MESSAGE
| DATE | 2009-03-15 |
| FROM | Michael L Richardson
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] The evil that is the MTA
|
Ok what part of this SACRED CASH COW (MTA) don't you understand and
believe in?
Read the GUARANTEE: www.paymymortgageearly.com
Ruben Safir wrote:
> The Evil that is the MTA
>
> Ruben Safir March 12th, 2009
>
> The Metropolitan Transit Authority is the single biggest threat to the
> long term stability of New York City. It has been standing on the throat
> of this city for decades, squeezing the economic life blood from this
> town. It has proven to be an irresponsible steward of this cities
> transportation network. It has political muscle and protection unlike
> any organization in our government. Unlike a private enterprise, it has
> no need to constrain its budget for the purposes of profitability.
> Unlike a government organization, it escapes any kind of voter over site
> at the ballot box. We are all victims of the MTA and its reckless use of
> government funds, and misguided priorities. This people, the voters of
> the City of New York, can never give the MTA enough funds to satiate its
> endless budget. Every dollar they acquire, they budget for completely,
> and then they spend one more. The MTA must die if the City of New York is
> to live.
>
> First of all, every citizen of this city needs to come to understand the
> basic facts of the MTA. It is an independent authority chartered under
> New York State Law which has no over site. It has an independent agenda.
> That agenda benefits the MTA, and is not designed to benefit New
> Yorkers. The MTA is not our friend, nor does it respond to our needs,
> and most of all it does not respond to public pressure or scrutiny. It
> borrows money and leaves the bills for the taxpayer and straphangers. It
> subsidizes suburban growth, and leaves the bill for the inner city
> working class. It buys glitzy toys, like underground radio systems, a
> connection for the LIRR to Grand Central Station along with the building
> of a new level at the terminal, it buys a new extension of the 7 train to
> the Javits Center, new cars with digital signage, elevators, and electronic
> billboards, it builds a completely uneeded new station complex at Fulton
> Street to bribe politicians who can't figure out how to rebuild the WTC,
> but it ignores basic safety and traffic needs like switches and steel rails,
> station maintenance, and subway cars with enough signs to know what
> train your hoping on without needing to look over the platform with the
> train arriving. And then they spend hundreds of millions of dollars to
> preach to us. Don’t run up the escalator, Don’t lean over the platform
> (so then how do we know what train is coming since they have removed
> most of the side car signage), don’t walk between cars (which was really
> useful at stopping over crowding for nearly a hundred years before some
> idiot decided it was too dangerous), pick up your trash, and give your
> seat to a pregnant women.
>
> Enough. We can’t take it any more. In 2000 the MTA tried to ram part two
> of its capital budget program down our throats, by permitting the MTA
> more borrowing than it could ever afford, about 1.6 billion dollars with
> another 2.2 billion dollars of pork for upstate highways and roads. It
> was rejected soundly by the voters of New York State. But the MTA is
> like a fly. If you swat it away, it just comes back. In 2005 the MTA
> launched an “education program†for yet another statewide referendum,
> this time worth 2.9 billion dollars in funding. In 1995 the New York
> Times reported that State lawmakers were aghast at the 4.5 billion
> dollars that the MTA would need to borrow between 1997 and 1999. That’s
> right, we’ve been playing this game for a very long time. And the major
> infrastructure we got was the retirement of the perfectly usable Red
> Bird Cars on the IRT, and the completely unnecessary electronic signal
> system for the ‘L’ train. Is it that hard to safely run trains on a
> line that has exactly one outbound and one inbound track that we had
> to pay almost a billion dollars for it? And with looming service cutbacks
> was it worth it? And the station rehabilitations that were necessary,
> did we get them? Well? Maybe, sort of. They cost us way to much and
> took way too long according to Joseph Rappaport of the Straphangers
> Campaign “All we’re getting in station rehabs is what we were already
> promised, and we’re getting it three years late and having to shell out
> more in the fare to get it.â€
>
> In 2003 the MTA attempted to side step the whole process when it created
> YET ANOTHER corporation in their authority with the creation of the
> Capital Construction Company with responsibility for overseeing system
> expansion projects for all MTA companies and managing their bonds. The latest
> plan for the MTA is for the state to do the same for the bond driven capital
> program through a charter. So then we’ll have yet another organization
> completely disenfranchised from the City’s electorate or even sensitive to
> the operations or fare burden, and which can raise fares and taxes without
> any over site whatsoever. Oh, and for those not watching, you should note
> that the latest Richard Ravitch plan calls for the elimination of public
> hearings for fare hikes.
