NY lawmakers won’t tackle Hochul-created MTA budget hole, for now
that resulted from Gov. Kathy Hochul’s abrupt decision this week to abandon a years-in-the-making toll on drivers entering parts of Manhattan.
On Friday afternoon, Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins said the Senate would wrap up later in the night without taking up an MTA funding plan. The Senate and Assembly are set to end their session at some point in the early morning hours on Saturday. They aren’t scheduled to return to the Capitol until January, though legislative leaders suggested they may be willing to bring lawmakers back to deal with the issue sometime before then during a special session.
In the 48 hours since Hochul’s announcement, she and legislative leaders have scrambled to come up with a way to replace the revenue that will be lost from not implementing congestion pricing as planned. Initially, Hochul proposed hiking the existing payroll tax on New York City businesses that helps fund the MTA. But lawmakers were cool to the idea, particularly in the Senate.
“If congestion pricing at this moment is not going to be what funds it, you have to raise revenue,” Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a Democrat from the Bronx, told reporters on Friday afternoon. “So you have to make a decision on raising revenue. So you'd have to do that now, sometime between now and January, or January.”
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