Just a quick administrative note about site access: Due to a problem I installed late Tuesday night, Second Ave. Sagas was inaccessible to visitors using Internet Explorer to access the site. The problem has since been resolved. My apologies for the inconvenience.
With the MTA facing a $1.2-billion deficit, the agency’s CEO and Executive Director Elliot Sander has declined a raise this year. His salary will remain at $275,000 with benefits that push his compensation package to around $350,000. While this is a hefty amount, Sander is probably underpaid considering the scope of his job and the MTA. However, he took a big PR hit when he accepted a $10,000 raise recently and couldn’t in good faith accept another raise right now.
Meanwhile, Sander made sure to drive home the symbolism of declining a raise. I think it’s a symbolic move but an appropriate move given where the MTA is,” Sander said to the Daily News. “We need to make the point to the Legislature that we’re prepared to sacrifice, and that’s what we’re doing here.”
In what is being called a rather somber speech, Gov. David Paterson laid out the economic outlook for New York in his first State of the State address. While the state is tight on money and new projects are being pushed aside, Paterson stressed his commitment to a sound transit policy, pleasing MTA officials and firmly tossing the ball into the state legislature’s court.
While New York, like much of the U.S., is facing a budget, Paterson recognized yesterday that focusing on infrastructure investment and development is a sound way to build an economy stimulus plan. In his vision, the Ravitch Commission’s recommendations will become a reality, and the Second Ave. Subway will continue its journey down Manhattan.
“To build a brighter future, we need a smarter, better infrastructure,” he said. “We should complete signature projects all across our State including the Peace Bridge, the Tappan Zee Bridge, the Second Avenue Subway, and the East Side Access. And we should implement the Ravitch Commission recommendations to improve an essential piece of our infrastructure, the MTA.”
MTA officials, facing a March 25 drop-dead date for their Doomsday budget, expressed relief that the city’s top statesman is on their side. “I was delighted. The governor’s been great, in terms of supporting the MTA and called for the Ravitch Commission, MTA Executive Director and CEO Elliot Sander said to NY’s Bobby Cuza: [I] just was thrilled that he mentioned it in the State of the State.”
More optimistic though is the growing support the plan seems to have from a few key Assembly members. Cuza reports:
The challenge now is winning the support of the legislature. The Ravitch recommendations include both new tolls on the East River bridges, and a new payroll tax. Assembly leaders said improvements to the plan can be made.
“There are controversial elements of it, but in the end, I think you’re going to see this legislature and this governor work to provide more money to save the fares on the trains, subways and buses, to make sure we build out the capital program of the MTA, so we have a good system 10 years from now,” said Assemblyman Richard Brodsky (D-Westchester).
Clearly, there are controversial elements to it. Any plan designed to ensure the long-term health of a transit system through a dedicated and non-variable source is bound to have costs and controversies. At some point, some elected official besides Paterson will have to recognize that far more people are impacted by a bad MTA than East River Bridge tools and that the region depends on the MTA far more than it depends on free access to Manhattan via the East River crossings.
For now, the MTA has some big names lining up behind this recommendation, but time’s a-wastin’. We have 10 weeks until the MTA starts implementing service cuts and fare hikes. No one wants to see that happen, but will someone step up to lead the effort to save the beleaguered transit agency?
In an effort to become more bike-friendly, Metro-North is testing bike hooks on the M-7 trains. While January is an odd time to start a bike pilot, the program will be ongoing as the MTA solicits feedback from bike-riding commuters. Trainjotting likes the look while Streetsblog wonders why bike space and disability seating have to clash.
Top: Bill Brand in 1980 poses with his recently-installed Masstransiscope. (Courtesy of Bill Brand. Click the images to enlarge.)
When Bill Brand’s Masstransiscope, a zoetrope hidden behind a slitted wall at the long-abandoned Myrtle Ave. stop just north of DeKalb Ave., first debuted in 1980, straphangers could view it from the Manhattan-bound QB train. One of those things, it seems, is ready for a revival. After an extensive restoration that involved removed layers of graffiti, the Masstransiscope is back.
“When I made the piece,” Brand, a film and video artist, said to me this week, “I didn’t even have a VCR. I’m just really happy to have it back.”
The recent saga of the Masstransiscope goes back about five years, according to Brand. The piece, designed as a zoetropic image, had been lost to time. Many of the lights had burned out, and the hand-painted panels had long been vandalized. It had become a rather of New York subway lore, forgotten to time by all but a few.
Brand, giving a talk to a group of film archivists, threw in a mention of the Masstransiscope as what he called one “an unusual cinematic work.” The response from the audience was immediate, and these archivists urged Brand to restore it. “Do I spend the time restoring this or do I make the next piece?” Brand questioned.
