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Even as the MTA planned to lay off workers and slash services, the agency's payroll increased last year, data show. The average total pay for Metropolitan Transportation Authority employees last year increased by 2.4% to $69,000 - inflated in part Read More

A searchable database of the complete Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) payroll for 2009 – including names, titles, base pay rates and total pay received by 74,708 individuals – shows an increase of 2.4 percent in the average total pay of MTA employees last year. Read More

Overtime for MTA employees has again come under scrutiny, as many transit workers’ total pay more than double their base salaries in 2009. The cash-strapped MTA has paid millions in overtime to employees ranging from agency presidents to train m Read More

New York State entities continue to scrape the bottom of the barrel to scare up a few dollars. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) will issue $475 million in short-term notes this week. The MTA pledges to repay the debt as soon as it get Read More

The Drum Major Institute's John Petro has a in today's Daily News calling for New York to implement congestion pricing to fix New York's transit problem. "We need a long-term solution that ... creates a permanent, steady source of revenue," Read More

Thirty-five years ago this month, the state Urban Development Corp. defaulted on its short-term debt -- setting off bond-market alarms that culminated in New York City’s 1970s fiscal crisis. Could the Metropolitan Transportation Authority become this era’s UDC? Read More

E.J. and I have a in today's Post on the MTA's quickly deteriorating finances. Especially disturbing is the MTA's recent reliance on short-term borrowing to cover its operating costs (in other words, paying millions to Wall Street banks in financin Read More

Moody's has on $12.2 billion worth of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA)'s debt, in part because money from the new $1.5 billion downstate payroll tax continues to fall far short of what the state expected. That tax gap was $200 millio Read More

Mayor Bloomberg, enlightenedly governing from Copenhagen via the World Wide Web this week, had the following to say about the dim-bulb, smaller-carbon-footprinted folks back home to CNBC:  "I don't think that congestion pricing and thos Read More

A court decision upholding a three-year, 11.5 percent pay raise for New York City transit workers should make local governments elsewhere nervous. State Supreme Court Justice O. Peter Sherwood has upheld an arbitration panel award to the Transport Read More

The state bailed out the MTA with a $1.5 billion payroll tax earlier this year. But it turns out revenues from the payroll tax will come in $200 million less than expected. If only the state and the MTA had had someone back then to tell them that th Read More

A few thoughts on the late-breaking Albany deal to pass the so-called , now stalled for good reason in the Senate after passing in the Assembly: Not for the first time, some of New York's well-meaning are being suckered by a bill title.  Like most Read More