Nicole Gelinas has a piece in the New York Post today skewering state Senate Republicans for passing a bill that would repeal the payroll tax in the Metropolitan Transportation Region without offering a solid plan for closing the holes in the MTA operating and capital budgets. Her view is summed up in the headline: “State Senate’s pathetic posturing.”
Nicole writes:
If the GOP were serious, it would address union-labor costs. In three years, MTA pension and health costs will rise 30 percent. It’s not just a city issue; suburban railroad workers enjoy benefits not available in the private sector.
But in Wednesday’s debate [before passing the tax repeal bill], senators talked everything from MTA “mob infiltration” to “criminal accounting” to whether tax-paying is “patriotic.” Nobody said that the MTA’s workers should pay more for health care, saving $150 million, or that pensions for new workers should be less generous.
The Senate GOP’s timidity when it comes to MTA employees is especially noteworthy given the intense focus on the payroll tax issue by senators from Long Island, home of all those notoriously “disabled” LIRR employees.
Do Republican senators whose constituents foot the bill for the MTA’s high labor costs actually believe it would be politically unpopular to take on these unions?
Every year for over a decade, the Empire Center has submitted Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for the payrolls of MTA corporate subsidiaries. And in almost every one o Read More
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has assigned its own police force to monitor attendance and overtime use by Long Island Railroad employees, the Daily News reports. Read More
Employees of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) make a good buck, and six-figure cash compensation in 2013 was by no means limited to the white-collar higher-ups, according to 2013 payroll records posted at SeeThroughNY today. Read More
Last week, at a Manhattan news conference that was also “live-streamed” on Governor Andrew Cuomo’s website, the chief executive officer of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and the president of Local 100 of the Transit Workers Union signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) reflecting a tentative contract deal that will shape the MTA’s labor compensation costs for years to come. Read More
Nicole Gelinas — Manhattan Institute senior fellow, City Journal contributing editor and frequent blogger here — wrote a tough column in the New York Post yesterday, criticizing Governor Cuomo’s nomination of former Governor David Paterson for appointment to an open seat on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) board. The choice, Nicole said, was tantamount to “business-as-usual New York" ... Read More
Republican pols in New York’s downstate suburbs loudly celebrated last week’scourt ruling tossing out a payroll tax enacted by the Legislature in 2009 to subsidize mass transit in the 12-county Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) region. Read More
AUTHOR’S NOTE: PLEASE SEE BELOW FOR IMPORTANT CORRECTIONS TO THIS POST IN BOLD.In May, after months of turmoil, Albany agreed to a new package of taxes for the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authorit Read More