Facing lawsuits from transit and environmental advocates over her reversal on congestion pricing, New York Governor Kathy Hochul has secured US$54 million from state funds to revive a stalled subway extension.
In June, Hochul thwarted New York City’s plans to fund its beleaguered transit system, reduce traffic congestion, and improve air quality through congestion pricing. But she has now “squeezed” the new funding from state coffers to revive long-awaited work on the Second Avenue subway line, reports the New York Times.
Congestion pricing would have generated $3 billion of the roughly $7.7 billion required to extend the subway line from the Upper East Side, where it ends, to East Harlem. “Politicians have promised for decades to bring the line to East Harlem in order to give a historically neglected community better transit access and shift passengers away from some of the country’s most crowded train lines,” the Times writes.
But the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) halted extension plans after Hochul, once a congestion pricing supporter, indefinitely paused the program just weeks before its official launch. Climate advocates decried Hochul’s about-face as a profound betrayal. It was “a generational setback for climate policy in the United States” and “one of the worst climate policy decisions made by a Democrat at any level of government in recent memory”, wrote Heatmap on Hochul’s change of heart.
Her office framed the decision in financial terms: “The governor is concerned about the economic recovery in Manhattan and the cost of living,” a Hochul spokesperson told the media. “New Yorkers are struggling. It’s not the right time to do it.”
But proponents of congestion pricing saw it differently, noting that the lost revenue would deepen an existing $51.5 billion hole in the MTA’s capital plan—while the monies collected from the congestion pricing plan, estimated at $1 billion annually, could have reversed the transit agency’s fortunes.
The governor’s decision to press pause on congestion pricing left the authority’s budget “in limbo,” writes the Times, with a $3-billion gap in construction funding for the second stage of the Second Avenue subway part of a $16.5-billion shortfall for other “crucial upgrades.”
Such upgrades include making subway stations more accessible for differently-abled people.
Now, the $54 million in state funding will allow the transit authority “to continue to relocate utility lines along Second Avenue and nearby streets, but billions more will be needed from New York to carry the project to completion,” the Times says.
Lisa Daglian, executive director of the MTA’s Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee, dismissed the $54 million as a flash in the -pan. “Having [funding] trickle in piecemeal doesn’t help companies get ready to line up their construction contracts,” Daglian said.
Still, the money could help the MTA keep a $3.4-billion federal grant for the extension that was conditional on a certain percentage of local funding, said East Harlem Representative Adriano D. Espaillat.
“East Harlem is a working-class neighbourhood and perhaps one of the biggest transportation deserts in the country,” Espaillat said. And now, the extension “continues to have a heartbeat. That’s important.”
News of Hochul’s success at finding new funds for the subway line came one day after MTA leaders said they trusted that the governor would fulfill her vow to close the transit funding gap.
Back at its June meeting—held after Hochul announced her retreat on congestion pricing—the MTA had “hinted” that this policy shift would leave it unable to follow through on numerous projects, reports The Gothamist.
But the latest news is that the MTA’s next five-year construction plan will proceed as planned. “The assumption is that the projects funded by congestion pricing are moving forward,” Jamie Torres-Springer, MTA’s president of construction and development, told a committee meeting in late July. “As the governor has said, and we take her at her word, the $15 billion will be restored.”
“Instead of formalizing draconian cuts to crucial transit projects, MTA leaders are assuring the public that Hochul will come through with the money, either by unpausing congestion pricing or reaching a new funding deal with lawmakers in next year’s state budget,” The Gothamist writes.
The expressions of trust come even as transit and environmental advocacy groups move forward with two separate state supreme court lawsuits challenging Hochul’s congestion pricing pause on legal and constitutional grounds.
In its suit, the City Club of New York, a good governance watchdog, called Hochul’s move “quite literally, lawless” and lacking “any basis in the law as democratically enacted,” reports the Associated Press.
In a separate court action, the Riders Alliance, the Sierra Club, and the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance said Hochul’s decision violated every New Yorker’s constitutional right to “clean air and water, and a healthful environment.”
“The people of New York City deserve to breathe,” the lawsuit states.
