Two days after the Empire Center highlighted looming deficits in the state Thruway Authority’s proposed budget, the authority’s board has put off the meeting at which it was expected to adopt a final budget for 2015.
A spokesman for the authority reportedly said the postponement, to next Friday from Monday, was due to (in paraphrase) a “scheduling conflict” following the Dec. 3 resignation of the board’s chairman, Howard Milstein. In fact, Milstein’s departure was announced Dec. 3 and supposedly had been in the works for a while.
As noted in this space Wednesday, the proposed 2015 budget projects shortfalls growing to more than $300 million by 2018, mostly due to the cost of constructing the new Tappan Zee Bridge. To balance expenses with its own revenues alone, the authority would need to raise tolls by 5 percent next year, growing to 44 percent in 2018, the proposed budget shows.
Thruway authority officials did not respond to emails sent by the Empire Center requesting more information. This CBS-6 Albany TV news report Thursday evening quoted a Thruway spokesman as saying the board would be cutting operating expenses by 30 percent in 2015. That would be quite substantial, adding up to nearly $90 million, if true.
So now what?
From the late-breaking Gannett story on the board meeting postponement:
“If you want to avoid a toll increase, like we did last year, the state subsidizes the toll,” [Gov. Andrew] Cuomo told reporters. “It’s just another agency of the state. It’s an entity of the state.”
Wow.
For the first 60 years of its existence, the state Thruway Authority was self-supporting. Since 2013-14, it has been receiving combined direct and indirect state budget subsidies of nearly $90 million a year — including a state pickup of the cost of Thruway State Police Troop T — which was Cuomo’s way of preventing a proposed 45 percent commercial toll hike. Now, the governor talks casually of raising that subsidy. But, you know, $90 million here and $90 million there, next thing you know, you’re talking real money. Having an authority dependent on a combination of tolls and a permanently larger tax subsidy could turn out to be the worst of all worlds for motorists and taxpayers.
As for the second sentence of the governor’s quote … wha-huh? The governor thinks a toll-supported public authority is “just another agency of the state”? That may be true as a political matter, at least from Cuomo’s perspective: he appoints the chairman and board members, and they do what he tells them. But it isn’t supposed to work that way. This authority is a completely off-budget corporate entity and the law envisions at least a pretense of independence from its directors. Here’s a primer.
Somewhere, Thomas E. “Pay-as-You-Go” Dewey is not smiling.
You may also like
Sorting Fact from Fiction on the Future of Medicaid
As Washington contemplates cutbacks to federal funding for Medicaid, officials in Albany have reacted in two self-contradictory ways.
On one hand, they warn of Read More
The 411 On New York’s 911 Skim
New York for decades has collected, under various names, a special tax on mobile phones. The tax, which today shows up on customer bills as the “public safety communications surcharge,” devolved from being a fee to pay for 911 services to a general revenue source with 911 services as a near second thought. Since 2009, almost half the surcharges paid by customers for public safety communications—more than $1 billion—have been redirected to New York’s general fund. Read More
Immigrant Enrollment in ‘Emergency Medicaid’ Surges to 480,000
One of the biggest drivers of New York's Medicaid enrollment growth over the past decade has been "emergency Medicaid" for undocumented immigrants, newly released state records show.
Read More
Medicaid’s Missing Million
The Health Department has been either unable or unwilling to document the eligibility status of almost one million Medicaid recipients, raising further concern about the possibility of large-scale over-enrollment. Read More
New York’s Medicaid Spiral Is Worse Than Hochul Admitted
Although Governor Hochul said last week that the current trajectory of Medicaid spending is "not sustainable," the upward trend is even steeper than she and her budget director have acknowledged.
Read More
NY’s Road To Electric School Buses Gets Bumpy
New York in 2022 told school districts they’d be barred from purchasing gasoline- or diesel-powered buses after 2027, and instead have to buy electric buses at more than double the upfront cost.
“The purchase of new electric buses will help grow the market,” officials later pledged, “which will in turn help reduce prices.”
Unfortunately for taxpayers, those reductions aren’t materializing—because state officials put the prices, and future increases, on cruise control. Read More
Hochul Shows a Jarring Lack of Direction on Health Care
Financing and regulating health care delivery is one of the biggest responsibilities of state government, yet Governor Hochul had remarkably little to say on that topic in her State of the State speech on Tuesday.
Read More
Hochul’s Pushing Affordability. It Would Cost A Lot.
Governor Hochul is hammering an “affordability” theme in the leadup to Tuesday's 2025 State of the State address. But her campaign, dubbed "Money In Your Pockets," has so far featured little that would reduce the cost of providing, and therefore buying, goods or services in New York.
Instead, the biggest announced and expected elements reflect Albany's waning interest in growing the state economy—and a greater appetite to redistribute what it produces. Read More