According to the proposed budget, the governor declares a state of emergency for the transit system and the state appropriates funds for the MTA to deal with that emergency, the city will be required to appropriate the same amount. | Getty Cuomo's MTA budget maneuvers appear to target City Hall

If President Donald Trump was the intended villain in Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s election-year budget, Mayor Bill de Blasio appears to be its intended victim.

Cuomo’s proposed $168 billion executive budget released Tuesday would impose significant liabilities on de Blasio and the city he governs by requiring it to assume more financial responsibility for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, according to budget watchdogs.


“This seems to be asking the city to vastly increase the amount of its general fund and capital budget dedicated to the transit authority,” said Jamison Dague, the director of infrastructure studies at the nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission.

Dague was referring to the MTA’s New York City Transit Authority, which operates its subways and buses. Cuomo's budget plan calls for the city of New York "to provide in full all funding required to meet the capital needs of the New York City Transit authority" in its five-year capital plans.

A state official, who requested anonymity, told POLITICO the state was merely reinforcing a pre-existing 1981 law that already requires the city to fund New York City subways.

That's a controversial interpretation of the law. After a particularly bad spate of headlines about the subway, Cuomo's MTA chairman, Joe Lhota, held a press conference espousing that view. Richard Ravitch, who was MTA chairman in 1981, promptly disputed the Cuomo administration's interpretation.

“That’s never been the understanding since the MTA was created,” he said at the time.

The implications for New York City, should the state reinforce Cuomo's interpretation of that 1981 law, would be seismic.

Had the law been in effect in 2015, when the state and city were negotiating the MTA's current, roughly $30 billion, five-year capital plan, the city would have been on the hook for at least $16.5 billion, according to Dague, rather than the $2.5 billion it committed to. That’s more than the city’s entire $13.1 billion capital budget for the 2019 fiscal year.

John Kaehny, executive director of Reinvent Albany, read the budget language in the same way, and then doubted himself.

“Maybe they mean something else, because otherwise this comes from an alternate reality,” he said.

The language would not preclude the state from contributing to city subways and buses in the future, the state official said.

The provision is the most potentially onerous of three MTA provisions that seem to target the mayor, in what appears to be the latest front in Cuomo’s effort to foist responsibility for the failing subway system onto de Blasio. It’s also the latest turn in the ongoing rivalry between Cuomo and de Blasio, whose decadeslong relationship has, since de Blasio became mayor, curdled into mutual animosity.

Another provision in the budget, this one on Page 77, would force de Blasio to do something he has thus far vehemently resisted: pay for half of the MTA’s $836 million, short-term plan to stabilize the flailing subway system.

According to the proposed budget, if the governor declares a state of emergency for the transit system and the state appropriates funds for the MTA to deal with that emergency, the city will be required to appropriate the same amount.

The provision would apply to the current funding dispute, said the state official, because the state of emergency is ongoing.

“It’s sort of heavy-handed,” Dague said.

There is, finally, a provision that would allow the MTA to create special districts in New York City and then claim the real estate tax receipts from those districts to pay for MTA projects, like a further extension of the Second Avenue Subway, the vastly over-budget project bringing the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal, and a proposal to bring Metro-North to Penn Station, by way of the Bronx.

It’s an unconventional take on what’s known as tax-increment financing. The Bloomberg administration paid for the 7 train extension to Hudson Yards via tax-increment financing, but the special tax district it created required City Council legislation.

A spokesman for the mayor had no immediate comment. Neither did the leadership of the Assembly or the Senate, which need to approve the budget.

“You have the MTA board, which is not elected and is controlled by the state, making decisions about the city’s property tax,” Dague said.