July 9, 2019 • 44 mins
Corey Johnson wants to be the next mayor of New York, and the press seems to think he will be. His plan to fix transit is the centerpiece of his platform. Tom Wright is the CEO of the powerful Regional Plan Association. That organization imagines the future and comes up with ideas for infrastructure and bureaucracy that could meet its needs. Nicole Gelinas, a reporter and a Manhattan Institute scholar of Urban Economics, also believes in big, innovative projects. But for the past 15 years, she's been reminding New Yorkers that we will not get a transit system worthy of our great city if we cannot get costs under control, and our financial house in order. Combine these three experts with Alec's curiosity and strong opinions about all things New York, and you get a great conversation about congestion pricing, organized labor, the MTA, and future of transportation everywhere.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the thing.
Cities live and die by housing policy and transportation policy.
Everything else is tinkering around the edges. Today, I'm talking
transit with three people who have thought a lot about
the current mess that we call the New York City
transportation system. New York City Council speaker and two thousand
(00:26):
twenty one mayoral candidate Corey Johnson Tom Wright, the head
of the century old Regional Plan Association, and journalist Nicole Jelinas,
who's also a scholar of urban economics at the Manhattan Institute.
Johnson wants to blow up the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the
(00:48):
most basic body in charge of New York transit today.
The mt A board is appointed by the governor. Johnson
would split off buses and subways into a new agency
called Big app Transit, with the buck stopping clearly with
the mayor meaning him, he hopes. At the Regional Plan Association,
(01:08):
Tom Wright has spent his career thinking about how to
improve how cities run. The r p A also wants
to break up the m t A and fundamentally rethink
housing and transit in New York. The coolech Alimas is
the person best suited to keep Corey and Tom's big
ideas in check. She believes in big changes as much
(01:31):
as the other two. But for years she has told
us again and again, we will not get a transit
system worthy of our great city if we cannot get
costs under control and our financial house in order. The
Metropolitan Transportation Authority is the single most important factor in
whether New York succeeds or fails. When New York had
(01:54):
its crises of the late sixties, throughout the seventies, and
then the early eighties, crisis began with the city losing
its way and transportation. When the transit system fails, new
York fails. If you cannot get people to work, get
people to school, the city's economy does not do well.
It is the mission, and I'll say this to Tom,
(02:15):
is the mission of the m T A unchanged from
sixty or how has that evolved since then? The goal
was to get people on public transportation. Can't move everybody
around by car? Is the mission the same? Basically? Yeah,
it basically is. And part of the problem is that
there was this idea that there would be a synergy
between having the subways and the buses and the Long
Island Railroad and Metro North all under one umbrella, and
(02:38):
that we would have a kind of coordinated, integrated metropolitan system.
The truth is the m t A it ain't metropolitan
because it doesn't look at the entire metropolitan region. It
doesn't pay attention to New Jersey. It ain't really transportation
because it's only parts of the system. The buses are
running on city streets. And it isn't really an authority
because an authority means to those of us in kind
(02:59):
of public service. An authority should be a self funded entity.
Like the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
does not get annual handouts from New York and New Jersey.
It's self financed from the operations, whereas the m t
A is unable to do that, and so it has
to go hat in hand every year. Back to see
the Port Authority is self funny. You're talking about fees
(03:19):
they charge at the Gates Institute airlines, at the airport.
It makes an enormous amount of money from the airports
and people driving across the Hudson River, and it takes
that money and it runs the airports and those crossings,
and it subsidizes the path system and the Port authority,
bus terminal and other operations. But they have a huge
amount of debt, but they're able to to serve it
with the cash flow that they generate on what percentage
(03:40):
is debt service? Oh, we're gonna get to that. I
think the same as it's it's it's lower than the
m T as I'm pretty sure Nicoles the expert on
these issues. Yeah, I haven't looked at the port throw
in a while. I think it's around temper. That's what
I would half of what the right now some would wonder.
And again you can educate us about this as well, Nicole.
At one point in the seventies and the Ford to
(04:02):
New York dropped dead period where the city files for bankruptcy,
the city goes into receivership with Albany. Albany is in
charge and the city can't really do very much of
what it wants to do in these large projects and
and and beyond that. And I'm not trying to point
a finger at City Hall or Albany, but was was
it as bad before the receivership in seventy five or
to get it to get worse once Albany was calling
(04:25):
all the shots in the city. It got a little
bit worse after nine and then it started to get better.
The subway system failing was part of what led up
to New York's financial distress and to take over essentially
by Albany and the federal government of New York's finances
for quite a long time actually, and the problem with
(04:49):
New York City's approach to the subway and bus system
is that from the nineteen forties well into the nineteen
sixties and seventies, the city's focus was on keep the
fair down. There was a nickel fair for a long time.
Then it went up to a dime. It was less
and less able to cover the operating costs. But mayors
(05:09):
from Wagner to lindsay for very good reason, they wanted
to keep the fair low because they wanted poor people,
working class people, middle class people to stay on the subway.
They thought, if we right, if we increase the fair
too much, more people are going to leave the city.
They're going to get in their cars and go to
the suburbs. But the problem with the focus on the
(05:30):
fair was that there was no focus on capital investment.
That they needed to increase the fair and they needed
some tax revenues to buy new subways, air conditioned subways.
We're gonna have to raise money at some point, right
buy new buses, repair the tracks, repair the same When
did they start doing that, well, they that changed in
the early nineteen eighties when finally trains were breaking down
(05:54):
every twenty thousand miles, very frequent for someone to be
kicked off the subway train and be stuck on the
platform because the doors on the train wouldn't close, and
so very frustrating commutes for people. And in the early
nineteen eighties, uh Dick Ravitch, who was the mt A
chairman at the time, convinced the governor convinced the state
legislative slature in Albany that they needed to approve a
(06:18):
package of taxes to support the m t A start
to rebuild the capitol. Yes, and the business community was
on board with this, and it was a signal to
New York that we're not going to give up on
the city. We're gonna double down and we're gonna rebuild
the physical infrastructure that the city needs to thrive again.
And starting in the eighties, as soon as they made
(06:40):
these first investments, population of the city started to grow,
tax based started to grow again, and that was the
only thing that made it possible for us to turn
around the crime situation and other problems starting in the
early nineties. How would you describe Let me ask this
to Corey, what's the city's relationship to Albany now? But
it's still in the same position. It wasn't seventy No,
(07:00):
I mean, there was a financial control board that was
put in place to oversee New York City, and the
financial control it still exists. It hasn't been phased out.
But we are not in the same position in any
way as we were now. We are the economic engine
for New York State. And I've been on the City
Council for five and a half years. I was elected
in two thousand and thirteen, and the first budget process
(07:21):
that I went through in the middle of two thousand
and fourteen, our city's budget was around seventy three billion
dollars with a B. The upcoming budget we're voting on
in the next couple of weeks is now ninety two
and a half billion dollars, almost twenty billion dollars in
growth in less than six years. It used to not
be that way, and the times that we're talking about,
(07:42):
what the financial crisis, with the subways deteriorating, with Central
Park being an unsafe place, and so now we give
more to Albany every year than we get back, just
like the exactly as New York ss the Washington We
are a donor city to Albany, and New York State
is a donor state to Washington. And so now part
(08:03):
of the reason why it's happened since a great recession
in two thousand and nine, when there was a major downturn,
we've seen seven and eighty thousand private sector jobs created
in New York City, unemployments at an all time low
three point nine percent, Tourism the highest level ever recorded
last year at over sixty six million tourists. So if
you looked at New York City on a piece of paper,
by the numbers, you would say, hot, damn, the city
(08:26):
is doing really well. But when you dig into the
finances of the m t A, when you look at
the number of homeless children in our school system, if
you look at what's happening, uh, just on poverty numbers
in New York City, there is still a long way
to go. But I think, as Nicole and Tom both said,
the future of New York City, the way we can
gain further economic growth is through investing in mass transit.
(08:48):
It's the lifeblood of New York City. And the m
t A has become a political hot potato where if
something good happens, people stand up and say I'm in charge,
and when something bad happens, they say it not me.
Go to that board that no one knows a single
person who serves on the board, and blame it on them.
And the m t A is far too important to
(09:08):
be put in the middle like that, which is why
I'm grateful we have someone like Andy Byford, who was
a world class guy, who has come in and I
think is moving the system in the right direction. Let
me let me highlight that. I mean, in the seventies
and eighties and nineties you were talking about those bad
old days, and I remember Central Park when you didn't
go in after dusk. Back then, for every ten jobs
created in the metropolitan region around New York City kind
(09:30):
of southwestern Connecticut, Long Island, northern New Jersey, nine of
them were outside New York and one of them was
inside New York City. It was a suburbanizing economy, is
Nicole was talking about. New York was trying and failing
to compete with the suburbs, and that's where all of
the growth of jobs and prosperity was occurring for the
last ten years, not only as New York suddenly caught
(09:50):
up with the rest of the region. Today, nine out
of ten new jobs created are in the five boroughs
of New York City, and it's parts of northern New
Jersey and Long Island and Connecticut that aren't keeping up.
