Too long a ride
If hailing a cab and then waiting as it inches through traffic for 15 minutes seems frustrating, imagine being a cab driver and medallion owner waiting more than half a year for the city to finalize its beefed-up program to assist debt-burdened cabbies with a city-guaranteed loan restructuring. The initiative, announced with much fanfare last November and garnering rare support from the biggest players involved — from then-Mayor de Blasio to the New York Taxi Workers Alliance to Marblegate Asset Management, the largest holder of outstanding medallion loans — hit the right notes and made for a darn good press release, complete with Sen. Chuck Schumer’s name in the headline.
Yet press releases aren’t legal documents, and the prior administration hadn’t drawn those up before the announcement, laying out standards — capping loans at $200,000 in principal with $1,122 monthly payments and a 20-year term at fixed interest — and leaving the time-consuming nitty-gritty to its successors. Mayor Adams’ Taxi and Limousine Commission has been in the unenviable position of actually drafting complex financial agreements governing multi-decade city-backed contracts involving several lenders and thousands of individual loans.
In the meantime, confusion reigns as drivers who’ve spent years in a stressful limbo with unsustainable debt hanging over their heads wait for a concrete program while getting conflicting information. This turmoil is having concrete consequences; OSK VIII, LLC, a Minnesota-based investment entity that holds more than 300 such loans has filed a federal lawsuit against the NYTWA for supposed interference in its relationship with borrowers. It will be up to the judge to parse the arguments, but there shouldn’t be any situation at all where drivers can be legitimately uncertain about whether their loans are part of the program yet or not.
This once-intractable problem has been solved in principle. The city must move quickly to put the agreements in place and quickly onboard lenders. It should also take this whole process out of obscurity and be as transparent as possible with drivers and the public about where things stand.