The MTA’s board didn’t let public sentiment deter it from approving a plan that could fundamentally transform how one of the nation’s most vital transit agency goes about providing 2.6 billion trips a year in the financial capital of the United States. | Getty Ignoring public comment, MTA adopts potentially transformative restructuring plan

Not one of the 42 public speakers at the MTA’s board meeting on Wednesday endorsed its plan to transform itself from a bloated, 74,000-person bureaucracy into a lean, mean 71,000-person transit machine.

Not one of the city’s prominent transit advocates embraced it.


Yet the MTA’s board didn’t let public sentiment deter it from approving a plan that could fundamentally transform how one of the nation’s most vital transit agency goes about providing 2.6 billion trips a year in the financial capital of the United States.

“We have to act like a real board, we’ve got to do hard things,” said Sarah Feinberg, a former federal transportation official who was appointed to the MTA board by Gov. Andrew Cuomo. “And we’ve got to take tough votes and we’ve got to try to move the ball down the field.”

Cuomo, who effectively controls the MTA, has been under tremendous public pressure to resurrect an authority that deteriorated dramatically on his watch. Via this year’s state budget, he and the state Legislature approved new revenue streams for the authority, including a first-in-the-nation congestion pricing scheme, and required the MTA to hire a management consultant to devise a restructuring plan.

It awarded AlixPartners a $4.1 million contract, and the MTA board was required to approve the resulting restructuring plan by the end of July.

The firm had just three months to come up with a proposal, a time frame that led some management consulting experts to question if the firm’s retention amounted to “air cover” for whatever politically difficult decisions Cuomo and his MTA proxies wanted to make.

The main thrust of the so-called “transformation” plan is consolidation.

The MTA's subway and bus division, its capital construction unit, its bridge and tunnel authority, its headquarters and its two railroads each have separate procurement, legal, budget, communications and human resources departments. The plan recommends a reduction in the MTA’s workforce of up to 2,700 jobs, in part by consolidating those functions, as well as consolidating engineering and capital construction into two, MTA-wide units.

Transportation advocates fear that some of the recommendations were designed to undermine New York City Transit President Andy Byford — a Cuomo hire who’s popular among transit types but doesn’t seem to get along with the governor.

Advocates also complained about the near-complete lack of public input into the final product, and said the plan would unnecessarily consolidate certain functions best left to existing agencies operating under the MTA.

“I didn’t talk to a single person that said taking IT out of the agencies and taking engineering out of the agencies was a great idea — that that would be a thing that they would advise doing,” said Norman Brown, a union leader and MTA board member. “In fact, they used words like ‘disastrous,’ ‘end of the railroad,’ things like that.”

In defending their decision to approve the hastily created scheme, several board members noted that the plan is still vague. They repeatedly described it using words like “blueprint,” and “draft.” They argued this is just the start of a long process, that the plan would necessarily evolve over time.

Prior consolidation efforts, experts note, haven’t fared all that well. But the MTA says that the creation of a chief transformation officer to shepherd the reform process will help it succeed.

Countless questions, however, remain unanswered, including whether Byford would lose control of his effort to resignal the system. New subway signaling is considered the main lever by which the MTA can dramatically improve subway service.

In the end, only one board member voted against the plan, de Blasio appointee Veronica Vanterpool. She said she couldn’t vote for something so apparently monumental, and yet so vague.

“Who can be against things like ‘savings,’ and ‘efficiencies’ and ‘centers of excellence’ and ‘shared services’ and ‘empowerment?’" she asked at the meeting, poking fun at some of the report's buzzwords.

But authority officials warned that should the MTA board not follow through with the AlixPartners blueprint, it will face even bigger operating deficits than anticipated in the coming years.

“The board is essentially voting on a vague plan with vague placeholders to reduce the operating deficit on paper for now,” said Manhattan Institute transit expert Nicole Gelinas.