And so this this economic boom has been really terrific
for the city and its finances, but still all many
controls things. I mean, we just passed, you know, congestion pricing,
(10:11):
which we think is a great policy, which will mean
that people will pay to drive into Manhattan south of
sixtieth Street, and that will generate money from mass transit.
And that's all very well and good, But the truth
is the city had no control over this. It was
up to Albany, and it was up to legislators in
Buffalo and Niagara to decide whether or not that's right. No,
of course it's not right. But it's a legacy of
this of the bankrupt and I want to go around,
(10:32):
and I want to go around the room. And I'll
continue with you, Tom. And that is about congestion pricing. Now,
I think congestion pricing is a horrible idea. I think
it's an awful idea. And the reason I think it's
an awful idea is it punishes people who It's a continuation,
in my mind of my least favorite condition of living
in New York, and that is the residents of New
York come last. People who live here and this is
(10:53):
their home, and they pay taxes to live here as
citizens of the Five Bros. They come dead, asked in
the decisions that are made. And congestion pricing should not
punish a person who lives in the Five Brooks. But
if you live along Island or Rockland, or Philly or Delaware,
they're commuting from all these different places to come to
New York to do a business. And you're gonna ride,
single person in the car, We're gonna hit you so
(11:14):
hard you're gonna pass out with the with the charge.
What's wrong with that idea? Basically, what's going through is
very consistent with what you said. Most of the people
who are driving into Manhattan south of sixtieth Street are
coming from Westchester, from Fairfield County, from Nassau County. That's who.
That's the vast majority of the people who are going
to be paying into the system in the first place,
and right now they've been getting a free ride. And
(11:36):
worse than that, there are some routes that are charged
and others that are free, and so a lot of
them are doing what we call toll shopping, and they're
driving out of their way to get in through the
free Brooklyn Bridge. A quarter of the people on the
b Que this morning, really we're coming from South Brooklyn,
and the most direct route for them to get into
Manhattan would have been the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, but instead
(11:57):
they drove across the b Que to get over to
the Brooklyn Bridge and take the free crossing in. It
makes no sense right now. As Tom said, if you
take the Battery Brooklyn Tunnel you currently pay a toll,
but if you take the Brooklyn Manhattan or Williamsburg Bridge
you don't pay a toll. If you take the Lincoln
Hall and Tunnel you do pay a toll. So it
was a piecemeal, screwed up approach that we're trying to
(12:21):
bring some sanity to and the real questionnaires. You have
to make these difficult public policy decisions when you have
a system that is failing and needs a permanent revenue
stream and six sixplomatic parking too. Well, they've got the money,
but but six million people take the subways and busses
(12:41):
every single day. And there's been an analysis done. If
you look at Queens and Brooklyn and the Bronx SAT
now is different because they don't have an extensive rail system.
But if you look at the three outer boroughs, the vast, vast,
vast majority of people that are coming into Manhattan every
single day below sixty Street are currently doing it by
(13:01):
subway already. So let's improve the subway service with a
reliable revenue stream for those people. Yes, what Corey and
Tom say is correct if and this is a big if,
if the m t A implements congestion pricing correctly on
both sides of the equation, cutting congestion and spending the
(13:23):
money on projects that actually improved the transit system. On
the congestion side, they're already overwhelmed with requests for exemptions.
The people who work for the m t A, they
wanted a congestion an exemption for the congestion charge exactly,
not just when they're on duty, but just when they're
(13:44):
driving to their workspace. The undergoing to set exactly. Other
other city unions are going to want the same exception exceptions, police, fire, santation,
teachers driving their private cars into the city are going
to want to be exempt from this charge. And you
know they do wonderful work. But everyone who works in
the city does wonderful work, private sector, public sector, low paid,
(14:06):
well paid. If we give one exemption, you almost have
to approve them all because everyone has some reason why
they shouldn't pay the charge. I mean we all do
so either do no exemptions or don't have the program.
The number of exemptions that are being lobbied for right now,
congestion pricing will look like a gigantic piece of Swiss cheese.
It would be like every thing that happens in New York.
(14:28):
The tour bus operators are asking for one is if
they don't cause any traffic congestion. Now are the web
of contractors who are bidding for mt A projects, not
just the Second Avenue debaccle, but other things like that.
Is it a kind of a uh, the usual suspects
that are coming, Like what prevents a person in charge
Albany or city Hall to turn around and fire every
(14:50):
single one of them and say, you know what I'm
gonna do. I'm gonna get housing in New Jersey. I'm
gonna bring a bunch of Amish people here. But Robert
Moses had them pitched ten on the frozen Zack's Bay
and the workers work through the dead of winter. So
the beach house that Joe, I mean, I read Carol's book,
so the Jones Beach could open on time for that summer.
I'm not sure we're going back to that. I wouldn't
(15:13):
go back to that. I would have them pitch tents
on the frozen reservoir in Central Park May They're gonna
all live there. But my point is is what's gonna stop.
What's going to stop the hemorrhage of the sickening contract
Because as we all know, certain politicians, mostly north of
the city have a have a very sweetheart relationship with
the unions and want them to and want to appease them.
(15:36):
What's your answer for how we lower these costs? Everybody
benefits from the current system except for the average New Yorker.
The contractors benefit because a lot of the global contractors,
the companies that are actually good at doing this in
France and Spain and Japan, they won't bid on our
projects because the system just intimidates them, and rightly so
(15:59):
whenever they bid, for example, they're afraid of our union
work rules. France, Germany, Japan, all countries with first world's
work rules. They treat their workers well in terms of healthcare,
in terms of working conditions, but they don't have the
byzantine work rules that are rich. In the end, it
takes political leadership, like if you look at the Long
(16:22):
Island railroad work rules for example, that are pushing up
over time, where people are making quintuple their incomes in
their last few years of work by essentially working around
to manipulate. Yeah, these are due to the work rules.
Their work rules have been enshrined in the contracts for
fifty years. In order to change them, the governor or
(16:42):
the mayor, if we put the mayor in charge of
them right now, the governor in the governor's responsibility to
address that. The governor has to decide he'll take a
strike that he's willing to take. The uh. Short term
pain of people having a much more difficult time vents
him from firing every single one of them and replacing
(17:02):
them with the starting another car. What prevents an emergency
financial measure in which a state where city entity gets
sit there and go, we just don't have the money anymore.
I really don't care how you feel about it. You
work for us. I'm not asking you what to do.
I'm telling you what to do. Right do than that
happen In the end, it comes down to the political
(17:23):
willingness and donations from those unions. A short term hit.
It's not even so much donations. I mean, Cuomo is
very close to the Transport Workers Union, which is the
subway and bus union. Not so much because he needs
the money, although money is always useful, but because he
wants the votes. This is a very reliable voting block.
A vote is worth a lot of money goes hand
(17:45):
in hand with a vote is worth a lot more
than a dollar. I mean, they spend dollars four votes,
So if you can get the votes directly, that's much
better from the governor's perspective. Tw this union helped the
governor tremendously during his primary fight with Cynthia Nixon a
few years ago. But I just want to jump in here,
and I'm not saying I don't believe this is what
Nicole was saying, But I want to be clear. I
(18:05):
don't think I think it would be easy to scapegoat
and vilify the workers who work on the subways and
buses every single day. And for a lot of these folks,
this has been a pathway to the middle class, to
a pension, to healthcare. And I don't think they're the
real problems here. I think part of the problem here
is that you've had at the m t A for
(18:27):
years and years and years major major mismanagement. You haven't
had oversight on contracting. I'll give one primary example, east
Side Access, which is the UH MEGA project which going
to connect UH, yes, exactly UH. And that project is
eleven billion dollars over budget. Eleven billion dollars over budget.
(18:50):
It's not eleven billion dollars over budget because of the
subways and bus workers. It's because of the broken, collusive
contracting system and bid system that exists. The amount to
re signal the entire subway system so that we could
have state of the arts signaling and cut down and
delays is nine billion, So we could have taken that
eleven billion dollars in the cost overrun and already re
(19:12):
signaled the entire system. The Brooke closer to exactly. We
can't even have a conversation right now about expanding the
subway system. You've got a few stations and Second Avenue,
you've got the one station at Hudson Yards, which was unique.
