How clearly can we say this? Gov. Cuomo controls the subways
Thursday and Friday, as temperatures topped 90 — that’s 20 degrees above average — the mayor and governor tooled around town in air-conditioned, policechauffeured SUVs, squabbling about who runs the troubled subways. Their constituents were stuck underground in smoldering stations, as equipment and signal failures across multiple lines and boroughs left hundreds of thousands of people stewing.
The answer to where the buck stops is easy: with Andrew M. Cuomo. It is the governor who selects the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s combined chairman-CEO and five other board members, dominating the agency.
It is the governor who gladly takes the credit for nice things like the Second Ave. subway (so much so that the printed subway maps from last winter’s opening display Cuomo’s name and signature — physical proof about who’s the boss).
It is the governor who announced the snowstorm shutdown in 2015, overriding the thenMTA chairman.
And it is the governor who must take responsibility for not-nice things, like bad service.
Yet Cuomo, pleased as punch to play conductor on days when corks pop, defers on days when trains stop, claiming Thursday that the MTA is just another “regional transportation system.”
“I have representation on the board. The City of New York has representation on the board, so does Nassau, Suffolk, Dutchess, Putnam, Rockland, other counties, okay?”
No, not okay. Six votes is a plurality on the 14-member board, and the MTA’s boss is chosen by and reports directly to the governor. Ergo, control. Cuomo has done plenty for the subway beyond Second Ave., most significantly by pushing through the system’s largest capital plan ever. He also held the recent fare hikes to a level below inflation. Subway crime is still thankfully low (in that case due to NYPD vigilance), and Cuomo oversaw a sound and smart recovery from the extensive damage from Superstorm Sandy.
But as any rider stuck on a 50-minute ride that should be a 30-minute commute maddeningly knows, there’s more to do. Much more.
Operating funds must increase, to make up for long-deferred maintenance. Cuomo was wrong to listen to his budget people and shortchange the MTA $65 million in ready cash this year.
Looking ahead, Cuomo must take the same track the MTA founder, Nelson Rockefeller, took a half century ago, making it a gubernatorial charge, not a mayoral one. And fund it with tolls.
Rocky saw the toll money collected by the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority under Robert Moses and married it to the subway.
It took a fight. Moses thought that he could block Rocky based on the contractual inviolability of the convents with the TBTA bondholders. But he was outmaneuvered, since the bondholders’ trustee was Chase Manhattan Bank, whose president was Nelson’s brother David. (It was good to be a Rockefeller.)
Cuomo should toll the East River bridges and plow the cash into the subways. The Rockefellers made it work 50 years ago. Cuomo must do it now.