State lawmakers on the verge of adjourning for the year are fretting over a vaguely defined, last-minute $1 billion Band-Aid for the MTA, pushed by Gov. Kathy Hochul as another means of filling the $15-billion budget hole she created by abruptly halting congestion pricing.
The plan, as initially presented, appeared to be little more than a one-year IOU promising $1 billion for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. State Assembly and Senate leaders presented the plan to their conferences late on Thursday, hours after legislators rejected Hochul’s first proposal to raise taxes on New York City-based businesses to cover some of the lost funding.
But transit advocates pressed lawmakers to reject the new funding promise, calling it a pale imitation of the $15 billion that the MTA would have been able to access almost immediately by bonding against $1 billion in recurring funding from congestion pricing tolls. The agency planned to put the proceeds toward major projects like the Second Avenue Subway, urgent maintenance needs and important signal upgrades. It is unclear whether the new plan will pass, since a half-dozen Senate Democrats have announced their opposition and Senate leaders cannot afford to lose more than nine votes if they want to pass the measure without help from Republicans, as is customary.
Friday appears likely to be the final day of this year’s Albany session, as lawmakers remained at the Capitol past their planned Thursday departure to tackle congestion pricing and other unsettled bills. Furor over the new proposal reached a fever pitch on Friday — Manhattan state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal wrote on social media that his office was getting more calls in support of congestion pricing “than any other other issue – ever – during my decade in the NYS Senate.”
Meanwhile, the MTA’s board was still scrambling for clarity as they assessed whether it will fall to them to review Hochul’s backtrack, according to three people familiar with the situation. Rumors circulated that the MTA board may be briefed on the situation later in the day by transit officials, and some board members were waiting to see what action Albany takes to shore up the MTA’s finances.
In the meantime, members of the authority’s 21-person board have been inundated with hundreds of emails and phone calls by reporters, riders, and advocates in favor of congestion pricing. “We are being directly lobbied by an incredible army of advocates,” said one board member who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Hochul, for her part, has been in hiding since the surprise announcement threw the session into chaos, taking no questions nor attending any public events since she announced her decision in a prerecorded video message on Wednesday.
The new funding promise is “something that just says, ‘There will be $1 billion for the MTA in the following year’s budget,’ but without any specifics as to what that means,” Senate Deputy Leader Michael Gianaris told NY1 late Thursday. Gianaris could not answer whether the state would be able to sell bonds off that initial $1 billion, as the MTA would have been able to do through congestion pricing.
The senators who announced early opposition to the new scheme were largely city-based lawmakers like Andrew Gounardes of Brooklyn, who said in a statement that he “cannot in good conscience ratify a decision that will eliminate a significant, dedicated revenue source” for the MTA. Another senator, Kristen Gonzalez, argued that paying out $1 billion from the general fund would jeopardize other state funding priorities like Medicaid and childcare.
By Friday afternoon, Gianaris told reporters that there was still no consensus on the measure, and that Senate majority leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins would discuss it later in the day.
Rachael Fauss, senior policy advisor for the watchdog group Reinvent Albany, called the new funding maneuver “a sleight of hand” that conceals how much the MTA would still be losing out.
“The congestion pricing law is solid and would give the MTA $15 billion, not some half-baked promise that no one can read,” she said in an interview Friday.
Since prior governors have routinely raided the MTA’s coffers for money, even a promise of continued funding in future years would be far weaker than the guaranteed tolling revenues the MTA would have gotten from congestion pricing, Fauss said.
Although rejecting the IOU would leave the MTA’s finances in immediate peril, transit advocates still called on the Legislature to vote the proposal down, fearing that authorizing the funding would lessen pressure on the MTA’s board members, who have a fiduciary obligation to the agency, to potentially defy Hochul and reinstate congestion pricing.
If the new funding scheme is approved, observers considered it likely that it will be folded into the “Big Ugly” — a mishmash of bills that Albany lawmakers typically approve late at night before finishing the year’s session.
Nick Garber, Caroline Spivack , 2024-06-07 19:46:41
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