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Commentary By Nicole Gelinas

Cuomo Suddenly Hiding Behind Trump at Huge Cost to MTA

Cities, Cities Infrastructure & Transportation, New York City

What happened to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Man of Action? Last week, in response to news that Team Trump is holding up the state’s plan to charge drivers to enter most of Manhattan next year, the governor didn’t sue or vow to outsmart the feds. Instead, he shrugged: “I’m not holding my breath for them to approve congestion pricing.” What gives? Well, a delay in congestion pricing is awfully convenient for the governor.

Why do the feds have anything to do with congestion pricing, approved by the state Legislature last March? Under federal law, New York must do an environmental analysis for any big project with “significant environmental impact.” These environmental reports can be little — or big.

Last spring, according to Politico, the state-controlled Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which will build the congestion-pricing system and benefit financially from it, asked the feds whether it should do an assessment or a statement, and the feds just … didn’t answer. So, according to Cuomo, that’s that.

Action-Man Cuomo would have directed the MTA to take a more aggressive posture. The MTA could have prepared a short “environmental assessment,” hiring consultants to say the scheme will help the environment by discouraging people from driving. The MTA could start preparing the longer document, just in case. It requires public hearings, which are a pain, but the city completed its environmental-impact statement for its four-borough jails from start to finish in 14 months, meaning the MTA would be almost done now.

The feds could reject the statement, sure. Or private citizens could sue, claiming deficiencies. But they’re going to do that anyway; see the three lawsuits filed recently over the borough-jails plan. The MTA may as well do everything it can to get congestion pricing started by January 2021.

Instead, the MTA is setting a strange precedent for political retribution — by meekly accepting it.

Or maybe Cuomo has already gotten the political benefit he needs from congestion pricing and doesn’t see the point of suffering the political downside.

Consider: When Cuomo signed congestion pricing into law last year, transit and environmental advocates lauded him as a brave visionary. Image as environmental steward, fixed.

Based on expected future revenues — $1.5 billion a year — state officials approved the MTA’s new, five-year $51.5 billion capital plan. Commercial real-estate and construction industries, fixed.

And with the MTA’s finances stabilized for the moment, albeit weakly, the governor could do a nice deal with the subway and bus workers’ union late last year, without any other important constituencies complaining; they, too, had theirs already. TWU, fixed.

The MTA needed the promise of a big new revenue source to get all of these things done. Hence, congestion pricing.

In practical terms, though, it doesn’t need the money — at least, not yet. The MTA has spent less than half of the $33.3 billion approved for the last five-year capital program, which expired last year.

With the immediate political emergency gone, it may have occurred to Cuomo that congestion pricing is just one giant toll, and this is a man who hates raising tolls. The governor has completed the long-awaited replacement for the Tappan Zee Bridge, the Mario M. Cuomo bridge. But drivers still aren’t paying a higher toll to pay the $4 billion cost.

Indeed, the governor once delayed issuing bonds for the Tappan Zee to avoid having to put out a toll schedule. Were the MTA to start its enviro process right now, it would have to make a range of tolls public. And now the governor has new problems. A statewide plastic-bag ban goes into effect in a week; Cuomo is already taking small-biz blowback there.

He also needs to fix bail “reform” to placate the Legislature’s suburban moderates — whose cooperation he needs to fix his Medicaid budget mess and fend off lefty pressure for tax hikes. But those moderates happen to be the faction queasy about congestion pricing.

So Cuomo doesn’t need the MTA to spend the rest of the year talking out loud about how much the congestion fee should be, and what special interests should and shouldn’t be exempt.

In the upside-down world of ­Cuomo’s Albany, what to most people looks like a problem — mean old vindictive President Trump thwarting his fearless plan to break car culture — is actually a solution.

This piece originally appeared at the New York Post

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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.

This piece originally appeared in New York Post