy bank. If this is the last-gasp proposal to stave service cuts, I would support it, but until every other available long-term funding option has been exhausted, we cannot fund the MTA through a short-term reshuffling of its two separate balance sheet.

Right now, Quinn is an ally of transit, and she should remain so. I won’t sign her petition yet, but I won’t begrudge those who do. Until we know that other options — bridge tolls and congestion pricing — simply will not work, we cannot rob from the future for a short-term fix today. It won’t solve the systemic problems with the way the MTA is funded and will only exacerbate these shortcomings in the future.