>
> Don’t you love the Metrocard. Fares can be raised at will with a few key
> strokes.
>
> Yet between 1981 and 1991 over 16 billion dollars was spent on MTA
> capitalization. And that barely made a dent. The 2001 capital program
> borrowed money for a 1.1 billion dollar expansion of the LIRR to reach
> Grand Central Station. Who from the city would want this at the cost of
> a 2 dollar fare hike and service shutdowns? But these proposals go
> through the Capital Program review board which the Mayor is outnumbered
> by statewide office holders 3 to 1. And that is how we get this shoved
> down our throats. And when horse trading erupted over the 2nd avenue
> subway for the LIRR expansion the MTA responded with a two tier bond
> program that brought out older less expensive dept for a greater new
> bond act over a longer time. Predictions at the time were that this
> massive debt would cause fares to skyrocket up to $4.00. But that is not
> the MTA’s problem. Its just the problem of the poor guy schlepping to
> work or ibringing his family around to the museum from Brooklyn and Queens.
> It was known as a fact that this program would put massive pressure on MTA’s
> finances between 2005-2009, just as it has. And the program in 2000 was
> decried by everyone in the know about the MTA including the then former
> MTA chair Robert R. Kiley and Gene Russianoff, the same lawyer pushing
> not for east river bridge tolls, and who both wrote jointly at the time,
> “In sum, it is our conclusion that the plan not only does not fund new
> capacity, it threatens the ability of the MTA to continue its State of
> Good Repair program for this and future plans.â€
>
> Need to see more? In February of 2004 the Mayor took the MTA to court to
> stop it from funneling monies for the Subway to buy new Metro North cars
> (NY Times: Feb 26th, 2004). The New York Times wrote then:
>
> The mayor is trying to exert influence on an obscure state panel that
> has the power to deny the $230 million in financing that the
> Metropolitan Transportation Authority needs for the new rail cars. He is
> also considering going to court over the issue if necessary, according
> to a senior aide to Mr. Bloomberg who spoke only on condition of
> anonymity.
>
> Then in December of 2004 the Times published this:
>
> Four years ago, the governor of New York and leading state legislators
> gave permission for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to pay off
> old bonds by borrowing $14 billion, creating a steep pile of new debt
> for a transit system filled with ancient structures, middle-aged
> equipment and little money to replace them.
>
> Today, with the M.T.A. facing short- and long-range financial crises,
> the public benefit of that decision remains a matter of vigorous
> dispute.
>
> On April 3rd, 2000 the Times published this little tidbit:
>
> In the last month, government and private analysts have developed a
> striking consensus that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s
> five-year, $16.5 billion capital improvement plan is a
> disaster-in-waiting, built on a mountain of borrowed money, that would
> force a major fare increase.
>
> They say the crush of debt would cripple the authority’s ability to keep
> New York City’s subways and buses and the commuter railroads in good
> repair, and would make the financing of future capital plans nearly
> impossible. The plan would require by far the largest sale of municipal
> bonds in history, more than $20 billion.
>
> October 3rd, 2004:
>
> The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is projecting budget deficits
> of more than a billion dollars in the coming years, and another round of
> fare increases and service cuts appears imminent. But now transportation
> authority officials want to spend even more money to continue to
> maintain the system, and even the authority’s critics are hard-pressed
> to fault them for it.
>
> The trouble is, no one has quite figured out how to pay for the
> improvements.
