By Philip Newman
Transit officials Friday predicted a “blowback” of reaction against some New York state legislators if they fail to bail out the MTA with 11 days left before the agency plans gargantuan bus and subway cuts and a 23 percent fare hike.
One transit advocate warned of Draconian cutbacks to bus and subway service in Queens.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority convened in an emergency meeting ostensibly to discuss its dire plight and answer questions from board members.
But much of the meeting, it turned out, brought exhortations to the New York state Assembly and Senate to quickly approve a financial plan to save the agency from what a transit activist called “edging toward a catastrophe.”
The holdup in Albany is in the Senate where perhaps as many as five senators say they will not vote for tolls on East River bridges. Since Democrats hold a two-vote majority, it would require Republican support, but that is uncertain.
The tolls are part of the Ravitch Commission plan to save the MTA, which faces a shortfall of as much as $2 billion by later this year. The plan also includes a payroll tax in the 12 counties the MTA serves.
State Sen. Malcolm Smith (D-St. Albans), the Senate majority leader, has questioned whether the MTA’s deadline of March 25 is real. But MTA Chairman Dale Hemmerdinger said “there is nothing artificial about March 25.
MTA Chief Financial Officer Gary Dellaverson explained in detail elements of the prodigious debt and its implications.
In the public speaker prelude to the meeting, Gene Russianoff, attorney of the transit activist agency Straphangers Campaign, said the outlook was grim.
“We are on the brink of catastrophe,” he said.
He cautioned that if the state Senate and Malcolm Smith do not take action to rescue the MTA, there could be severe consequences for the senator’s own borough.
“If he doesn’t come to the aid of riders, his constituents will see a total or major cuts on 14 bus routes – Q24, Q30, Q31, Q41, Q42, Q56,Q84, Q74, Q75, Q76, Q110, QM4, Q21 and X28 – and more crowding and longer waits on the already brutally overcrowded E and F trains in Queens,”
Neysa Pranger of the Regional Plan Association said more than 6,000 people had e-mailed the Albany legislators imploring them for financial help and more than a thousand had writer letters.
Defending the March 25 do or die deadline before cuts kick in, Hemmerdinger said: “We did the numbers on exactly when we would have to do this to balance our budget, which the law requires us to do.”
Hemmerdinger said there comes a point of no return since “we would have to reprogram thousands of turnstiles and vending machines and countless of pieces of equipment,” he said.
Asked whether he thought no action by the Legislature would set off a “blowback” against Albany lawmakers, Hemmerdinger said: “If we get no help and these cuts become reality and people are confronted by them and they say ‘they’ve taken away my train, I can’t get to work on time’ or ‘I can’t afford this, who do you think they are going to complain to – who do you think they’re going to call?’”
Andrew Albert, a non-voting board member assigned to represent transit riders, said “this mass transit system affects thousands of people who seldom ride the subway or bus and thousands who never ride either. It’s the lifeblood of our economy.
“It’s a house of cards,” Albert added. “Something had better be done.”
