New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority expects to resubmit its five-year capital program request to state officials by the end of next month, Chairman Thomas Prendergast said Thursday.
The dollar amount is in question, with officials of the MTA, a state agency, and New York City squabbling over how much the city will contribute. Prendergast, an appointee of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and Mayor Bill de Blasio even bickered over funding at the recent opening of the No. 7 line Hudson Yards expansion.
“We’re in uncharted waters. We’ve never been in this place before,” Prendergast told reporters after the monthly MTA board meeting in lower Manhattan. “This is as far as we have ever gone into a new capital program without an approved plan.
“We’re running out of time in terms of being able to use other dollars to keep making project awards, so we need to get that ’15 through ’19 program approved,” he said.
After de Blasio this year increased the city’s contribution to $657 million, Prendergast, backed by Cuomo, asked city officials to quintuple the amount to about $3.2 billion. De Blasio officials have said they are open to further discussions, but want more say on project priorities.
Prendergast said further limbo could force more delays to the East Side access project, which will funnel Long Island Rail Road trains to Grand Central Terminal, and a new fare-payment system to replace MetroCards.
“There are some very large East Side access contract awards that need to be made,” he said. “We’ve got that date of 2022 out there to complete, and we want to complete the project.”
The fare-payment system, he said, includes a “very complicated systems engineering procurement.”
The MTA is one of the largest municipal issuers with $36 billion in debt. It issued about $2.4 billion of bonds over the past three months, including remarketing, refunding, commercial paper takeout and new money.
“We seem to be in a food fight and it’s not good for your customers,” Gene Russianoff, an attorney and chief spokesman for the Straphangers Campaign ridership lobbying group, told the board.
Richard Ravitch, who as MTA chairman from 1979 to 1982 crafted the authority’s initial capital program and successfully pitched it to businesses and state lawmakers, said Prendergast and board members should lean harder on state officials.
“The simple truth is the board of the MTA should be the advocate of the financing, of getting the state to legislate revenue streams that would support the capital financing that is the sine que non of having a safe and sound transportation system,” Ravitch said in a recent interview.
Last October, a state capital program review board rejected without prejudice the authority’s $29 billion plan – which does not include $3 billion of self-funding from bridge and toll revenue.
After the MTA last summer said it could trim about $3 billion through procurement cost reductions, it has committed $14.6 billion of its own money. Cuomo has committed $8.3 billion of state funds in next year’s budget, subject to legislative approval.
Monday’s finance committee featured a testy exchange between Prendergast and Polly Trottenberg, a board member and the city’s transportation commissioner. She accused Prendergast of threatening to withhold funding from New York City-centric projects because the city has balked at his request for more money.
Prendergast called for the capital financing staff to resubmit a truncated capital plan to the state review board “in alignment with the commitments made so far.” That would affect New York City Transit projects, he said, or what he called “the urban portion.”
Trottenberg took issue. “I think it is punitive and pretty divisive,” she said. “Maybe you only want the staff to do a New York City scenario, but I would like them to do a regional scenario.”
Thursday’s rhetoric about the capital plan was calmer.
“Your use of the term threatened is certainly not my use of the term threatened,” Prendergast told one reporter.
