ALBANY – The Metropolitan Transportation Authority got railroaded in the state’s newly adopted budget, advocates charged Thursday.
Facing a $15 billion gap in its capital budget, the MTA received a paltry $250 million from the state’s $6 billion windfall from recent legal settlements.
The transit agency also stands to receive $750 million from the state’s capital budget, which is borrowed money.
“Instead of offering tax breaks for a few yacht-buyers, Gov. Cuomo and the Legislature should fund the transit that eight million New Yorkers use every day,” said Jess Nizar of the Riders Alliance.
Cuomo budget division spokesman Morris Peters defended the allocation but added “work on the MTA capital plan will continue with all stakeholders.”
A spokesman for the MTA declined to comment.
The state’s $6 billion windfall resulted from a series of high profile legal settlements with banks and major financial houses stemming from a 2008 Wall Street meltdown.
Cuomo and state lawmakers, in the budget, allocated the money for a host of projects, including $500 million to improve broadband service upstate, $500 million to aid farms in the Hudson Valley and Southern Tier, $1.5 billion for economic development projects upstate and $1.3 million for capital projects along the Thruway, including the Tappan Zee Bridge.
“I think the state has just missed a huge opportunity to make a strategic use of this windfall and get ahead of the MTA’s capital needs,” said E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center for New York State Policy.
© 2015 New York Daily News
You may also like
Faced with $10B deficit, MTA says it’s eyeing cutting overtime spending
Alfonso Castillo
The financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is adding urgency to the agency’s efforts to curtail overtime numbers that critics say remain alarmingly high.
The MTA said at Wed Read More
Pandemic, recession don’t bring down school budgets
Stephen T. Watson
This year's school elections were delayed and then shifted entirely to voting by mail thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, which also shut down schools here and across the country.
District officials worried this new method of Read More
The good, the bad and the ugly in Cuomo’s budget
“We are at the early stages of what shapes up as the biggest state and city fiscal crisis since the Great Depression,” said E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center. “Borrowing and short-term cuts aside, the budget doesn’t chart any clear path out of it.” Read More
Medicaid cuts make the state budget, with some tweaks
Bill Hammond, director of health policy at the conservative-leaning think tank the Empire Center, suggested this is because the proposed cuts are meant to slow the otherwise rapid growth in Medicaid spending, which means an increase is still possible. Read More
Comptroller warns of financial distress at the MTA, and the MTA goes on a hiring spree
According to Ken Girardin, a labor analyst at the right-leaning Empire Center for Public Policy, every new police officer will cost the MTA roughly $56,000, which means the new personnel would initially cost the MTA roughly $28 million a year.
Those costs should rapidly increase over time, as police salaries rapidly increase. Read More
LIRR union chief blames OT on inadequate staffing levels, increased workload
“That’s one heck of an incentive,” said E.J. McMahon, research director for the Empire Center for Public Policy, the organization that publicized the MTA’s alarmingly high overtime rate in an April MTA payroll report. Read More
MTA, LIRR union relationship worse than ever; up next is collective bargaining
The MTA’s heightened focus on overtime follows an April financial report from the Empire Center for Public Policy that revealed alarmingly high overtime rates among some MTA employees, including former LIRR chief measurement officer Thomas Caputo, who made $344,147 in overtime on top of his base salary of $117,499. Read More
EDITORIAL: The MTA’s culture of fraud
Raymond Murphy, a foreman with the LIRR’s Buildings and Bridges department, was one of the MTA’s top earners in 2017, pulling in $405,021, including $295,490 in OT, according to data compiled by the government watchdog Empire Center. Read More