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MTA Reveals Doomsday Plan If Feds Don’t Deliver On $12 Billion In Relief
By
Stephen Nessen
Published Aug 26, 2020
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Kostas Lymperopoulos/CSM/Shutterstock
By
Stephen Nessen
Published Aug 26, 2020
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The MTA called an emergency board meeting on Wednesday to outline the most draconian cuts it would make if the federal government doesn’t deliver on its request for $12 billion before the end of the year.
The agency said it needs the funds to balance the budget and get through 2021. In November, they will present next year’s budget options to the board, which it must vote on by December 31st. (Last year’s operating budget came in at $16 billion.) If the $12 billion doesn’t come through, the MTA is considering slashing subway and bus service by 40 percent, and commuter rail service by 50 percent. Layoffs and fare and additional toll hikes other than the planned ones are also on the table. Nearly all capital projects would be put on hold under this plan.
In July, the agency estimated that it was losing $200 million a week from a combination of the dramatic drop in ridership and tax revenue and the increased cost of cleaning buses and trains to lower the risk of coronavirus infection. Subway service is down 75 percent from pre-pandemic levels, and buses are down 45 percent. Chairman and CEO of the MTA, Pat Foye, said if service levels continue at this rate the financial shortfall will be far worse than the Great Depression.
The MTA exhausted its first round of $3.9 billion in federal relief funding at the end of July. Earlier this month, the U.S. Senate went on recess without passing a second relief bill.
“The future of the MTA and the future of the New York region rests squarely in the hands of the federal government, the U.S. Senate specifically,” Foye said. “If they fail to do so, horrendous choices lay ahead.”
The MTA estimates that cutting subway and bus service by 40 percent, and laying off 7,200 transit workers would save the agency $880 million a year.
But the president of the Transit Workers Union Local 100 and board member John Samulsen said there’s no way the union would accept these cuts. “We’ve paid with blood,” he said, “That you’d come to ask the workers that just put their necks on the line by being on the frontline of this fight against Covid-19 is ridiculous.” The union said nearly 100 transit workers suffered COVID-related deaths.
The MTA’s CFO Bob Foran also predicted the agency would need to cut 50 percent of commuter railroad service to balance the budget, leading to 850 Long Island Railroad job cuts.
Speaking Wednesday, Governor Andrew Cuomo added the state doesn’t have enough money to prevent these types of cuts. “It’s not mathematically possible,” he said.
Sen. Chuck Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said they’ll fight to secure the funding.
“I was proud to stand with MTA leadership last month to call for billions in federal funding in the upcoming relief package and I will continue working with Chairman Foye and state and local leaders to secure the MTA’s future and our region’s economic recovery,” Gillibrand wrote in a statement that went on to blame Republican Senator Mitch McConnell for a lack of federal relief.
Budget watchdog Nicole Gelinas, from the Manhattan Institute, said congress should provide the funding, but it won’t solve the MTA’s bigger issues like reduced ridership. “The MTA should be thinking of the money from Congress not as a solution, but as a way to buy time to do many of the other things it mentioned as draconian — e.g. work with the workforce to become more productive through attrition, not layoffs (particularly with commuter-rail train crews and overnight one-person subway-train operation with camera coverage of the train), rather than wait until the last minute and have to do indiscriminate layoffs or pay freezes,” she wrote in a statement.
Foye calls the government the “funder of last resort." If federal funds don’t come through he predicts, “it will cause a huge disruption in the MTA’s operation, its service in the region, and huge lasting damage to the economy of the New York City region costing tens and hundreds of thousands of jobs.”
Tagged
MTA
budget
Stephen Nessen
Stephen Nessen covers transportation. Since 2008 he has reported on everything from Occupy Wall Street, the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site, Hurricane Sandy, to Trump’s campaign for president. His transportation reporting has taken him everywhere from the MTA’s secret Rail Control Center to the gleaming subways of Seoul. Got a tip? Email [email protected].
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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