But you can't have a conversation about the Utica extension
in Brooklyn and the other places to expand where they're
transit deserts when you get have two fresh meadows in
(19:34):
South Brooklyn and other places. Because we are constantly treading
water and trying to just keep things going, and you
can't have a conversation going forward and provide a little
more context. Eric Garciti the mayor of Los Angeles right now,
he was able to pass by selling it to the
voters a multibillion dollar bond on subway expansion. Now l
a Is, you know, is not a subway city, but
(19:56):
they're trying to become one. Rama Manuel just left office
in Chicago and one of the highlights of his final
term was improving subway service there. Andy Biford was in Toronto, Sydney, London,
places where they did this type of expansive work, and
we can't have that conversation in New York because of
how broken the system is. Now let me just interject,
(20:18):
you announced your running from mayor, and of course I
don't fault you for wanting to not scapegoat the union
transit workers and say that the problem was more the
contracting process and so forth. But nonetheless, many unions get
into that whole gouging thing where it's like, you know,
quadruple overtime to the last three years to get the
(20:40):
sweetheart pension. Do you agree that's got to stop? Yeah?
But part of the problem right now, and this has
been I think part of the issue at the very
public fight you've seen on the mt A board and
with the governor on the long unmoored overtime. It's hard
to defend those overtime numbers. But these these are the
overtime rules that the m t A set up themselves.
(21:00):
So the union is taking advantage of the rules that
were given to that. But I appreciate that. I'm saying,
if you set up a set of rules, of course
they're not going to say no. But eventually someone's got
to say no. I have found that in most instances,
at least recently. And it's different now because economic times
have been going well, so the city has a lot
of money. But most unions are willing to make a sacrifice,
(21:24):
and there is a trade that gets involved. They may
take a hit on healthcare, but they don't want to
bag a hit on the pensions. It's always a sort
of a little bit of a trade back and forth.
And I think if you sit down and you have
a conversation and you say this is what we need
and the public understands what the need is, I think
most times, uh, most of the union leaders are willing
(21:45):
to do that. I think John Samuelson at t W
is actually a pretty pragmatic guy and he's someone that
you can work with. He's not someone who's out there
being irresponsible. And I think you need to sit down,
get around at table. But again, I want to get
back to the big thing here, which is the m
t A is set up to deflect any level of accountability.
So we can talk about all these super important issues
(22:05):
on repairing, contracting, and on negotiating with unions and expanding
the subway system. But until you get down to the
fundamental issue of singular accountability and responsibility, everyone is always
going to be able to point fingers, which is why
I called for municipal control. I agree with you piggybacking
on that the roads in the city, and it is appalling.
(22:26):
The roads are better in Lima, Peru than they are
in New York City. They finished fiction the roads on
my block, and two weeks after they had the gutted, pitted,
bombed out preparations done, and then and they went and
laid the roads on their Two weeks later they started
cutting it up for some utility start of chopping it
up again. I had a meeting about this yesterday, this
fairy topic not and not to get too granular, but
(22:47):
one of the big issues if we're talking about contracting
that New York City is run into, is that when
you want to restripe the roads after the paving, you
can't restripe the roads for weeks, which is like the
most basic thing a government should be able to do
in a city. Can't why because none of the striping
is done by the city. The striping is done by
outside private contractors who have set up a collusive industry
(23:10):
on how to gouge the city by all working together.
And so these are big issues that affect basic municipal services.
New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson with him our
Regional Plan Association President and CEO Tom Wright, and journalist
(23:32):
Nicole Jelinas. If you like thinking about how New York works,
you'll love my conversation with Martin Horne, who has had
just about every job imaginable in New York City corrections,
including head of the prison system, which led him to
some unusual opinions. I would legalize drugs across the board.
(23:52):
You would legalize which all of them? You would legalize
old rugs? Yes, that's a pretty well well, I wouldn't
say that. I wouldn't say that while I worked for
a governor or a mayor who was an elected definition.
Why wouldn't you say that then as opposed to now
because I had a mortgage debate. The rest of my
conversation with Martin Horne at Here's the Thing Dot Org.
(24:31):
This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing.
I'm joined by journalist Nicole Jelinas, New York City Councils
Speaker Corey Johnson and Tom Wright, President and CEO of
the Regional Plan Association. Right in the middle of another topic,
just had to turn back to the insane amount New
(24:53):
York pays to build and maintain its subways. I have
to hit this issue on why things cost so much.
It's impossible to defend the work rules of the unions
and some of the things that drive up the cost.
We've got to get more competition and with contractors and
other things, but the entire system is broken from front
to end. The procurement process in New York State is
(25:16):
so ridiculous that contractors will be hired to build a
piece of the Second Avenue subway. They will know that
it's going to change, but it's going to take a
year for the procurement process to effectuate that change. So
they build something knowing that at the end of it
they're going to be told to rip it up and
rebuild it again under some new way. But they have
(25:38):
to do it, and the contractors if they don't do
all the time, all the time. There were thousands of
change orders on the Second Avenue Subway in the last
year or two to opening it up as subway. All
of these things subway. Here's another example of one running
the Number one line through the World Trade Center site.
(25:59):
It was a kind of historic achievement of the MTA
to restore that service, and then the mt A basically
said to the Port Authority, you can rebuild this new
path station at Fulton, but you're going to continue to
run our subway through it. The cost of doing that
was hundreds of millions of dollars, when any rational situation
would have looked at and said, you know what, we're
going to shut this down for a couple of months
(26:20):
and we're gonna then rebuild the whole thing and it
will save us an enormous amount of money. But essentially
you had kind of the m t A and the
Port Authority, both state entities, kind of saying, well, it's
not my dollars, so I don't care. You just have
to go do it. And that's the kind of failure
of the eleven billion dollar overrun that Corey talks about
with east Side Access close to a half a billion dollars.
(26:41):
Because New York State has ridiculous insurance protections. I'm sure
that if we just adopted the California protections that people
would still have plenty of protection here in New York,
but we add hundreds of millions of dollars to the
cost CUOMO rated the subways state of good repair money
for pet projects. Correct, is that on a yeah? Well
when did that happen? Well, you were very critical of
(27:03):
thattor we were, we were critical of The truth is,
depreciation is not just a kind of financial accounting idea.
It is cables giving out, it is wheels giving out.
And it's not sexy, it doesn't add it doesn't give
you a big ribbon cutting. But those kinds of basic
investments in the system have to keep going. And that's
what God got it. And that's what we saw over
the last decade or so, kind of money being taken
(27:26):
out of and that's what suddenly led to the situation
of the crisis and Nicole. If you were given some
czar like position of the biggest cost controls that you
would implement, what would you do? More transparency? And I
know that that's a cliche, but I'll give you a
couple of specific examples of a project's cost is buying
(27:46):
materials meant steel. These are global commodities and the global
price is known. You can look in the newspaper and
see what's the going price for especially right, But these
are part of these contracts where the contractors go to
subcontractors and buy the materials, and so the cost of
the raw materials is not known by the public. Every
(28:09):
single materials purchase, the volume and the price should be
disclosed to the public and benchmarked to a global index.
So well, why isn't it because the system as it
is benefits everybody. But contractors should not be making a
profit on the portion of the contract that involves materials
(28:30):
purchases because they're not adding any right, they're they're not
they're not adding any value to that, so they do
get a markup on it, but they shouldn't. That's one
thing is making sure that there's not a lot of
padding and corruption in the materials purchase process. And the
other thing would be all of these construction contracts between
(28:51):
the contractors and the construction unions iron workers union, steel workers, carpenters,
all of these contracts should be public right now. The
contractors and the unions keep these contracts in these work
rules private because they say these are just arrangements between
private parties. I mean, if Tom and I signed contracts,
really nobody's business. But in this case, the public is
(29:14):
the final payer. If the m t A is spending
twelve billion dollars on the East Side Access Project five
billion dollars on the Second Avenue subway, the public should
know every single one of these work rules, and each
work rule should have a cost item next to it.
This costs US fifty million dollars a year. Just getting
(29:35):
those two pieces of information would get us a long
way to reform because all of these things are connected.
