It’s not just the MTA’s latest blueprint for the future of the transit system that is jeopardized by the abrupt pause of congestion pricing.
While the $55 billion MTA Capital Program for 2020 to 2024 faces a more than $15 billion hole after Gov. Kathy Hochul derailed the Manhattan vehicle-tolling plan weeks before its scheduled June 30 start, the next five-year budget for upkeep and big-ticket items now also faces an uncertain funding future.
The 2025 to 2029 capital program — which maps out how the MTA invests in its infrastructure and which is separate from the agency’s operating budget — is scheduled to be released Oct. 1. Even before Hochul axed congestion pricing, it was projected to be big and underfunded.
A May report from the office of State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli forecast that it’s “likely to exceed the size of the current plan” and potentially face a $25 billion funding shortfall.
“The governor is focused on dealing with a $15 billion problem,” Janno Lieber, the MTA chairperson and CEO, told reporters after the transit agency’s first post-pause board meeting on Wednesday. “She’s also mindful of the need to address the MTA’s [next] capital program.”
Like the current plan, the one due in a few months will likely be unable to count on billions of dollars that would have been generated for transit improvements by tolling vehicles going into the congestion zone south of 60th Street.
Those long-planned improvements include station renovations, installing more elevators, buying new trains and buses, putting modern signals on stretches of multiple subway lines and maintaining tunnels and elevated structures.
‘A Perfect Storm of Funding Problems’
In a lengthy statement released after being criticized by most MTA board members at the June 26 meeting, Hochul touted her role in pulling the troubled transit agency back last year from an operating budget crisis that she described as “one of the most existential threats in the system’s history,” and mentioned the next capital plan.
“In the coming months, my team will work with the MTA to further develop a comprehensive approach to fund both the remaining projects in the 2020-2024 capital plan and the new capital plan,” she said.
But government watchdogs and transportation experts say Hochul’s u-turn on congestion pricing, which followed years of casting herself as the tolling plan’s champion, creates a mammoth dilemma for the regional transportation network that will face heavy competition from other agencies seeking state money.
“It’s a sort of perfect storm of funding problems now for the MTA,” said Jon Orcutt, a former top official with the city Transportation Department, who has warned of the implications of the transit system having to do less with less.
Congestion pricing, approved by state lawmakers in 2019, was designed to fund the current capital plan. Hochul’s shift has forced the MTA to largely prioritize projects that keep the system in a safe, working order while pushing other projects into the next capital plan without a clear vision for how they will be funded.
“The simplest solution, and the most viable one, is the one that was on the table,” Rachael Fauss, senior policy advisor for the watchdog group Reinvent Albany, told THE CITY. “And that’s the one the governor took off.”
Lawmakers will also have to scramble to find new sources of revenue for maintaining and improving the subway, bus and commuter rail system.
“If we fail that assignment, the future for New York City, and, I believe, this entire region, will be greatly harmed,” state Sen. Liz Krueger (D-Manhattan) told THE CITY.
Scaling Back
MTA officials on Wednesday presented plans for reshaping the current capital program, by holding off on replacing century-old signals along the A, C and B, D, F, M subway lines, on buying new trains and buses and putting off plans to make legally mandated accessibility upgrades at 23 stations.
The purchase of hundreds of new electric buses and awarding contracts for work on the next phase of the Second Avenue Subway — which would extend the Q line from the Upper East Side to Harlem — will also likely have to wait for the next capital plan, or longer.
“You can’t let the current system collapse and we’ve seen what happens when you fail to invest in state of good repair and you start to have your train and bus system collapse,” said Krueger, who chairs the State Senate’s finance committee.
It’s unclear what projects will make up the 2025 to 2029 capital program, though it’s possible that the MTA’s aspirations may have to be scaled back from the current plan. That plan, the largest in MTA history, prioritized signal and accessibility upgrades, along with modernizing a subway fleet by phasing out cars that had been in service since the 1960s and 70s.
The MTA 20-Year Needs Assessment, released last October, is a long-term outlook for key potential projects across the region. Those include expansion projects such as the Interborough Express light rail line that would link Brooklyn and Queens and Penn Access, which would add four Metro-North stations in The Bronx and connect the commuter railroad to Penn Station for the first time.
“We’ve been planning for the next capital program like crazy,” Lieber said after the board meeting. “We’ve got that very detailed 20-Year Needs Assessment, we’ve got board working groups going on preparing some more of the detail.”
Orcutt, the former city DOT official, cited what he called “the shallowness of some elected officials” and a push from the construction industry as potential factors that may keep glossy expansion projects like Phase Two of the Second Avenue Subway on track — at the expense of basic upkeep.
“You’re probably going to cheat ‘state of good repair’ work in favor of stuff like Second Avenue,” he said. “Politicians understand extending a subway line[but] they have a harder time talking about replacing signals and even more obscure infrastructure like ventilation plants that keep air moving in the subway and which were built before the New Deal.”
Adding to the uncertainty of investments in the MTA is this fall’s presidential election.
“It’s sort of ‘Stay tuned,’” Krueger said. “Look, we live in a very strange world where, if Donald J. Trump is the president, do we think the federal government is going to send us money? I don’t think so.”