>
> “I don’t think there’s any question that more money is needed for the
> system’s operation and for upkeep and maintenance,†said Doug Turetsky,
> a spokesman for the Independent Budget Office, a nonpartisan city
> agency, on the financial quandary. “The question is where those
> resources are going to come from.â€
>
> On the authority’s shopping list: more than $17 billion in system
> upgrades and replacement of old equipment, $500 million for security
> improvements and several billion dollars for expansion projects,
> including the building of the first phase of the long-awaited Second
> Avenue subway and connecting the Long Island Rail Road with Grand
> Central Terminal.
>
> It is all part of the authority’s proposed five-year capital improvement
> plan for 2005 to 2009, sent to Albany last week for approval. Making his
> priority clear, Peter S. Kalikow, the authority’s chairman, said he
> would be willing to sacrifice the highly publicized expansion projects
> if it meant protecting the $17 billion for the existing system.
>
> “This is the minimum number that we will accept,†he said Wednesday at
> the authority’s board meeting. “It’s the minimum number to keep the
> system running.â€
>
> It will be up to lawmakers, however, to wrangle over how to come up with
> the money, or if they even can.
>
> The problem is a familiar one for the authority. Similar hand-wringing
> accompanied the passage of the authority’s current $19 billion capital
> program for 2000 to 2004. In the end, much of that program was paid for
> by bonds, repaid out of riders’ fares. But that has left the authority
> facing a mountain of debt. Payments coming due on that debt are at the
> core of the authority’s struggle with its operating budget.
>
> As Gene Russianoff, a staff lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign, a
> transit advocacy group, put it, “Their credit card is maxed out.â€
>
> Authority officials have made clear that issuing more debt, paid for by
> riders, would be extremely difficult, if not impossible.
>
> October 25th, 2005:
>
> New York’s city and suburban transit network faces enormous,
> fast-growing debts and budget deficits, with no clear plan for
> addressing them. It raised fares last year, plans to raise them again
> next year and warns that it may do so again in 2006.
>
> This is not a surprise to people who monitor the Metropolitan
> Transportation Authority. The current situation was predicted four years
> ago by, among others, former top transit officials, fiscal watchdogs
> like the Independent Budget Office and the Citizens Budget Commission,
> the state comptroller, business groups like the New York City
> Partnership and transit advocates like the Regional Plan Association and
> the Straphangers Campaign.
>
> The financial problems, critics contend, are the direct result of more
> than a decade of policies by New York State, New York City, and the
> authority, which operates the city’s subways, buses, bridges and
> tunnels, and the Metro-North and Long Island commuter railroads. In
> particular, they point to a $17 billion capital maintenance and
> expansion program adopted four years ago that was broadly denounced at
> the time as a fiscal time bomb.
>
> March 6th 2003:
>
> The decision of transit officials to propose substantial fare increases
> to close a budget shortfall has not ended a bitter political fight about
> whether the public should be given more information about the
> Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s budget.
>
> The state comptroller, Alan G. Hevesi, a Democrat, has subpoenaed 18
> cartons of budget documents from the authority and forced three of its
> top budget officials to give lengthy depositions about their
> bookkeeping. He vowed today to continue that inquiry to its conclusion
> no matter what the authority’s board decides on Thursday when it votes
> on the fare increase.
>
> Both Mr. Hevesi and the New York City comptroller, William C. Thompson
> Jr., called on the authority’s board to postpone the vote Thursday until
> Mr. Hevesi’s office completed its review of the authority’s books.
>
> MTA debt is what is driving up the fares of the MTA. They have been
> rolling in public financed doe through out the fat years and now they
> must face the reality of a deep recession and a declining City economy.
> And it is LONG time for New York City to get its SUBWAY BACK without the
> interference of Albany. It is time for the Queen of Hearts and to stop
> the lies that our current state legislator is somehow responsible for
> the MTA’s crimes. If a massive fair hike comes on March 25th, it will be
> squarely the fault of the MTA. OFF WITH THEIR HEADS. It is high time to
> end the MTA
>
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