You know, someone might say Long Island Railroad Union has
nothing to do with construction unions. But if one set
of unions gives up something, the other sets of unions
knows that it has to give that thing up to
(29:55):
t W is never going to sign a deal that
is less generous the Long Island Railroad contract because one
side looks like a chump, one side looks like you've
got a better deal. So all of these things have
to everybody right all down together. Um, Now for Corey,
just to change the arc here just a bit, what
would you do if you want to improve the city's
(30:16):
relationship with the governor. Well, I would say that I
don't want to be presumptuous, but I think one of
the things that you need to do in politics and
in life is you need to be able to relate
to people and to maybe use a little bit of
charm sometimes. What what do I may that? I mean
that in a hollow, empty way. What I mean is,
(30:38):
I think part of the job of being mayor of
the City of New York is when you saw at
Cotch standing at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge during
the transit strike, shaking people's hands. There was a little
bit of theater involved when you see people out there
when you're screaming how am I doing. Part of what
the job of mayor is is making sure the city
is running in the right way, so that you don't
(31:00):
have homeless encampments, so that the subway isn't breaking down
every day, and you're working with Albany to get that done.
See that you don't have a hundred and ten thousand
homeless children during one point of the year in the
City of New York. You need to work on those issues,
but you also have to be a cheerleader for the
City of New York. You have to do both of
those things. And I think if you do that, if
the if the public relates to you in that way,
(31:23):
not just on an operational level, but they like you.
They like how you're championing and cheerleading New York. I
go around last night. I spoke at the y m
C A galat Cipriani Street, and I stood up and
I said, New York City is the greatest city in
the world. We are the city that gave the world
j Lo and Barbara streisand we are the city that
is the holes. We are the city of the home
of the lemon Ice, King of Corona. We are the
(31:45):
city with the Statue of Liberty not that far from me,
or the torch is a beacon to immigrants and refugees,
sam seekers. I think the disconnect is in that budget
number I gave you from seventy three billion dollars to
billion dollars, nineteen billion dollars in revenue growth in five years,
and you still have people who feel like they're being screwed.
You still hear that money coming from the economy. The
(32:06):
economy has been hosting You've seen prosperity. So if you again,
if you look at seven eighty thousand private sector jobs,
three point nine percent unemployment, the highest number of tourism ever,
recorded crime, homicides, and an all time low since nine
when crime numbers started to get reported. And New Yorkers
(32:26):
right now, the mayor is not getting credit for that
because you actually do need to cheer lead those things.
But you need to cheer lead those things and at
the same time say, I know that it is totally
screwed up that we have a record homeless population New
York City, that nights is crumbling, public housing is crumbling
before our eyes, that the subways are in a state
(32:47):
of disrepair, and that I'm going to go out there
and use all of that record growth that we've seen
to address this crisis. Uh. There are things that I
don't agree with Michael Bloomberg on, like the third term,
but he said something which I do agree with him on.
He said it, and this is why I was a
critic of the Amazon deal. He said, if you want
to attract businesses and jobs to New York City, you
need to do three things. Number one, you need to
(33:09):
have low crime. Number two, you have to improve the
school system. And number three, and that's what we're talking about,
you have to invest in infrastructure and public spaces. If
you do those three things, businesses will come to New York,
people will come to New York, and the economy will grow.
And the disconnect is, with twenty billion dollars in growth
just in our city's budget in five and a half years,
(33:30):
that prosperity is not being felt. And people are like,
how come the trash cans are overflowing on my corner?
How come public housing as fall? How come the street
sweepers can't have a camera on their truck and when
they pull up behind you and you haven't moved, they
take a picture, email it to the traffic post and
you get a ticket. But I want to say, but
I want to say, well, I mean, I'm don't get
(33:51):
me started by how much I want to point the
finger at Albany. But what did our pa think of
the Amazon deal? We were supportive of the Amazon deal.
I will admit, UH don't love the idea of of
public finance incentives, although most of the ones that they
were talking about were ones that are readily accessible to
any company that's coming in. And I think that there
should be a re examination of that entire of that
(34:11):
entire situation. Everybody that I know that lived out there
said this thing is going to come out here and
the speculative buying of of of housing is going to
drive all of our costs through the roof and ruin
our neighborhood. That's true. But I want to add one thing,
not to check on Tom Google, who what is about
twenty five blocks north of where we're sitting in the studio,
which is the biggest employer in my council district. They've
(34:32):
created the most fifteen thousand jobs in the last decade.
How much subsidy and incentiment they received from the City
of New York zero. So if you do in a
precedential nature saying to Amazon, we're gonna give you two
point three billion dollars in non discretionary subsidy and incentive
(34:52):
and a five hundred million dollar cash grant which could
go to the subway system. By the way, a five
or a million dollar cash grant to build your headquarters.
What's going to keep Goldman, Sachs, JP, Morgan, Chase, Google, Facebook,
name a company to come back three years from now.
Would say we want the same deal Amazon, that I
can't defend these kinds of deals. And I can remember
(35:14):
when Governor Pataki essentially because because I would say right
now that's kind of the way the game is played.
The rules of the game ought to be changing. But
I do think that that was what was on the table.
But isn't right now the time to change the game.
If not now, when I mean the Amazon deal was
a classic nineties seventies massive subsidy to build buildings. In
(35:38):
the seventies under Mayor Lindsay. Under Mayor Beam, these things
were more understandable because people were fleeing the city. No
one wanted to locate their business here. We had to
give something away just to keep some kind of the core.
Today the problem is the opposite. We don't have catastrophic
failure anymore. We have a catastrophe fixed success, and so
(36:01):
to be giving subsidies away when we need every last
tax dollar for the infrastructure just doesn't make any sense.
Amazon has been their entire business model for twenty two
years has been to avoid paying their taxes. Often legally,
you know they're not breaking the law, but they don't
want to pay taxes. In Texas, they never wanted to
(36:23):
pay the sales taxes, and so they were competing unfairly
with bricks and mortar retailers for years and years, and
this was just another game that they were playing. They
miscalculated this one and they sort of took their blocks
and went home. And so the city will be fine
without Amazon, but only if we stick to Corey's three things. Actually, though,
(36:44):
in the absence of an Amazon and a kind of
large growth there, what's most likely to happen is it's
going to convert to what's been happening, which is residential development,
which is more residential on the waterfront and people moving
in there and then trying to cram onto the subways
to get into jobs in Manhattan. What we need to do, actually,
and I think Nicole's the jobs out there is put
the jobs out there. Nicole's come and catastrophic success is
(37:07):
absolutely right. Wasn't it done in the Bronx? They wet
to be well? Hell, look, and this might be an
athema here. I think if Amazon had gone to New Wark,
it would have been even better. Also way too much,
you know, actually kind of spreading those jobs around so
that we take advantage the trains run in both directions,
and we ought to be taking full advantage of the
capacity that we have by balancing growth. And yes, the
(37:29):
Bronx is the place where be even better for them
to go than the Amazon should still come to New
York City. I want them to come. There is office
space available down in Lower Manhattan at the World Trade Center.
There is office space available at Hudson Yards. It hasn't
been leased up yet. There is office space available. It's
going to be available in Midtown East where we just
rezoned it for more class A office space. There is
(37:50):
a glut of office space available. Amazon should come to
New York City. They should play by the same rules
as everyone else, Google and other Fortune five companies that
don't get a hunger games like sweetheart deal. The European
Union bans these type of contests. They should come here,
and they should come and they should say, wherever we're going,
we want to invest in that local subway station and
(38:11):
improve it and make it better for our workers. We
want to be a good corporate citizen in New York City.
I'm not against Amazon coming in New York City. I'm
I'm against setting up this hunger Games like contest which
doesn't benefit the city real quickly give me uh the
next mayor. In terms of the problems with the m
t A, the next mayor should do what's their first
priority or two. The next mayor's got to come and
(38:34):
make sure congestion pricing gets implemented in the right way,
and make sure that we fully fund Andy Byford's fast
Forward plan, because that's the right plan. He needs forty
billion dollars to do it, and we can't be nickel
and diming him on that s your idea, I think,
someone who is contemplating a run from mayor, I think
you need to come up with big, bold, creative, outside
(38:55):
the box ideas. Bloomberg did it when he called for
mayor control the school system, to Blasio did it when
he called for universal pre k. I think the future
of New York City, the lifeblood of our economy, is stabilizing, transforming,
expanding our mass transit system. And so I think we
need now a better governance model, singular accountability, not a
(39:16):
deflective model, which is what the m T. A. Garners
right now by the way it's set up. And so
I think we have talked about municipal control of the
subways and busses tied in to a master plan of
the streets of New York City. In London, the person
that oversees the tubes and the buses is also the
Department of Transportation commissioner who oversees the city street. How
(39:37):
would you plan to do that with when you become there? Well,
typically it's okay. In two thousand and one, when Bloomberg one,
he got mayoral control in the first six months of
his first term. When to I think there's a little
bit of a mandate that is given to a new
mayor after they've won if they have run on a
(39:58):
big idea, and if this is also a part if
they have convinced the public it is the right thing
to do ahead of time, which typically they have if
they've won the mayorw election. And I think that's one
of the big things. So I'm gonna keep talking about
municipal control, transforming our streets, breaking our call culture, focusing
on pedestrians and cyclists, and having a livabol city. And
(40:18):
I saw that. I have to mention that I saw
that on your phone. You were getting a call from
Andy Biford, who we begged to do the show, who
stiffed us, but being British, he did it in the
most elegant where he stiffed us in a really plummy
and very very English way. You're big ideas for the
m T and Nicole. The next mayor should be riding
the subways and the buses every day and should be
(40:39):
walking the streets. We we need much faster bus service,
which means we need zero tolerance for double park cars,
double park trucks. Every single one of these vehicles should
be slapped with a ticket every single time they violate
the bust lane. We need more bike lanes to the
extent that we can get people. Road closure. Well that yeah,
(41:01):
that's another process. Yeah. I think parts of Fifth Avenue,
Madison Avenue, Sixth Avenue, these avenues should be for buses,
bicycles and for Yellow times Yellow taxis because Yellow taxis
already paid the congestion fee and in terms of paying
a million dollars in some cases for the medallion. And also,
at some point, you know, fifteen years in the future,
(41:23):
a free autonomous bus that does a fixed route that
comes every minute, so if you're going by Rockefeller Center,
no private cars and things like we pedestrianized Times Square.
