MTA vs. NYS: who will win?

Probably not the MTA

Vintage train, February 2020.

It’s pretty obvious that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is trying to undermine Governor Hochul’s “pause” of congestion pricing. The MTA immediately halted pre-work on the Second Avenue Subway phase 2, and lots of people are out there crying crisis about how the MTA will also stop upgrading “dangerously outdated technology” (yes, old signals should be updated, but they are not dangerous).

The idea is (apparently) to foment such an outrage that the governor will change her mind.

Will this effort work? Probably not. Yes, it is true that the MTA has acted independently before, but strategically independent is not the same as baldly insubordinate.

In the early 1980s, when then-MTA chair Richard Ravitch asked the MTA board to raise the subway fare, he had the backstage support of the then-Governor, Hugh Carey, who understood that the fare had to go up but also understood that he didn’t want to be directly accountable for the fare hike (this is in Wendy Feuer’s oral history). Similarly, when Ravitch went to the press and to the business world to build public support for a state tax package to support the MTA, he had the governor’s support. Ravitch was independent because Carey let him be independent, if that makes sense. Ravitch would not have taken the job if Carey hadn’t made it clear that he would have the freedom to manage the MTA’s finances and court the press and CEOs as he saw fit, and Carey wouldn’t have chosen Ravitch if he hadn’t wanted someone to do that.

That dynamic does not appear to be the case here (or, if it is, both sides are doing a really good job of acting). Hochul doesn’t have the MTA’s support at all in her “pause” of congestion pricing. Likewise, the MTA doesn’t have Hochul’s support in any of the public statements that she has made in recent weeks; the short version is that they say they can’t keep building the Second Avenue Subway and doing other important things without congestion pricing starting right this minute, and she says they can.

The big picture is that, right or wrong, Kathy Hochul clearly considers the congestion pricing “pause” an important political priority right now, and presumably wants good news stories about it, not bad ones. The MTA isn’t cooperating and is in fact (again, unless it’s all a charade) trying to sabotage her during an important campaign season for national Democrats. Most politicians would find this intolerable.

It doesn’t appear that the MTA has the state legislature in its corner; yes, a few lawmakers have flipped out about the congestion-pricing “pause,” but a majority of lawmakers aren’t eager to push her hard to start the tolling program right now.

What most people in Albany, from the governor to legislative leaders, probably want is just for the MTA to be quiet for the summer, which it’s just not doing. The MTA was created to provide political cover for politicians, and now, for the first time (?), at least the first time I can think of, it is providing the opposite of political cover.

Can the MTA win this standoff? Probably not. It can never be a truly independent public body because it is too dependent on state-provided tax revenues for its annual operating budget. And it is unwise for the MTA to join the transit advocates and start blaming every daily delay on the “pause” in congestion pricing; Hochul can just turn right around and blame MTA management for not managing their existing system, generally a politically winning line of attack. The one thing they have going for them is that she seems a little unwilling to go for the jugular on this and other issues, but people will surprise you when pushed too hard.

The governor and the MTA cannot remain at cross purposes to one another for very long. Only one of these duelists, though, is New York state’s top elected official, vested with the broad power to set big policy for the state. Agree or disagree with her policymaking or the timing of that policymaking, she can’t easily be undermined on big policy by unelected officials.