In the end, Brand decided to contact the MTA about restoring the piece. While Arts for Transit was initially resistant mainly due to the price, Brand secured some funding through a grant from the Albers Foundation. When development above ground allowed for temporary access to the remnants of the Myrtle Ave. station, Brand headed underground to survey the damage.
What he found was not pretty, but with the grant in hand, volunteer labor from some of his NYU students and some good old trial-and-error, Brand eventually figured out the best approach to cleaning and repairing the unique work. “I was interested in restoring it,” he said, “but not sure how.”
At first, Brand consulted with Metroclean Express, the company tasked with power-washing the city’s bus shelters. While the original work contained an anti-graffiti film, Brand was unsure how kind the years had been to his now-28 -year-old piece. Four hours into the work on one of the Masstransiscope’s 57 segments, just half of the panel had been cleaned, and the cleaning was taking its toll on the panel. “I thought this isn’t going to work this way,” he said.
Back in his studio, Brand experimented with a variety of commercial paint cleaners and eventually discovered a combination that did the trick. In a few weeks, all 57 panels had been stripped clear of what Brand guessed were between 20 and 30 layers of graffiti. While the piece still has some minor damages, as Brand said, “that was dust and hair.” Riders espying it from the windows of a passing B or Q train won’t be able to notice the damage.
Newly restored, the Masstransiscope has enjoyed something of a soft launch. Randy Kennedy profiled the piece in a Times article on New Year’s Day, but the MTA has not held any sort of formal unveiling ceremony. It is now including on Arts for Transit’s permanent artwork website as well. “It’s really exciting to be able to present it again,” Amy Hausmann, assistant director at Arts for Transit, said.
Now relit with longer lasting lightbulbs, the Masstransiscope will be in the minds of MTA officials. Hausmann and Lester Burg, a curator at Arts for Transit, told me that they plan to keep on eye on it. Conservation is indeed an issue for the arts-minded side of the MTA.
Over the next few months, Brand is hoping to give a Transit Museum-sponsored lecture about the work, but in the meantime, he is quite content to let riders discovery it for themselves. In fact, just a few weeks ago, I overheard a couple wondering just how long that “flip-book type thing” had been on display. The two could not agree as they spent the ride across the Manhattan Bridge talking about it.
“I’ve been really tickled by how much self-generated interest it’s generating this time around,” Brand said of his piece that offers riders a 20-second glimpse at a zoetrope live in the subways.
Late last week, MTA CEO and Executive Director Elliot Sander predicted that the transit authority and the Transport Workers Union would be able to avoid another strike as the TWU contract is set to expire later this month. While the two sides have been negotiating for the last few weeks, they are not going to come to a negotiated resolution and will instead head to arbitration.
A few minutes ago, the MTA released the following statement:
Over the past several months, the MTA and TWU Local 100 have discussed a possible agreement on a contract effective January 16, 2009. However, due to complications associated with today’s current economic climate, we have reached an impasse and have jointly decided to arbitrate contract terms.
The Union, on the other hand, does not seem as optimistic:
After months of discussions with the M.T.A., a settlement could not be reached. As the contract moves to arbitration, we wait to see whether transit workers will be treated fairly or in a manner disparate to the other workers who serve this city.
While arbitration is not as ideal as a negotiated contract and can lead to animosity further down the road, both sides have so far seemed willing to do what it takes to avoid a strike. That is, of course, good news for straphangers, but today’s development throws a wrench into those plans. The TWU is obviously not too happy about the arbitration development, and another strike would probably throw MTA bailout efforts into turmoil.
I’ll have more on this development as the story develops.
As President-elect Barack Obama plans to take over the reins of a country in an economic recession, he has been putting forth some transportation stimulus package plans. Unfortunately, transit advocates are finding much to bemoan in Obama’s road-centric plans. Yesterday’s Times joined the fray with an editorial calling for transit investment. Hopefully, Obama will heed the call, and if he does, I have to believe that New York stands to benefit.
On March 25, this Doomsday budget-Richard Ravitch-MTA drama will come to a head for it is on that day that the MTA Board will have to decide whether or not to approve draconian service cuts and rampant fare hikes. Start your clocks, folks, because we’re in for a wild political ride.
“The drop-dead date is March 25, which is when the MTA board of directors meets and will vote whether to hit the riders with a 23 percent fare hike and massive service cuts or whether the state legislature and Governor Paterson will come to the rescue of the riding public,” Gene Russianoff, head of the Straphangers Campaign, said to NY1’s Bobby Cuza.
