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MTA head Lhota joins retired Assemblymember Brennan to discuss transit crisis

Independent neighborhood democrats host discussion in Brooklyn Heights

February 20, 2018 By Andy Katz Special to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle
MTA Chairman Joe Lhota addresses a question from the audience while retired Assemblymember Jim Brennan listens in the background. Eagle photos by Andy Katz
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In the best tradition of Daniel entering the lion’s den, one-time Republican mayoral candidate and current MTA head Joe Lhota appeared before the Independent Neighborhood Democrats at St. Francis College to explain the origins of and possible remedies for the city’s growing transit crisis.

“This past spring, there was pretty much collapse in the transportation system — the number of delays, the number of breakdowns, problems with the signal system — and it became obvious to me very quickly what had happened.” Referring to the fiscal crisis of 2008, Lhota pointed out that revenues declined sharply: “The MTA had to make certain decisions. And they did it by cutting back on services, cutting back bus routes and they also cut back on maintenance on a system as old as ours.”

Since July 2017, Lhota continued, the priority became getting the system fixed.  “But everyone in Albany, and here in New York City, everyone agrees that the MTA needs a new source of funding.” Lhota described several alternative methods of raising money, including “congestion pricing,” charging motorists for entering Manhattan from, for example, FDR Drive at 42nd Street. “With the current technology,” he said, “it could be done quite easily.”

Lhota concluded his opening remarks citing a metaphor of the MTA as NYC’s circulatory system that conducts nearly 10 million riders per day. “The two things that make New York special,” Lhota summed up, “are the subway system and the water system.”

“The transit system is very much the lifeblood of this city,” former Assemblymember for the 44th District Jim Brennan, who shared the stage with Lhota, agreed. Prior to retiring, Brennan had chaired the NYS Assembly committee that oversees operations of the MTA.

“The current situation is both a short-term and a long-term problem,” Brennan continued. He outlined a congestion-pricing model that would address maintenance issues in the short-term by taxing for-hire vehicles as they enter Manhattan at rates depending on their proximity to the central business district.

“The MTA also has a long-term problem,” he continued. One consequence of the state intervening to rescue the MTA in the 1980s was the creation of a Capital Review Board to which MTA must submit a five-year plan. MTA can only implement projects that are approved in this plan. “The next five-year cycle begins in 2020,” Brennan said. “The last two plans each amounted to $30 billion, and when they were approved, the governor and the board really didn’t know where much of that money would come from. So MTA borrowed about $15 billion in 2010 and scaled back on many of its projects in 2015. Now the state comptroller believes that the next plan, in 2019, will be similarly unfunded.”

“It’s not at all clear,” Brennan concluded, “whether or not the legislature would approve congestion pricing … I don’t think the governor or the Legislature would support higher taxes to fix the MTA this year. I do hope eventually they’ll support limited congestion taxes so they can come home with some money.”

“I agree with Jim,” Lhota said. “There won’t be any sort of congestion tax coming out of Albany until at least after the election.”

Given that New York state operates a system as vast as MTA, but funds only about 1 percent of its total costs, it’s probably amazing that it’s managed as long as it has, even thriving from a nadir in the 1970s when NYC’s storied underground was squalid and perilous.

“Where does the buck stop?” demanded moderator and IND President Joe Colletti. “Whom do we blame? Whom do we praise?”

“Because I live in the vortex between the mayor and the governor,” Lhota said smiling, “I’d say ‘blame me.’ I don’t want to get in the middle of that fight, but I am in the middle of that fight.”

It was the evening’s first and only reference to the Ali-Frazier-level feud dividing Albany from City Hall, and which many believe has not caused but certainly exacerbated NYC’s transit crisis.

“I’d say to both of them, ‘Serve your constituents!” Lhota added.

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