State legislators in Albany are now over a month late passing the 2011 budget. While the Assembly continues kicking the fiscal can week after week, state agencies are left waiting to see how big the cuts will be.
For the MTA, budget numbers keep coming in worse. This week the agency reported an additional $72 million shortfall as tax revenues it had been counting on came in below expectations. This is on top of the $450 million already projected.
Riders in the city will soon begin to see the effects. Train lines will disappear, rides will take longer and be more crowded, and a fare hike could be coming soon. While city riders are being told to expect less for more, the city and state, say transit advocates, can’t afford a crippled transit system.
“The city is going to lose employment. It happened in the 70s and early 80s; it can happen again,” said Robert Paaswell, director of the University Transportation Research Center at the City College of New York. “By starving the MTA we’re really starving New York City.”
New York City provides state coffers with more than half of its net revenue. With the state’s budget security so tied to the city’s economy, anything that could make it harder for workers—like a poorly operated public transit system—could have a ripple effect.
“The fundamental issue is that the MTA needs long-term committed sources for capital,” Paaswell said. “The problem is that the legislature is so afraid of the tax word.” He favored a number of possible taxes, including a gasoline tax and tolling on the West Side Highway.
“The only reason New York is what it is today is because of our transit system,” said Tri-State Transportation Campaign’s executive director Kate Slevin. She said that the economic rebound from the 1970s and 80s was tied to the investment in the city’s transit system. Defunding now, she said, would have a negative future effect.
Elected officials in Albany, however, have few encouraging words for those hoping for a funding reversal.
“The state is doing what it can to get additional funds to the MTA. Generally speaking what it can do for the MTA it has done,” said Graham Parker, a spokesperson with state senator Martin Malavé Dilan of Brooklyn. Senator Dilan chairs the Senate’s transportation committee.
“People are used to is how this authority has been operating for the past several decades,” he said. “I can understand how in the long view they can’t foresee it working differently.”
Yet that’s exactly what Dilan and other state elected officials appear to be telling the MTA, and the riders it serves, to expect.
— Colby Hamilton