Meanwhile, New York State leaders are already lining up behind the Ravitch proposals. Whether the state legislature will is another question entirely. Cuza has more on this story:
The Paterson administration said it’s already drafting legislation to implement the recommendations of the Ravitch Commission, including a new payroll tax and new tolls on the East River bridges, to allow for a much smaller fare hike. The MTA will be sending a delegation to Albany next week to lobby legislators who go back to work this Wednesday…
Last week, MTA Executive Director Lee Sander said the proposed hikes are not just a scare tactic. “If we don’t get the money from Albany, we would have to do this. Having said that, do I hope that this will have a stimulative effect on our legislators and further encourage them to pass the recommendations of the ravitch commission? Yes,” said Sander.
While the MTA may also get money from a federal stimulus bill, it’s likely those dollars will go toward construction projects and won’t prevent a fare hike. As for the mayor, he said he has faith in Albany. “I’m optimistic that they’ll do something. But right now, if they don’t do anything, we’re going to have Draconian increases in fares and some cuts in services,” said Bloomberg.
We’ll be hearing a lot of that over the next two and a half months as New York’s straphangers and rail commuters await for a final judgment.
As this drama unfolds, it will be interesting to see how newspaper support lines up behind Ravitch. While The New York Times recently endorsed the Ravtich recommendations, other city newspapers haven’t embraced the full slate of tolls and taxes. Last week, the Downtown Express, while voicing approval of the tax-and-toll plan, urged state officials to consider higher on-street parking rates and vehicle registration fees as an alternate possibility.
In the end, this will boil down to the political feasibility of the chosen plan. While only three percent of Brooklyn drivers would be hit by a toll while nearly 60 percent stand to lose out if service cuts and fare hikes come to pass, for some reason, tolls are a political no-no. They might best for the city, but politicians are loathe to wreck their re-election chances. Either way, the Doomsday clock is ticking, and in 78 days, we’ll know what the future holds for our subway system.
The 86th St. station on the West Side IRT has long been decorated with mosaic versions of paintings. While the third graders’ art at 59th St. have long been removed, these tiled paintings at 86th St. still give the station a more artistic feel. Today, Times reporter Martin Espinoza chats with some of the artists about the origins of the paintings and what these drawings mean to them 20 years later. It’s a nice New York story about some good that came out of an Arts for Transit program.
As the first week of 2009 dawns, we’ll soon be hearing a lot about more about the MTA’s finances. The authority has public hearings on the Doomsday budget set for this month, and at some point, the state legislature will begin to deal with a Ravitch-inspired bailout plan.
But in the meantime, let’s hop into the Wayback Machine. We’ll visit a time when the MTA had money and decided to spend all on us! Those were the days, eh?
The time is 2005, and the MTA has determined that they will enjoy a $928-million budget surplus for that fiscal year. That number would in fact eventually reach $1.04 billion. As The Times explained at the time, the surplus “stemmed from the unusually high real estate taxes and low interest rates.” We now know all too well what happens when unusually high real estate taxes turn into unusually low real estate taxes, but we’ll get to that later.
In an effort to give something back to the riders, the MTA in October announces a plan for discount holiday fares. Immediately, this move is decried as “a marketing gimmick” by city experts. This move will cost the MTA $100 million of their surplus with the rest going to reducing some unfunded pension liability, enhancing subway security and expanding service.
Experts were skeptical. “Why is the M.T.A. engaging in feel-good, short-term gimmicks rather than convincing riders and business leaders that it has sensible, long-term plans for a balanced operating budget and a fully funded capital budget?” James A. Parrott, chief economist at the Fiscal Policy Institute, said to Sewell Chan.
Some city officials wondered about the rational behind the move. “Whom does this actually benefit?” Preston Niblack of the city’s Independent Budget Office said to The Times. “It does not really solve any structural issues. It’s great from a public relations point of view, but it does not address long-term needs.” It never does.
In the end, the MTA Board approved the plan but not without dissent. Some board members feared the discount offerings would lead the public to believe the MTA had full coffers at a time when internal documents were predicting a $900-million deficit for as soon as 2009. (They clearly underestimated.)
In the end, the program earned mixed reviews, and transit advocates maintained that the money should have been reinvested in the system and used to shore up the MTA’s shaky future financial picture. Even in 2006, hindsight was 20/20.
Now, three years removed from the days of discount fares, the MTA has gone from a surplus to a deficit of a size larger than the one predicted in 2005. If the agency knew that their finances were going to head south, why didn’t they urge a Ravitch Commission-type investigation sooner? For years, we’ve know that real estate tax revenue is no way to fund a transit system, and now we’re paying the press.
At some point, the MTA’s finances will improve, and the agency may once again be saddled with the “problem” of a surplus. But for now, we can just look back on 2005 as a moment in time when transit funding seemed secure, and the riders got a discount, misguided as it may have been.