That's been a success. If we hadn't pedestrianized Times Square,
we would have to do it today because of the
risk of vehicle terrorism. We should be doing more of
that in Rockefeller Center in Lower Manhattan. But coming back
(41:46):
to the mt A, the one thing that the mayor
controls now is the streets. Use the streets for much better,
faster bus service, and if the MTA doesn't provide it,
hold them accountable. I would have alternate side of the
street delivery. So if you're on the east side of
the street or the north side of the street, it's Monday, Wednesday, Friday,
and your deliveries on the other side there's Tuesday, there
is a Saturday. To cut down there. We want people
(42:08):
to have their goods delivered, but they can't do it
whenever they want to. I mean the double parking. I mean,
I'll name one company who's more egregious than UPS. They
pull their truck over the open grave while you're at
your mother's funeral. If they could, they would like to
move to a district system and and look UPS could
actually be part of the solution there. I'll throw that
(42:28):
out there. UPS would like to be biking the everything
within a couple of blocks, but they got to work
with the city and the management of the streets just
hasn't been there. But I want to just finish by saying, obviously,
thank you, to all three of you. We could have
gone on and on and and and and served into
other topics. But thank you well because in my lifetime
I have never seen people in New York more demoralized
(42:50):
it used to be. There was it seemed that there
was a plan when you built buildings. Were at another
one of those stages where we're tearing down ten or
fifteen percent of the city. I'm an exaggerate perhaps to
build new things, but knew what since you brought up
the construction. That's another problem with the streets. These construction
companies that are building these super tall towers, they only
(43:12):
pay a hundred and fifty dollars a month to close
off the whole lane of the street, sometimes for two
and three years briskly. They should be paying market price
for closing that lane of street and get the building
build faster. If you can't do it faster, than you've
got to pay this money, and a good chunk of
that money should go towards the transit. I think if
you become the mayor of New York, she should have
(43:34):
some huge position and he should be yours. That was
Corey Johnson, Nicole Jollinas, and Tom Wright. This is Alec Baldwin,
and you're listening to Here's the Thing
I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the thing.
Cities live and die by housing policy and transportation policy.
Everything else is tinkering around the edges. Today, I'm talking
transit with three people who have thought a lot about
the current mess that we call the New York City
transportation system. New York City Council speaker and two thousand
(00:26):
twenty one mayoral candidate Corey Johnson Tom Wright, the head
of the century old Regional Plan Association, and journalist Nicole Jelinas,
who's also a scholar of urban economics at the Manhattan Institute.
Johnson wants to blow up the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the
(00:48):
most basic body in charge of New York transit today.
The mt A board is appointed by the governor. Johnson
would split off buses and subways into a new agency
called Big app Transit, with the buck stopping clearly with
the mayor meaning him, he hopes. At the Regional Plan Association,
(01:08):
Tom Wright has spent his career thinking about how to
improve how cities run. The r p A also wants
to break up the m t A and fundamentally rethink
housing and transit in New York. The coolech Alimas is
the person best suited to keep Corey and Tom's big
ideas in check. She believes in big changes as much
(01:31):
as the other two. But for years she has told
us again and again, we will not get a transit
system worthy of our great city if we cannot get
costs under control and our financial house in order. The
Metropolitan Transportation Authority is the single most important factor in
whether New York succeeds or fails. When New York had
(01:54):
its crises of the late sixties, throughout the seventies, and
then the early eighties, crisis began with the city losing
its way and transportation. When the transit system fails, new
York fails. If you cannot get people to work, get
people to school, the city's economy does not do well.
It is the mission, and I'll say this to Tom,
(02:15):
is the mission of the m T A unchanged from
sixty or how has that evolved since then? The goal
was to get people on public transportation. Can't move everybody
around by car? Is the mission the same? Basically? Yeah,
it basically is. And part of the problem is that
there was this idea that there would be a synergy
between having the subways and the buses and the Long
Island Railroad and Metro North all under one umbrella, and
(02:38):
that we would have a kind of coordinated, integrated metropolitan system.
The truth is the m t A it ain't metropolitan
because it doesn't look at the entire metropolitan region. It
doesn't pay attention to New Jersey. It ain't really transportation
because it's only parts of the system. The buses are
running on city streets. And it isn't really an authority
because an authority means to those of us in kind
(02:59):
of public service. An authority should be a self funded entity.
Like the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
does not get annual handouts from New York and New Jersey.
It's self financed from the operations, whereas the m t
A is unable to do that, and so it has
to go hat in hand every year. Back to see
the Port Authority is self funny. You're talking about fees
(03:19):
they charge at the Gates Institute airlines, at the airport.
It makes an enormous amount of money from the airports
and people driving across the Hudson River, and it takes
that money and it runs the airports and those crossings,
and it subsidizes the path system and the Port authority,
bus terminal and other operations. But they have a huge
amount of debt, but they're able to to serve it
with the cash flow that they generate on what percentage
(03:40):
is debt service? Oh, we're gonna get to that. I
think the same as it's it's it's lower than the
m T as I'm pretty sure Nicoles the expert on
these issues. Yeah, I haven't looked at the port throw
in a while. I think it's around temper. That's what
I would half of what the right now some would wonder.
And again you can educate us about this as well, Nicole.
At one point in the seventies and the Ford to
(04:02):
New York dropped dead period where the city files for bankruptcy,
the city goes into receivership with Albany. Albany is in
charge and the city can't really do very much of
what it wants to do in these large projects and
and and beyond that. And I'm not trying to point
a finger at City Hall or Albany, but was was
it as bad before the receivership in seventy five or
to get it to get worse once Albany was calling
(04:25):
all the shots in the city. It got a little
bit worse after nine and then it started to get better.
The subway system failing was part of what led up
to New York's financial distress and to take over essentially
by Albany and the federal government of New York's finances
for quite a long time actually, and the problem with
(04:49):
New York City's approach to the subway and bus system
is that from the nineteen forties well into the nineteen
sixties and seventies, the city's focus was on keep the
fair down. There was a nickel fair for a long time.
Then it went up to a dime. It was less
and less able to cover the operating costs. But mayors
(05:09):
from Wagner to lindsay for very good reason, they wanted
to keep the fair low because they wanted poor people,
working class people, middle class people to stay on the subway.
They thought, if we right, if we increase the fair
too much, more people are going to leave the city.
They're going to get in their cars and go to
the suburbs. But the problem with the focus on the
(05:30):
fair was that there was no focus on capital investment.
That they needed to increase the fair and they needed
some tax revenues to buy new subways, air conditioned subways.
We're gonna have to raise money at some point, right
buy new buses, repair the tracks, repair the same When
did they start doing that, well, they that changed in
the early nineteen eighties when finally trains were breaking down
(05:54):
every twenty thousand miles, very frequent for someone to be
kicked off the subway train and be stuck on the
platform because the doors on the train wouldn't close, and
so very frustrating commutes for people. And in the early
nineteen eighties, uh Dick Ravitch, who was the mt A
chairman at the time, convinced the governor convinced the state
legislative slature in Albany that they needed to approve a
(06:18):
package of taxes to support the m t A start
to rebuild the capitol. Yes, and the business community was
on board with this, and it was a signal to
New York that we're not going to give up on
the city. We're gonna double down and we're gonna rebuild
the physical infrastructure that the city needs to thrive again.
