Assembly kills congestion plan

Congestion pricing is dead.
With less than 10 hours remaining before the federal deadline to approve Mayor Bloomberg’s congestion-pricing proposal expired, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver announced that the Assembly conference did not support the plan and would not take the matter up for a vote.
“After hours upon hours upon hours of debate in the Democratic conference, there is just virtually no support for congestion pricing,” said Assemblymember Rory Lancman, who has been against the mayor’s plan since he introduced it more than a year ago. “Thus concludes the congestion pricing drama in New York.”
“This was a victory for democracy,” said Assemblymember Mark Weprin, saying that the Assembly conference carried out the will of the people they represent. “It didn’t have support, and that’s why it died.”
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and a number of environmental and business groups had been lobbying hard for the state legislature to approve the plan by the April 7 deadline in order for the city to qualify for up to $354.5 million in federal funds to help implement the plan.
Bloomberg’s proposal would have charged car drivers $8 and trucks $21 to enter Manhattan south of 60th Street during weekdays from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. in order to reduce congestion, improve air quality in the area and raise money for mass transit.
Meanwhile, shortly after Silver announced that the Assembly was not going to hold a vote on the legislation, John Gallagher, a spokesperson for Bloomberg, said in a statement that the Assembly’s actions constituted “one of the biggest cop-outs in New York’s history.”
“After insisting on the formation of a commission to make recommendations for a bill, and then for the City Council to vote to endorse that bill, the Assembly needs to stand up and be counted,” the statement continued. “They owe it to the majority of New Yorkers who support this plan, the scores of environmental groups, public health organizations, business leaders, unions, and the public at large, to put this proposal to a public vote.”
However, Lancman disagreed and said that no piece of legislation has “an inherent right to come to the floor” and that the Assembly was not going to put it to a vote just to appease the mayor.
Weprin said it was his job to listen to the people in his district, and they were the ones who overwhelmingly opposed the plan.
“I say good riddance because I don’t think it was fair to the people I was elected to represent,” Weprin said.
Last week, the City Council approved the plan by a 30-20 margin, after Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn spent much of the previous few weeks convincing members to vote in favor of the plan.
“There was never any support for congestion pricing, and the only reason it even made it so far was the extraordinary resources of the mayor,” said Lancman, who also believed that the last minute “inappropriate political shenanigans” that occurred in the City Council had a negative effect in Albany.
Meanwhile, Lancman said that the mayor’s unwillingness to compromise on the current legislation did not win him any more supporters in Albany.
“We’re still raising the same objections to the bill that we were raising a year ago when the mayor introduced it,” said Lancman, referring to the lack of environmental review and financial impact on not-for-profits and low income people.