We already know that Carl Kruger will take no responsibility for his own bad bailout plan. Now another Senator — Martin Malave Dilan — is pointing fingers at the MTA in a way that just doesn’t make sense.
In an open letter to MTA CEO and Chairman Jay Walder, Dilan sounds personally offended that Walder did not tell Dilan about the agnecy’s financial woes before word leaked to the press. Never mind the fact that Dilan is one of the Senators who passed a reduced state budget with $143 million in appropriations taken away from the MTA. Never mind that the MTA is more important to the state than Dilan. It is all about him.
The full letter is embedded below the jump. I’ll excerpt the best parts right here:
Specifically, I find it disappointing that members of your staff would notify the media, while excluding my colleagues and I in the Legislature.
To be clear, my sentiments are not rooted within the action of notifying the press, I simply believe your organization should provide the Legislature with the same consideration we have provided you. Both, prior to your arrival, with the new revenue package advanced in May, and throughout your nomination process, we have continually relied and agreed upon the importance of an open dialogue. I am disappointed that your commitment to an openness within the MTA and initiating a new era of accountability and transparency has not begun to take shape.
It is an affront to our burgeoning partnership, often discussed in previous months, to exclude us from this critical information. Additionally, it is difficult to think that our exclusion was not simply a matter of being overlooked. One can only conclude that by going to the press first, your organization was in fact using the media to once again stir the bees’ nest, rallying fears of insufficient funding and potential fare increases and service cuts.
This is, without a doubt, the most self-important letter a State Senator has ever written to another in charge of the MTA. Elizabeth Benjamin at the Daily News believes that this letter “does not bode well” for future relations between Walder and Albany. Somehow, the MTA head is responsible for one of the recipients of Gary Dellaverson’s letter leaking it to the press.
In my opinion, though, this letter just reinforces my belief that Albany doesn’t know what to do with the MTA and is intent on choking off New York City’s transportation lifeline. Dilan is a Democrat from District 17, an area in Brooklyn in which approximately 65 percent of those who commute do so via public transit. If he wants to form an adversarial relationship with the agency, let him.
In a sweeping piece on the MTA’s financial crisis, Nicole Gelinas urges the authority to target its cuts to areas represented by those who oppose the agency. She wants Transit to penalize Sheldon Silver’s inability to deliver congestion pricing by slicing up Lower Manhattan; she urges the agency to cut services to Carl Kruger’s and Pedro Espada’s transit-dependent districts. I would add Dilan to this list, and when they foolishly allow the MTA to fail, we can send them packing.
For the full text of Sen. Dilan’s letter, click through.
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