And starting in the eighties, as soon as they made
(06:40):
these first investments, population of the city started to grow,
tax based started to grow again, and that was the
only thing that made it possible for us to turn
around the crime situation and other problems starting in the
early nineties. How would you describe Let me ask this
to Corey, what's the city's relationship to Albany now? But
it's still in the same position. It wasn't seventy No,
(07:00):
I mean, there was a financial control board that was
put in place to oversee New York City, and the
financial control it still exists. It hasn't been phased out.
But we are not in the same position in any
way as we were now. We are the economic engine
for New York State. And I've been on the City
Council for five and a half years. I was elected
in two thousand and thirteen, and the first budget process
(07:21):
that I went through in the middle of two thousand
and fourteen, our city's budget was around seventy three billion
dollars with a B. The upcoming budget we're voting on
in the next couple of weeks is now ninety two
and a half billion dollars, almost twenty billion dollars in
growth in less than six years. It used to not
be that way, and the times that we're talking about,
(07:42):
what the financial crisis, with the subways deteriorating, with Central
Park being an unsafe place, and so now we give
more to Albany every year than we get back, just
like the exactly as New York ss the Washington We
are a donor city to Albany, and New York State
is a donor state to Washington. And so now part
(08:03):
of the reason why it's happened since a great recession
in two thousand and nine, when there was a major downturn,
we've seen seven and eighty thousand private sector jobs created
in New York City, unemployments at an all time low
three point nine percent, Tourism the highest level ever recorded
last year at over sixty six million tourists. So if
you looked at New York City on a piece of paper,
by the numbers, you would say, hot, damn, the city
(08:26):
is doing really well. But when you dig into the
finances of the m t A, when you look at
the number of homeless children in our school system, if
you look at what's happening, uh, just on poverty numbers
in New York City, there is still a long way
to go. But I think, as Nicole and Tom both said,
the future of New York City, the way we can
gain further economic growth is through investing in mass transit.
(08:48):
It's the lifeblood of New York City. And the m
t A has become a political hot potato where if
something good happens, people stand up and say I'm in charge,
and when something bad happens, they say it not me.
Go to that board that no one knows a single
person who serves on the board, and blame it on them.
And the m t A is far too important to
(09:08):
be put in the middle like that, which is why
I'm grateful we have someone like Andy Byford, who was
a world class guy, who has come in and I
think is moving the system in the right direction. Let
me let me highlight that. I mean, in the seventies
and eighties and nineties you were talking about those bad
old days, and I remember Central Park when you didn't
go in after dusk. Back then, for every ten jobs
created in the metropolitan region around New York City kind
(09:30):
of southwestern Connecticut, Long Island, northern New Jersey, nine of
them were outside New York and one of them was
inside New York City. It was a suburbanizing economy, is
Nicole was talking about. New York was trying and failing
to compete with the suburbs, and that's where all of
the growth of jobs and prosperity was occurring for the
last ten years, not only as New York suddenly caught
(09:50):
up with the rest of the region. Today, nine out
of ten new jobs created are in the five boroughs
of New York City, and it's parts of northern New
Jersey and Long Island and Connecticut that aren't keeping up.
And so this this economic boom has been really terrific
for the city and its finances, but still all many
controls things. I mean, we just passed, you know, congestion pricing,
(10:11):
which we think is a great policy, which will mean
that people will pay to drive into Manhattan south of
sixtieth Street, and that will generate money from mass transit.
And that's all very well and good, But the truth
is the city had no control over this. It was
up to Albany, and it was up to legislators in
Buffalo and Niagara to decide whether or not that's right. No,
of course it's not right. But it's a legacy of
this of the bankrupt and I want to go around,
(10:32):
and I want to go around the room. And I'll
continue with you, Tom. And that is about congestion pricing. Now,
I think congestion pricing is a horrible idea. I think
it's an awful idea. And the reason I think it's
an awful idea is it punishes people who It's a continuation,
in my mind of my least favorite condition of living
in New York, and that is the residents of New
York come last. People who live here and this is
(10:53):
their home, and they pay taxes to live here as
citizens of the Five Bros. They come dead, asked in
the decisions that are made. And congestion pricing should not
punish a person who lives in the Five Brooks. But
if you live along Island or Rockland, or Philly or Delaware,
they're commuting from all these different places to come to
New York to do a business. And you're gonna ride,
single person in the car, We're gonna hit you so
(11:14):
hard you're gonna pass out with the with the charge.
What's wrong with that idea? Basically, what's going through is
very consistent with what you said. Most of the people
who are driving into Manhattan south of sixtieth Street are
coming from Westchester, from Fairfield County, from Nassau County. That's who.
That's the vast majority of the people who are going
to be paying into the system in the first place,
and right now they've been getting a free ride. And
(11:36):
worse than that, there are some routes that are charged
and others that are free, and so a lot of
them are doing what we call toll shopping, and they're
driving out of their way to get in through the
free Brooklyn Bridge. A quarter of the people on the
b Que this morning, really we're coming from South Brooklyn,
and the most direct route for them to get into
Manhattan would have been the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, but instead
(11:57):
they drove across the b Que to get over to
the Brooklyn Bridge and take the free crossing in. It
makes no sense right now. As Tom said, if you
take the Battery Brooklyn Tunnel you currently pay a toll,
but if you take the Brooklyn Manhattan or Williamsburg Bridge
you don't pay a toll. If you take the Lincoln
Hall and Tunnel you do pay a toll. So it
was a piecemeal, screwed up approach that we're trying to
(12:21):
bring some sanity to and the real questionnaires. You have
to make these difficult public policy decisions when you have
a system that is failing and needs a permanent revenue
stream and six sixplomatic parking too. Well, they've got the money,
but but six million people take the subways and busses
(12:41):
every single day. And there's been an analysis done. If
you look at Queens and Brooklyn and the Bronx SAT
now is different because they don't have an extensive rail system.
But if you look at the three outer boroughs, the vast, vast,
vast majority of people that are coming into Manhattan every
single day below sixty Street are currently doing it by
(13:01):
subway already. So let's improve the subway service with a
reliable revenue stream for those people. Yes, what Corey and
Tom say is correct if and this is a big if,
if the m t A implements congestion pricing correctly on
both sides of the equation, cutting congestion and spending the
(13:23):
money on projects that actually improved the transit system. On
the congestion side, they're already overwhelmed with requests for exemptions.
The people who work for the m t A, they
wanted a congestion an exemption for the congestion charge exactly,
not just when they're on duty, but just when they're
(13:44):
driving to their workspace. The undergoing to set exactly. Other
other city unions are going to want the same exception exceptions, police, fire, santation,
teachers driving their private cars into the city are going
to want to be exempt from this charge. And you
know they do wonderful work. But everyone who works in
the city does wonderful work, private sector, public sector, low paid,
(14:06):
well paid. If we give one exemption, you almost have
to approve them all because everyone has some reason why
they shouldn't pay the charge. I mean we all do
so either do no exemptions or don't have the program.
The number of exemptions that are being lobbied for right now,
congestion pricing will look like a gigantic piece of Swiss cheese.
It would be like every thing that happens in New York.
(14:28):
The tour bus operators are asking for one is if
they don't cause any traffic congestion. Now are the web
of contractors who are bidding for mt A projects, not
just the Second Avenue debaccle, but other things like that.
Is it a kind of a uh, the usual suspects
that are coming, Like what prevents a person in charge
Albany or city Hall to turn around and fire every
(14:50):
single one of them and say, you know what I'm
gonna do. I'm gonna get housing in New Jersey. I'm
gonna bring a bunch of Amish people here. But Robert
Moses had them pitched ten on the frozen Zack's Bay
and the workers work through the dead of winter. So
the beach house that Joe, I mean, I read Carol's book,
so the Jones Beach could open on time for that summer.
I'm not sure we're going back to that. I wouldn't
(15:13):
go back to that. I would have them pitch tents
on the frozen reservoir in Central Park May They're gonna
all live there. But my point is is what's gonna stop.
What's going to stop the hemorrhage of the sickening contract
Because as we all know, certain politicians, mostly north of
the city have a have a very sweetheart relationship with
the unions and want them to and want to appease them.
(15:36):
What's your answer for how we lower these costs? Everybody
benefits from the current system except for the average New Yorker.
The contractors benefit because a lot of the global contractors,
the companies that are actually good at doing this in
France and Spain and Japan, they won't bid on our
projects because the system just intimidates them, and rightly so
(15:59):
whenever they bid, for example, they're afraid of our union
work rules. France, Germany, Japan, all countries with first world's
work rules. They treat their workers well in terms of healthcare,
in terms of working conditions, but they don't have the
byzantine work rules that are rich. In the end, it
takes political leadership, like if you look at the Long
(16:22):
Island railroad work rules for example, that are pushing up
over time, where people are making quintuple their incomes in
their last few years of work by essentially working around
to manipulate. Yeah, these are due to the work rules.
