Cut out the ‘s—t’AP
Transit boss: Who’s doing what is a mystery
MTA officials have run into a unique obstacle in their efforts to cut costs: The agency has no organizational chart detailing what each of its 70,000 employees do, or who they even report to.
Interim NYC Transit President Sarah Feinberg said in an interview with the Daily News Thursday that she was confounded last month when no one was able to provide her with a full breakdown of the workforce she’s led since March.
Some managers maintain a chart of their own employees, but there is no unified document for the whole agency, Feinberg said.
That chart would serve as a sort of Rosetta Stone for the massive bureaucracy, and she said it’s necessary in order to find ways to save money.
“There are people who do not work here who we are paying,” said Feinberg. “It’s crazy … I absolutely believe there are a lot of people wandering around and no one knows who they report to.”
Feinberg said she’s working with other Metropolitan Transportation Authority honchos to build out an organizational chart — but that’s just a small measure of the problems the nation’s largest transit agency faces as the coronavirus pandemic continues to crater its finances.
MTA Chairman Patrick Foye has requested an additional $3.9 billion in relief from Congress in order to keep mass transit service running across the five boroughs for the rest of the year. The agency in March received roughly $4 billion from the feds.
The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives included the relief money in a bill the chamber passed in May, but there is no indication that the Republican-controlled Senate will sign off.
Feinberg said every dollar she saves buys her more time before she’s forced to execute devastating reductions in subway and bus service.
“I’m basically doing my own reorganization,” said Feinberg. “I’ve been here four months, before that I was on the MTA board for a year. We’ve been talking about ‘transformation’ and consolidation the entire time.”
“I can’t wait any longer to save money,” she added.
The MTA in December hired Anthony McCord as
“chief transformation officer,” a new position created in order to slash jobs across the agency. McCord in January announced plans to hire 120 consultants to figure out how to cut 2,700 jobs — but those efforts were put on hold due to the pandemic.
Feinberg expressed a distaste for many MTA consultants — and said she does not need them in order to find ways to cut costs or build out her master chart.
“The first thing you do is cut internally, you cut the consultants, cut the s—t you didn’t even know you were spending money on,” said Feinberg. “There is money being spent here that I did not know about.”
She said she’s received three different lists of all the consultants who have contracts with NYC Transit, and is trying to identify which ones are unnecessary.
Feinberg said she’s also put a hold on spending money for employees to travel out of state, and plans to crack down on dozens of workers who use MTA-owned vehicles for personal trips and commutes.
What’s more, she said managers across the agency have found ways to get around a hiring freeze put in place in 2018, which was supposed to keep any new nonessential employees from joining the agency.
“The way you get around a hiring freeze is by saying, ‘I need to hire this person in order to continue operations or in order to keep the system safe,’ ” said Feinberg. “You can give someone an operational title like conductor, but what you really have them do is data entry or be someone’s driver.”
There is also little oversight when it comes to how the MTA hires people, Feinberg said. The agency’s human resources department is given a budget, and just brings in new staff until the funds are spent, a process the transit boss said she wants to fix.
“You tell me my budget is $100, and I just hire people until I’ve spent that $100,” she said. “It’s almost like you blindly walk down the aisle at a grocery store and what is in your cart is a surprise.”
The lack of organization at the MTA has also hampered transit officials’ efforts to do in-house contact tracing among employees who may have been exposed to COVID-19. The disease has killed at least 131 agency employees.
The agency has no phone number or email address on file for thousands of its workers, Feinberg said. Officials have mulled giving every single worker an MTA email account, but found that it would cost $3 million annually.
It’s not clear how quickly Feinberg will be able to hack away at NYC Transit. MTA executives have for decades attempted to introduce reforms and make the organization more efficient, but have largely fallen short.
But Feinberg said the COVID-19 outbreak has made it clearer than ever that the agency needs to change.
“There are going to be a lot of cuts that will be painful, but they need to come,” she said. “Some of them we never would have done, but we have to do them because we are in this position with the pandemic.”