The image of schoolchildren standing with their thumbs in the air, hitchhiking along a busy thoroughfare raises quite a few red flags. Yet that is just the sad and dangerous scenario City Councilmember Elizabeth Crowley described at a recent rally in protest of a Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) plan to eliminate free MetroCards for students.
About a week later, on Thursday, February 25, a state Assembly coalition fired off a similarly critical letter to MTA Chairman and CEO Jay Walder. The dispatch was in response to Walder’s note to the 41-member coalition, in which he defended his agency’s decision to cut the student assistance program in response to a “dire fiscal situation.”
Critics decried the newfound expenses that would fall on the parents of up to 550,000 youngsters who rely on mass transit to get to school.
Currently, third- through sixth-graders are eligible for free fare cards if they commute more than one mile to the classroom, and seventh-graders through high school seniors don’t pay if they live beyond 1.5 miles.
Under the proposed MTA plan, adopted in December 2009, students would be required to pay half-price fares as of September 2010 and full-price a year later. The MTA is phasing in the plan because it understands that “this policy change would cause pain for a lot of families,” explained MTA deputy press secretary Aaron Donovan.
Confronted with an $800 million budget gap, Donovan said the MTA sees no way around the cost-cutting measure. The agency presently loses $214 million in “foregone revenue” as a result of the free MetroCard program, he added.
In his letter to the Assemblymembers, Walder pointed out that the state only reimburses the MTA $6 million toward its student MetroCard losses, when, he said, it is “a matter that must be addressed by parties other than the MTA.”
Walder’s explanation does nothing to appease opponents of the plan.
In a statement, the chair of the Assembly Committee on Corporations, Authorities and Commissions, Richard Brosky, of Westchester, said he and his colleagues “will not permit the MTA to use students and working families as bargaining chips.”
Fellow committee member William Scarborough, who chairs the Assembly Children and Families Committee, said city schools already have enough problems with dropouts and kids having difficulty getting to the classroom.
“We certainly don’t need to throw another roadblock in the way by making them have to pay,” Scarborough told The Courier.
Coalition members like Scarborough are prepared to recommend to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver that the MTA be forced to trim $14 million from its current headquarters and administrative expenditures before eliminating student fare cards. Such a reduction, they argue, would help to reinstate the student travel program.
“We have a little bit of time but certainly we can’t allow this to go forward and can’t leave this uncertainty hanging out there,” explained Scarborough, who said the Assembly is awaiting a response from Walder and his MTA.
In the meantime, the southeast Queens Assemblymember said he has heard from “very concerned and angry” constituents.
“It has to be dealt with quickly,” he said.