Their work rules have been enshrined in the contracts for
fifty years. In order to change them, the governor or
(16:42):
the mayor, if we put the mayor in charge of
them right now, the governor in the governor's responsibility to
address that. The governor has to decide he'll take a
strike that he's willing to take. The uh. Short term
pain of people having a much more difficult time vents
him from firing every single one of them and replacing
(17:02):
them with the starting another car. What prevents an emergency
financial measure in which a state where city entity gets
sit there and go, we just don't have the money anymore.
I really don't care how you feel about it. You
work for us. I'm not asking you what to do.
I'm telling you what to do. Right do than that
happen In the end, it comes down to the political
(17:23):
willingness and donations from those unions. A short term hit.
It's not even so much donations. I mean, Cuomo is
very close to the Transport Workers Union, which is the
subway and bus union. Not so much because he needs
the money, although money is always useful, but because he
wants the votes. This is a very reliable voting block.
A vote is worth a lot of money goes hand
(17:45):
in hand with a vote is worth a lot more
than a dollar. I mean, they spend dollars four votes,
So if you can get the votes directly, that's much
better from the governor's perspective. Tw this union helped the
governor tremendously during his primary fight with Cynthia Nixon a
few years ago. But I just want to jump in here,
and I'm not saying I don't believe this is what
Nicole was saying, But I want to be clear. I
(18:05):
don't think I think it would be easy to scapegoat
and vilify the workers who work on the subways and
buses every single day. And for a lot of these folks,
this has been a pathway to the middle class, to
a pension, to healthcare. And I don't think they're the
real problems here. I think part of the problem here
is that you've had at the m t A for
(18:27):
years and years and years major major mismanagement. You haven't
had oversight on contracting. I'll give one primary example, east
Side Access, which is the UH MEGA project which going
to connect UH, yes, exactly UH. And that project is
eleven billion dollars over budget. Eleven billion dollars over budget.
(18:50):
It's not eleven billion dollars over budget because of the
subways and bus workers. It's because of the broken, collusive
contracting system and bid system that exists. The amount to
re signal the entire subway system so that we could
have state of the arts signaling and cut down and
delays is nine billion, So we could have taken that
eleven billion dollars in the cost overrun and already re
(19:12):
signaled the entire system. The Brooke closer to exactly. We
can't even have a conversation right now about expanding the
subway system. You've got a few stations and Second Avenue,
you've got the one station at Hudson Yards, which was unique.
But you can't have a conversation about the Utica extension
in Brooklyn and the other places to expand where they're
transit deserts when you get have two fresh meadows in
(19:34):
South Brooklyn and other places. Because we are constantly treading
water and trying to just keep things going, and you
can't have a conversation going forward and provide a little
more context. Eric Garciti the mayor of Los Angeles right now,
he was able to pass by selling it to the
voters a multibillion dollar bond on subway expansion. Now l
a Is, you know, is not a subway city, but
(19:56):
they're trying to become one. Rama Manuel just left office
in Chicago and one of the highlights of his final
term was improving subway service there. Andy Biford was in Toronto, Sydney, London,
places where they did this type of expansive work, and
we can't have that conversation in New York because of
how broken the system is. Now let me just interject,
(20:18):
you announced your running from mayor, and of course I
don't fault you for wanting to not scapegoat the union
transit workers and say that the problem was more the
contracting process and so forth. But nonetheless, many unions get
into that whole gouging thing where it's like, you know,
quadruple overtime to the last three years to get the
(20:40):
sweetheart pension. Do you agree that's got to stop? Yeah?
But part of the problem right now, and this has
been I think part of the issue at the very
public fight you've seen on the mt A board and
with the governor on the long unmoored overtime. It's hard
to defend those overtime numbers. But these these are the
overtime rules that the m t A set up themselves.
(21:00):
So the union is taking advantage of the rules that
were given to that. But I appreciate that. I'm saying,
if you set up a set of rules, of course
they're not going to say no. But eventually someone's got
to say no. I have found that in most instances,
at least recently. And it's different now because economic times
have been going well, so the city has a lot
of money. But most unions are willing to make a sacrifice,
(21:24):
and there is a trade that gets involved. They may
take a hit on healthcare, but they don't want to
bag a hit on the pensions. It's always a sort
of a little bit of a trade back and forth.
And I think if you sit down and you have
a conversation and you say this is what we need
and the public understands what the need is, I think
most times, uh, most of the union leaders are willing
(21:45):
to do that. I think John Samuelson at t W
is actually a pretty pragmatic guy and he's someone that
you can work with. He's not someone who's out there
being irresponsible. And I think you need to sit down,
get around at table. But again, I want to get
back to the big thing here, which is the m
t A is set up to deflect any level of accountability.
So we can talk about all these super important issues
(22:05):
on repairing, contracting, and on negotiating with unions and expanding
the subway system. But until you get down to the
fundamental issue of singular accountability and responsibility, everyone is always
going to be able to point fingers, which is why
I called for municipal control. I agree with you piggybacking
on that the roads in the city, and it is appalling.
(22:26):
The roads are better in Lima, Peru than they are
in New York City. They finished fiction the roads on
my block, and two weeks after they had the gutted, pitted,
bombed out preparations done, and then and they went and
laid the roads on their Two weeks later they started
cutting it up for some utility start of chopping it
up again. I had a meeting about this yesterday, this
fairy topic not and not to get too granular, but
(22:47):
one of the big issues if we're talking about contracting
that New York City is run into, is that when
you want to restripe the roads after the paving, you
can't restripe the roads for weeks, which is like the
most basic thing a government should be able to do
in a city. Can't why because none of the striping
is done by the city. The striping is done by
outside private contractors who have set up a collusive industry
(23:10):
on how to gouge the city by all working together.
And so these are big issues that affect basic municipal services.
New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson with him our
Regional Plan Association President and CEO Tom Wright, and journalist
(23:32):
Nicole Jelinas. If you like thinking about how New York works,
you'll love my conversation with Martin Horne, who has had
just about every job imaginable in New York City corrections,
including head of the prison system, which led him to
some unusual opinions. I would legalize drugs across the board.
(23:52):
You would legalize which all of them? You would legalize
old rugs? Yes, that's a pretty well well, I wouldn't
say that. I wouldn't say that while I worked for
a governor or a mayor who was an elected definition.
Why wouldn't you say that then as opposed to now
because I had a mortgage debate. The rest of my
conversation with Martin Horne at Here's the Thing Dot Org.
(24:31):
This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing.
I'm joined by journalist Nicole Jelinas, New York City Councils
Speaker Corey Johnson and Tom Wright, President and CEO of
the Regional Plan Association. Right in the middle of another topic,
just had to turn back to the insane amount New
(24:53):
York pays to build and maintain its subways. I have
to hit this issue on why things cost so much.
It's impossible to defend the work rules of the unions
and some of the things that drive up the cost.
We've got to get more competition and with contractors and
other things, but the entire system is broken from front
to end. The procurement process in New York State is
(25:16):
so ridiculous that contractors will be hired to build a
piece of the Second Avenue subway. They will know that
it's going to change, but it's going to take a
year for the procurement process to effectuate that change. So
they build something knowing that at the end of it
they're going to be told to rip it up and
rebuild it again under some new way. But they have
(25:38):
to do it, and the contractors if they don't do
all the time, all the time. There were thousands of
change orders on the Second Avenue Subway in the last
year or two to opening it up as subway. All
of these things subway. Here's another example of one running
the Number one line through the World Trade Center site.
(25:59):
It was a kind of historic achievement of the MTA
to restore that service, and then the mt A basically
said to the Port Authority, you can rebuild this new
path station at Fulton, but you're going to continue to
run our subway through it. The cost of doing that
was hundreds of millions of dollars, when any rational situation
would have looked at and said, you know what, we're
going to shut this down for a couple of months
(26:20):
and we're gonna then rebuild the whole thing and it
will save us an enormous amount of money. But essentially
you had kind of the m t A and the
Port Authority, both state entities, kind of saying, well, it's
not my dollars, so I don't care. You just have
to go do it. And that's the kind of failure
of the eleven billion dollar overrun that Corey talks about
with east Side Access close to a half a billion dollars.
(26:41):
Because New York State has ridiculous insurance protections. I'm sure
that if we just adopted the California protections that people
would still have plenty of protection here in New York,
but we add hundreds of millions of dollars to the
cost CUOMO rated the subways state of good repair money
for pet projects. Correct, is that on a yeah? Well
when did that happen? Well, you were very critical of
(27:03):
thattor we were, we were critical of The truth is,
depreciation is not just a kind of financial accounting idea.
