New York State Insider: For Immediate Release: MTA: Lying Liars Who Lie.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: STATEMENT ON MTA’S DUPLICITY BY KEEP NYC CONGESTION TAX FREE. 

May 13, 2024

“The MTA’s duplicity knows no bounds. Now it’s telling New Yorkers that failure to get a $15 Congestion Pricing Tax would blow a $25 billion hole in its budget. Interesting considering that the Congestion Pricing Tax is only authorized to leverage $15 billion in future borrowing. 

“The MTA throws around bogus numbers all the time in an effort to squeeze more out of beleaguered taxpayers, but it rarely throws around these real ones: 

• The MTA spent $1.42 billion in overtime costs last year; 
• More than 700 MTA employees received in excess of $100,000 in overtime;
• The MTA loses more than $700 million every year by failing to enforce fare payments; 
• It costs seven times more to lay a mile of track in New York than in the second most expensive city in the world; 
• The MTA blew through more than $6 billion in federal Covid funding; 
• The MTA spent twice as much money on ‘consultants’ as it did building the Second Avenue Subway tunnel; 
• The MTA is wasting billions of dollars making consultant-designed stations larger than experts say they need to be, and 
• MTA Chairman Janno Lieber earned $400,999 in 2023, but still can’t count.

“What’s happening is clear: New Yorkers overwhelmingly reject the looming Congestion Pricing Tax, so the MTA is back to issuing false doomsday predictions again to push it forward. Maybe it should look at its own books. Better yet, how about an independent authority looking at the MTA’s books? Only then would the MTA’s true fiscal incompetence come to light. Imagine that.” 

Keep NYC Congestion Tax Free, a diverse coalition of civic, business, and labor organizations and businesses throughout New York City, argues that implementing a tax on vehicles traveling south of 6oth Street in Manhattan will, among other things, permanently damage efforts to revitalize the two districts.