By Philip Newman
State Comptroller Alan Hevesi has called for reforms to curb public authorities, such as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and other agencies which he says operate without accountability.
Hevesi said he would push for legislation early in 2004 to extend the rules on spending, competitive bidding, and personnel that now govern regular state agencies to public authorities as well.
The comptroller, who is from Forest Hills, spoke on WNBC-TV's “News Forum.”
“They are unaccountable for the most part, they are unsupervised, they develop their own cultures,” Hevesi said of the more than 100 New York state authorities, which operate outside the regulations for state departments.
Hevesi said the result was a variety of problems from mismanagement to corruption in the public authorities. For example, he said the MTA spent $6 million on elevators that he contended should have cost $700,000 and the New York Racing Association, which operates Aqueduct, admitted its guilty in a nearly 20-year series of tax frauds.
Besides the MTA and the NYRA, Hevesi also cited the Long Island Power Authority, among many other authorities.
Such agencies are nearly all controlled by the governor and mostly accountable only to their own boards of directors, who are largely appointed by the government.
Hevesi has long criticized the MTA, which he attacked last spring as arrogant and unaccountable to anyone other than Gov. George Pataki. Hevesi accused the MTA of keeping two sets of financial books, one for the public and another for its own use. He said the MTA exaggerated the seriousness of its financial plight in pursuit of a fare increase for the subways, buses and commuter railroads as well as higher bridge and tunnel tolls.
MTA officials last spring called Hevesi’s criticism political since there is a Republican administration in Albany and Hevesi, a former New York City comptroller, is a Democrat.
Hevesi said the preliminary step in his proposal would be to establish a committee to decide whether the public authorities should exist and if they have a “rationale for existing.”
He said those that could not justify their existence as a public authority] should then be subject to the same controls as regular state government agencies.
Reach contributing writer Philip Newman by e-mail at Timesledger@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 136.
