Last week was exciting for NYC Tracks.  We live-blogged from four public hearings held in Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan.  Here are some of our visual impressions of the events.  For a brief discussion of the hearings by the five NYC Tracks bloggers,  check out our podcast.

The past week has been full of headlines about the MTA’s budgets problems. Whether it was the announcement that nearly 1,000 MTA employees will be let go, to a drop in subway ridership (and, hence, fare revenue) for the first time in six years, the MTA’s budget problems continue.

Yet a number of groups and individuals have been offering — and resurrecting — ideas for how the MTA can work to fill its fiscal hole.

The Drum Major Institute released a report entitled “The Urgency of Resurrecting Congestion Pricing in New York.” In it, they argue that congestion pricing, which was promoted by Mayor Bloomberg but defeated by the New York State Assembly in 2008, could close the MTA’s $400 million projected shortfall.

Late last week New York City Public Advocate de Blasio told StreetsBlog he thought setting up tolls along the East River Bridges might be a way to bring extra funds to the agency.

And a week ago Rep. Michael McMahon (D-Staten Island) joined a number of MTA board members in a call for the MTA to use federal stimulus funds to help avert major service disruptions.

However, the ability for these programs to solve the MTA’s problems, let alone get passed, was something policy and labor groups, as well as a former MTA board member, were asked about.

“I think all of them are good options. I’m completely in favor of congestion pricing,” said Jonathan Bowles, Director of the New York City-based think tank Center for an Urban Future. While acknowledging he wasn’t following the details of the MTA’s struggles intensely, Bowles supported much of the program advocated in the Drum Major Institute piece.

However, the political reality — and danger — of championing something as legislative controversial as congestion pricing or bridge tolling was not something he thought many state legislators were willing to take on in an election year.

“I’d be surprised if the legislators outside of Manhattan or even the suburban districts vote right now to include a new–what is perceived as a new levy — on their constituents,” Bowles said. He believed that, out of the three, federal stimulus funds — which other major transit systems have used — was most likely to move forward.

James Parrot, Deputy Director and Chief Economist at the Fiscal Policy Institute, felt it was too soon to begin discussing new revenue streams for the MTA. He believes the payroll tax enacted last year — which the Drum Major Institute cites in its report as falling $700 million short in expected revenues — needs more time to see if it can bring in the money it promised.

“Part of the shortfall might be due to a timing issue regarding the collection of the payroll tax,” Parrot said. He made it clear who he felt should bear the blame for the MTA’s situation.

“Under former Governor Pataki, MTA finances were royally screwed up,” he said. Parrot pointed to the organization’s debt service budget — that money the MTA pays out to cover its debt– which grew by hundreds of millions of dollars thanks, he said, to Pataki tax and budget policies.

“Give George Pataki credit for that,” Parrot added. “He’s responsible for this mess we’re seeing today.”

While she agreed that the MTA’s financial obligations were a major problem facing the agency, Nicole Gelinas, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and Contributing Editor to their quarterly magazine, City Journal, felt the issue was the MTA’s labor costs that put it, as she said, “in a constant permanent crisis.”

“We need top to bottom labor reform,” Gelinas said. She also was less than convinced proposals like East River bridge tolling or congestion pricing would live up to expectations. She pointed to the payroll tax shortfalls and wondered if new tolling would deliver as disappointingly.

Jim Gannon, a spokesperson for the Transit Workers Union, which represents thousands of MTA employees, believed the agency’s priorities helped fuel the crisis.

“It’s a crisis of immediacy,” he said. “It’s time to calm down, hold back a little bit on these megaprojects.” He wanted to see a shift in funds from the capital budget, which pays for the MTA’s new projects like the 2^nd Avenue subway construction, to the operating budget, which is where the current cuts to subway and bus lines would come from.

Gannon, too, was critical of the MTA’s handling of its debt load. “The operating budget is consistently being handcuffed and burdened with payment to debt service, all of it used for capital projects,” he said.

Regardless of whether or not a proposal like bridge tolls or congestion pricing will make a difference for the MTA, said former board member Barbara Fife, is irrelevant if it can’t get passed in Albany. And the chances of that, she believed, are slim.

“The east river tolls are something almost every mayor has brought up but it is a very tough political issue,” Fife said. “It has been a third rail and it would take a lot of political skill to get support behind that.”

— Colby Hamilton

amNY reported yesterday that the MTA’s threat to layoff over 450 station agents could be a power play to get the transit union to agree to a pay freeze. The MTA announced early yesterday that it was planning on laying off over 1,000 workers as it struggles to bridge a $400 million budget gap.

Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch told the Gotham Gazette yesterday that he does not support Gov. Paterson’s proposed payroll tax increase. The payroll tax on businesses in 12 counties in and around New York City was enacted last year, but has so far failed to raise the funds needed to meet the MTA’s budget needs.

WNYC has a podcast that follows federal stimulus money around the country to see how it impacts transit.