$106 mil deal on fare break
MAYOR DE BLASIO and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson have struck a deal to fund halfpriced MetroCards for low-income New Yorkers, sources confirmed to the Daily News.
The city will commit $106 million to the project, two sources said. That’s just half of the Council’s full ask for the program, which was $212 million, but comes after de Blasio’s repeated arguments that the state, which runs the MTA, should pick up the tab for it and not the city.
A spokesman for de Blasio insisted the deal wasn’t done.
“We have more work to do. There is no deal,” spokesman Eric Phillips.
Earlier Thursday, Johnson had said a deal was close.
“We are fighting, we are pushing. I feel like we, hopefully, will have a deal soon,” Johnson said. “I continue to have conversations with the mayor every single day about this.”
Johnson made the funding a major priority in his budget negotiations, and was backed up by a small army of advocates who have been pushing for years for the program, as well as a majority of the Council. Those supporters often noted that de Blasio had promised to make the city the “fairest” in the world — and that one way to do that would be to help low-income people get to work.
The push also came as de Blasio had defended the city’s prosecution of fare-beaters — with Fair Fares advocates noting that many people jump the turnstile because they simply can’t afford to pay to get to work.
The push for the program began with a report from the Community Services Society in 2015 that found one in four New Yorkers struggled with the cost of their MetroCard.
“This will make an enormous difference for economically struggling New Yorkers and will be a major step toward making New York a fairer, more equitable city,” the Community Service Society and the Riders Alliance said in a joint statement on behalf of the Fair Fares Coalition.
David Jones, a de Blasiopicked MTA board member and a lead advocate on the Fair Fares movement, congratulated the mayor for “seeing the light.”
“The breakthrough is because of the Council and the willingness to be single-minded,” Jones said.