Christmas Sockings: Carl Heastie and Andrea Stewart-Cousins Say ‘No’ to Better Transit

The Rolling Stones lied: Sometimes you don't even get what you need.

The transit world is reeling this week after Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins used their positions on an obscure oversight board to halt the MTA from undertaking tens of billions of dollars in major transit improvements over the next five years.

The block came in the form of a Christmas Eve letter from the pair — who in addition to their part-time Albany jobs are also members of the MTA Capital Program Review Board — notifying MTA CEO Janno Leiber that they had rejected the $68-billion capital plan for the years 2025 through 2029, Gothamist first reported.

(The timing of the letter was propitious for tabloid news editors, with the Daily News editorial board condemning Heastie and Stewart-Cousins' legislative lump of coal as a "Christmas Eve ambush.")

First, the outrage. The MTA emphasized that its 2025-29 capital plan is big for a reason: It funds essential work over many years. Plus the agency said it was blindsided by the two legislative leaders' objections coming just days before the start of the plan.

"This capital program was grounded in our 20-Year Needs Assessment, and we haven’t heard any concerns or objections from the legislature since it was approved by the MTA Board in September," said John McCarthy, the MTA's chief of Policy and External Relations. "It will unlock dozens of transformative projects – many of which are funded and ready to go on Jan. 1. We remain optimistic that the legislature will join the governor in supporting safer, more reliable, and expanded transit."

The MTA said the rejection of the capital plan means that the agency must delay awarding an option for more than 300 new electric commuter rail cars known as the “M9A” for the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North, plus delaying an option to purchase 39 LIRR locomotives to renew an aging diesel fleet on the Montauk, Oyster Bay, Port Jefferson and Greenport branches/segments.

Concern was also voiced this week by Gov. Hochul, who has had a fraught relationship with the legislature ever since she killed congestion pricing and tried — and failed — to get Heastie and Stewart-Cousins to find funding to replace the tolls' $1 billion in revenue earlier this year.

"The MTA has laid out a comprehensive plan to improve subway service, support suburban commuter rail, improve safety, crack down on fare evasion and fund new projects like the Interborough Express," said her spokesman Avi Small. "Now that the Legislature has raised these objections to the capital plan, we look forward to seeing their recommendations on which of these projects should be deprioritized and which revenue streams they are willing to propose.”

The comment suggests that the ball is now in the legislature's court, but Heastie and Stewart-Cousins are suggesting that the very existence of the ball is partly the governor's fault. Back in the fall, in a press release designed to highlight her support for the MTA, Hochul's office admitted that "potential contributions from federal, state, city and MTA sources are expected to be sufficient to fund approximately half of the plan."

That release said that Hochul's "intention" was "to work during budget negotiations next year with federal, state legislative and city partners to close the remaining gap." (Small reiterated that on Thursday, saying, "The governor has repeatedly said that funding would be part of budget negotiations. [The] executive budget will be unveiled next month as per usual." He declined to go beyond that.)

Another state source said it's likely that the legislative leaders are merely playing a budget negotiation game: either they want something from the governor, or, more likely, simply want her to be the face of any tax increase or shift in revenues that will be required for the MTA to be fully funded — another product of the Albany accountability avoidance machine.

The waiting game is itself a problem, state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli had said earlier this year:

"As the MTA moves forward with the [capital] program, it must be fully transparent on how the projects it has chosen to prioritize are the right ones to improve safety, frequency and reliability of service," he said. "This will help underscore the importance of the work to the MTA’s funding partners as they examine the proposal."

So Heastie and Stewart-Cousins's block was, in that context, inevitable — especially when the governor herself admitted that the MTA needed "to find $100 million in annual savings building on recent cost saving initiatives" in order to demonstrate "fiscal responsibility and greater efficiency at the MTA."

On that topic, the MTA also got some bad news on Thursday in the form of a new audit from DiNapoli that argued that the MTA "has not done enough to consolidate its procurements across its agencies to save money."

“The MTA faces continued pressure to implement its capital programs and savings initiatives, which would benefit from furthering its stated goals of transforming its procurement process,” DiNapoli said in a statement. “More savings may be possible if it does more to coordinate purchasing among its agencies instead of the status quo of having them procure their needs independently. Consolidation, efficiency, and savings in this area was promised years ago, but has yet to be fully realized.”

The MTA spends $7 billion on buying things like equipment such as trains and cables and even office supplies. The procurement office said it saved $152 million in 2022, but DiNapoli audited about one-quarter of those alleged savings and determined that they were much lower in actual efficiencies. It's unclear why the comptroller only audited $37.3 million of the MTA's claimed $152 million savings beyond a single line in the audit: "We sampled 37 items (26 items in cost savings totaling $30.8 million and 11 items in cost avoidance totaling $6.5 million)."

An MTA spokeswoman suggested that DiNapoli's audit represented just one moment in time.

“The MTA successfully consolidated and reorganized the agency per the Transformation Plan, forging ahead with less redundancy and red tape," said Joana Flores. "The MTA is still continuously improving business practices with more cost savings and has achieved reduced costs – identifying an additional $100 million in annual recurring savings for a total of $500 million annually, all while providing more subway, bus, and railroad service than ever before.”

Nonetheless, is likely that opponents of MTA funding will seize on this audit — however minuscule a part of the overall MTA budget and capital plan it represents — as evidence that the MTA is misspending taxpayer dollars.

Speaking of those opponents, neither Heastie nor Stewart-Cousins responded to multiple calls and emails on Thursday.

Meanwhile, advocates reminded the lawmakers that the MTA is the lifeblood of the entire metro region:

"The biggest concern for riders is that the least-visible projects are the most vulnerable to cuts — but also often the most essential, like new signals and upgrades to power systems and structures," added Danny Pearlstein of Riders Alliance.

In the end, both legislative leaders will be responsible if the MTA's capital plan ends up being trimmed. As Streetsblog reported earlier this year, the next five-year MTA capital plan is not about glitz or glamour, but the basic work of shoring up the unseen pieces of the system.

The plan includes $9 billion to fix "critical structures" like railroad bridges and tunnels, $7.8 billion to rebuild and repair hundreds of subway stations, $7.1 billion for elevators and ramps at 60 subway stations, $4 billion to upgrade 80 power substations, $2 billion to upgrade two ancient train repair yards and $1.4 billion set aside for 500 more electric coaches and charging infrastructure at bus depots.

"We looked very closely at a couple of asset types that haven't been focused on in the past," Jamie Torres-Springer, president of MTA Construction and Development, said at the time. "And to some people, they're not the most exciting assets. They're the ones that ensure that we can provide service. It's structures and power and station components."

As McCarthy mentioned, the agency's 20-year needs assessment concluded that the MTA needed to focus on a raft of assets that were in marginal or poor condition: stations, massive physical elevated structures and especially power substations. Without getting back to basics, New York's transit would go the way of its bête noire, New Jersey Transit.

"We always reference the condition on the other side of the river that led to these catastrophic failures for New Jersey Transit and Amtrak this summer," said Torres-Springer. "A lot of it was the condition of substations and the other equipment that connects the power from the substation to the trains that are running over the rail. We have a similar situation, and we need to address many, many components that are past their useful life in a state of disrepair."

The plan is not all under-the-hood stuff. It also included $10.9 billion for new subway and commuter rail cars — nearly 70 percent of it for new subways to allow for the retirement of trains first put into service in the 1980s.