Pressure's gonna drop on her.
Gov. Hochul needs to find a way to fill the $35-billion hole in the 2025-2029 MTA capital plan after state legislators failed to put forward any ideas in their proposed budgets this week.
Released on Tuesday, the Assembly and State Senate's budgets function as the legislature's two responses to the governor's budget proposal from the beginning of the year — a budget that stated the governor's empty commitment to funding the MTA plan.
Negotiations between the legislature and governor have not borne fruit, putting the issue squarely at the feet of the person who actually creates the budget (and runs the MTA): Gov. Hochul.
"The governor has to lead here," said Riders Alliance spokesman Danny Pearlstein. "There's no way the houses on their own can find anywhere near the amount of money needed if the governor is in the driver's seat when it comes to the state budget. ... It's the governor's MTA."
Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie did, however, manage to make things slightly harder for the MTA with their one-house budget proposals.
When the MTA Board approved the 2025-29 capital plan in September, the agency assumed that $4 billion would come from each of New York City and New York State. But Hochul's budget proposal cut the expected contributions to $3 billion, widening the funding gap by $2 billion. The Senate and Assembly budget proposals mirror Hochul's smaller state and city contributions.
Even though she controls the annual budget process, Hochul maintains that Stewart-Cousins and Heastie bear responsibility to fund the capital plan hole after they vetoed the proposed capital plan last December. Stewart-Cousins and Heastie said they vetoed the plan because the MTA has not not identified a way to fund what was then a $33-billion hole.
Hochul kept the finger pointed at legislators on Wednesday.
"Gov. Hochul remains committed to making the investments necessary to immediately improve public transportation and provide long-term stability for the MTA," Hochul rep Kara Cumoletti said in a statement.
"The Legislature vetoed the 2025-29 Capital Plan and said they wanted to address funding concerns in the context of the State Budget, and now that the budget process is underway, these conversations are ongoing."
Still, the finger-pointing can be reverse-UNO'd back to the governor — since Hochul sucked all the oxygen in the transit room when she paused congestion pricing last June. As Streetsblog noted at that time, the scramble to determine the fate of the rest of the 2020-2024 capital plan and what would happen with congestion pricing made it impossible to have a conversation about the 2025-29 capital plan. The MTA did its job and came up with a new capital plan, but Albany leaders are falling down on their when it comes to actually making it happen.
"It's easier to talk about where the money is going to go than where it's going to come from, but it has to come from somewhere," said Pearlstein. "That's the life of an elected official. That's the job the governor chose to do. She needs to do it."
The need to get projects funded and underway leaves no time for the Albany accountability avoidance machine to spin up and screw over commuters or the region at large, said Carlo Scissura of the New York Building Congress.
"I think government has a very simple job to do, which is to provide to its constituents, and it is now clear that the Assembly, Senate and governor have not provided adequate funding for the MTA," Scissura said in an interview. "It's disappointing. For folks that are going to build the projects, the uncertainty and the inability to plan based on not knowing is frustrating."
This is hardly the first time that Albany has played games with a partially unfunded MTA capital plan.
In 2014, then-Gov. Cuomo vetoed the 2015-2019 MTA capital plan because of a funding gap. Cuomo did not fully fund that plan until the end of the 2016 budget cycle. By then, projects had languished so long that subway entered a crisis widely blamed on him.
Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday, MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber noted that bit of troubling history as a warning for the state's current crop of elected leaders.
"The bottom line is that the Senate, Assembly and, most of all, the governor, understand that you must fully fund the MTA capital program," said Lieber.
"What's at stake now is, are we going to preserve the system and make it better with a $68 billion program, or are we going to let it decline? We already tried that once. It resulted in the 'Summer of Hell,' and riders paid the price."
The budget is supposed to be signed, sealed and delivered by April 1 — only three weeks from now. The tight timeframe combined with a total lack of sunshine on any possible proposals means that the fate of necessary transit upgrades is at the mercy of the worst aspects of Albany legislating.
"The clock is ticking; April 1 is around the corner," said Reinvent Albany Senior Policy Advisor Rachael Fauss. "The longer they wait on this the higher the odds are that a funding deal becomes more backroom Albany shenanigans that the public has no input on."
