MTA Boss Warns GOP Bill Will Blow A Hole In Transit Budget

The Republican-controlled Congress’s proposed five-year federal surface transportation bill, known as the BUILD America 250 Act, would cut a quarter billion dollars per year from federal funding the agency typically receives, MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber warned on Wednesday.

“The version that is circulating right now would significantly cut funding from what we’ve received in the past, hitting us for about $250 million a year in formula funding,” Lieber said during Wednesday’s MTA board meeting. “This is unacceptable, considering the MTA is already wildly underfunded in the first place.”

Under the proposed legislation, Republicans would cut the amount of money given to numerous transit grants, most notably Urbanized Area Formula Grants. The exact amount of these grants, which are aimed at states and transit agencies, depends on a formula that accounts for population, transit miles traveled per year and the overall size of a particular transit system.

The MTA currently receives just 17 percent of federal formula funding, Lieber said, despite the agency carrying more than 40 percent of the transit riders nationwide. The Republicans’ draft legislation would even further shortchange the MTA and the city in a sector that fuels the region’s very existence.

“Mass transit is our thing,” he said. “Denying New York its fair share of mass transit is a little like telling Florida you can’t get your fair share of hurricane relief, or telling the people in Iowa, okay, no more crop subsidies for you.”

Cuts to the formula funds would obligate the MTA to find replacement funds locally or simply spend less money on capital projects. Transit advocates blasted Congressional Republicans for potentially forcing that choice on New York — an especially absurd decision in light of the economic activity the MTA’s capital spending creates and sustains in the Tri-State area.

“Funding to pay for these projects has to come from somewhere, but it cannot come from riders: it is incumbent on the federal government to live up to its responsibility to its citizens to continue to fund the transit that millions of us rely on every day and upon which our region’s economy is dependent,” said Lisa Daglian, the executive director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA.

BUILD America 250 has already taken some local flack because of the way that it intersects with the federal leadership of the Penn Station renovation. In May, a House committee approved an amendment to the bill that gives Amtrak sweeping powers that override local land use and even tax laws under the guise of giving the federally managed railroad more powers to capture value near its properties. In the case of Penn Station, this would also allow Amtrak to work with local developer Vornado Realty to cash in on the company’s longtime dream of building an office district around Penn Station at a cut-rate tax level.

The bill’s cuts to transit and passenger rail have alarmed national street safety and transit organizations. Indeed, the bill’s entire approach to funding anything other than highways and motor vehicle infrastructure is to unwind and undermine as much of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the previous transit funding bill passed under President Joe Biden.

The good news, if there is any, is the increasingly dysfunctional House failed to pass the bill in the full body before Congress adjourned until after the upcoming midterm elections in November. A Senate version of the bill failed to make it out of committee. But Lieber said he wouldn’t be lulled into a false sense of security, and decided to sound the alarm before Congress returns for a lame duck session after the election.

“[Congress] is going to come back and look at the surface transportation bill as something that they might try to do in the lame duck,” he said. “That’s why I am calling out for all New York legislators and people who represent cities and other communities that depend on transit.

“There are real downsides to that bill, and if it is pushed into the next Congress we may have another crack at improving or correcting some of the shortcomings. But we are getting the word out to first and foremost of the New York legislators, including leadership in both houses, that there are real problems for the MTA if this bill becomes permanent.”

The state’s Congressional delegation seems to be getting the message, as the man that Lieber has often called the MTA’s “guardian angel in Washington” called the current bill a nonstarter.

“The proposed reduction in transit funding in the Build America 250 Act is a nonstarter, and it would have a significant impact on the MTA,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York). “As I have many times before, I will continue fighting for robust transit funding in the next Surface Transportation Bill.”