Paying the MTA Piper

In another front in the turf war between Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio, Cuomo-appointed MTA-Chairman Tom Prendergast warned last week that he’ll have to cut funding for projects like the Second Avenue Subway if the city doesn’t pony up more to help close the MTA’s $15 billion capital budget deficit.

Prendergast wants the city to kick in $640 million a year for five years. He argues that’s warranted, since city riders make up 90 percent of all MTA customers — whose fares are heavily subsidized by the authority.

The state government gives about 2¹/₂ times as much to the MTA as does the city. On the other hand, the city also produces a huge share of the state’s revenues — Wall Street alone covers about a fifth of the state budget.

De Blasio’s says he’s open to giving more to the MTA — above the $1 billion already pledged — if the extra money actually goes into MTA coffers.

Fair enough: The agency’s been a favorite piggybank for Albany pols for decades.

And while it was city mismanagement that led to the state taking over the MTA in the first place, the agency’s in dire need of some better bigpicture controls.

The MTA’s capital budget would be in far better shape if it had never started the East Side Access boondoggle. Back when it was launched in 2003, the project to bring the LIRR into Grand Central Terminal was supposed to cost $4.3 billion and finish by 2009. The price tag is now up to nearly $11 billion — with a due date in 2023. If then.

And that doesn’t even take into account the generous MTA union deals the governor has signed off on.

Yes, the city and the state need to stop the fingerpointing and get on the same page to fund the MTA, but they also need to start facing up to years of political malpractice that let it get into this mess in the first place.