It is cables giving out, it is wheels giving out.
And it's not sexy, it doesn't add it doesn't give
you a big ribbon cutting. But those kinds of basic
investments in the system have to keep going. And that's
what God got it. And that's what we saw over
the last decade or so, kind of money being taken
(27:26):
out of and that's what suddenly led to the situation
of the crisis and Nicole. If you were given some
czar like position of the biggest cost controls that you
would implement, what would you do? More transparency? And I
know that that's a cliche, but I'll give you a
couple of specific examples of a project's cost is buying
(27:46):
materials meant steel. These are global commodities and the global
price is known. You can look in the newspaper and
see what's the going price for especially right, But these
are part of these contracts where the contractors go to
subcontractors and buy the materials, and so the cost of
the raw materials is not known by the public. Every
(28:09):
single materials purchase, the volume and the price should be
disclosed to the public and benchmarked to a global index.
So well, why isn't it because the system as it
is benefits everybody. But contractors should not be making a
profit on the portion of the contract that involves materials
(28:30):
purchases because they're not adding any right, they're they're not
they're not adding any value to that, so they do
get a markup on it, but they shouldn't. That's one
thing is making sure that there's not a lot of
padding and corruption in the materials purchase process. And the
other thing would be all of these construction contracts between
(28:51):
the contractors and the construction unions iron workers union, steel workers, carpenters,
all of these contracts should be public right now. The
contractors and the unions keep these contracts in these work
rules private because they say these are just arrangements between
private parties. I mean, if Tom and I signed contracts,
really nobody's business. But in this case, the public is
(29:14):
the final payer. If the m t A is spending
twelve billion dollars on the East Side Access Project five
billion dollars on the Second Avenue subway, the public should
know every single one of these work rules, and each
work rule should have a cost item next to it.
This costs US fifty million dollars a year. Just getting
(29:35):
those two pieces of information would get us a long
way to reform because all of these things are connected.
You know, someone might say Long Island Railroad Union has
nothing to do with construction unions. But if one set
of unions gives up something, the other sets of unions
knows that it has to give that thing up to
(29:55):
t W is never going to sign a deal that
is less generous the Long Island Railroad contract because one
side looks like a chump, one side looks like you've
got a better deal. So all of these things have
to everybody right all down together. Um, Now for Corey,
just to change the arc here just a bit, what
would you do if you want to improve the city's
(30:16):
relationship with the governor. Well, I would say that I
don't want to be presumptuous, but I think one of
the things that you need to do in politics and
in life is you need to be able to relate
to people and to maybe use a little bit of
charm sometimes. What what do I may that? I mean
that in a hollow, empty way. What I mean is,
(30:38):
I think part of the job of being mayor of
the City of New York is when you saw at
Cotch standing at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge during
the transit strike, shaking people's hands. There was a little
bit of theater involved when you see people out there
when you're screaming how am I doing. Part of what
the job of mayor is is making sure the city
is running in the right way, so that you don't
(31:00):
have homeless encampments, so that the subway isn't breaking down
every day, and you're working with Albany to get that done.
See that you don't have a hundred and ten thousand
homeless children during one point of the year in the
City of New York. You need to work on those issues,
but you also have to be a cheerleader for the
City of New York. You have to do both of
those things. And I think if you do that, if
the if the public relates to you in that way,
(31:23):
not just on an operational level, but they like you.
They like how you're championing and cheerleading New York. I
go around last night. I spoke at the y m
C A galat Cipriani Street, and I stood up and
I said, New York City is the greatest city in
the world. We are the city that gave the world
j Lo and Barbara streisand we are the city that
is the holes. We are the city of the home
of the lemon Ice, King of Corona. We are the
(31:45):
city with the Statue of Liberty not that far from me,
or the torch is a beacon to immigrants and refugees,
sam seekers. I think the disconnect is in that budget
number I gave you from seventy three billion dollars to
billion dollars, nineteen billion dollars in revenue growth in five years,
and you still have people who feel like they're being screwed.
You still hear that money coming from the economy. The
(32:06):
economy has been hosting You've seen prosperity. So if you again,
if you look at seven eighty thousand private sector jobs,
three point nine percent unemployment, the highest number of tourism ever,
recorded crime, homicides, and an all time low since nine
when crime numbers started to get reported. And New Yorkers
(32:26):
right now, the mayor is not getting credit for that
because you actually do need to cheer lead those things.
But you need to cheer lead those things and at
the same time say, I know that it is totally
screwed up that we have a record homeless population New
York City, that nights is crumbling, public housing is crumbling
before our eyes, that the subways are in a state
(32:47):
of disrepair, and that I'm going to go out there
and use all of that record growth that we've seen
to address this crisis. Uh. There are things that I
don't agree with Michael Bloomberg on, like the third term,
but he said something which I do agree with him on.
He said it, and this is why I was a
critic of the Amazon deal. He said, if you want
to attract businesses and jobs to New York City, you
need to do three things. Number one, you need to
(33:09):
have low crime. Number two, you have to improve the
school system. And number three, and that's what we're talking about,
you have to invest in infrastructure and public spaces. If
you do those three things, businesses will come to New York,
people will come to New York, and the economy will grow.
And the disconnect is, with twenty billion dollars in growth
just in our city's budget in five and a half years,
(33:30):
that prosperity is not being felt. And people are like,
how come the trash cans are overflowing on my corner?
How come public housing as fall? How come the street
sweepers can't have a camera on their truck and when
they pull up behind you and you haven't moved, they
take a picture, email it to the traffic post and
you get a ticket. But I want to say, but
I want to say, well, I mean, I'm don't get
(33:51):
me started by how much I want to point the
finger at Albany. But what did our pa think of
the Amazon deal? We were supportive of the Amazon deal.
I will admit, UH don't love the idea of of
public finance incentives, although most of the ones that they
were talking about were ones that are readily accessible to
any company that's coming in. And I think that there
should be a re examination of that entire of that
(34:11):
entire situation. Everybody that I know that lived out there
said this thing is going to come out here and
the speculative buying of of of housing is going to
drive all of our costs through the roof and ruin
our neighborhood. That's true. But I want to add one thing,
not to check on Tom Google, who what is about
twenty five blocks north of where we're sitting in the studio,
which is the biggest employer in my council district. They've
(34:32):
created the most fifteen thousand jobs in the last decade.
How much subsidy and incentiment they received from the City
of New York zero. So if you do in a
precedential nature saying to Amazon, we're gonna give you two
point three billion dollars in non discretionary subsidy and incentive
(34:52):
and a five hundred million dollar cash grant which could
go to the subway system. By the way, a five
or a million dollar cash grant to build your headquarters.
What's going to keep Goldman, Sachs, JP, Morgan, Chase, Google, Facebook,
name a company to come back three years from now.
Would say we want the same deal Amazon, that I
can't defend these kinds of deals. And I can remember
(35:14):
when Governor Pataki essentially because because I would say right
now that's kind of the way the game is played.
The rules of the game ought to be changing. But
I do think that that was what was on the table.
But isn't right now the time to change the game.
If not now, when I mean the Amazon deal was
a classic nineties seventies massive subsidy to build buildings. In
(35:38):
the seventies under Mayor Lindsay. Under Mayor Beam, these things
were more understandable because people were fleeing the city. No
one wanted to locate their business here. We had to
give something away just to keep some kind of the core.
Today the problem is the opposite. We don't have catastrophic
failure anymore. We have a catastrophe fixed success, and so
(36:01):
to be giving subsidies away when we need every last
tax dollar for the infrastructure just doesn't make any sense.
Amazon has been their entire business model for twenty two
years has been to avoid paying their taxes. Often legally,
you know they're not breaking the law, but they don't
want to pay taxes. In Texas, they never wanted to
(36:23):
pay the sales taxes, and so they were competing unfairly
with bricks and mortar retailers for years and years, and
this was just another game that they were playing. They
miscalculated this one and they sort of took their blocks
and went home. And so the city will be fine
without Amazon, but only if we stick to Corey's three things. Actually, though,
(36:44):
in the absence of an Amazon and a kind of
large growth there, what's most likely to happen is it's
going to convert to what's been happening, which is residential development,
which is more residential on the waterfront and people moving
in there and then trying to cram onto the subways
to get into jobs in Manhattan. What we need to do, actually,
and I think Nicole's the jobs out there is put
the jobs out there. Nicole's come and catastrophic success is
(37:07):
absolutely right. Wasn't it done in the Bronx? They wet
to be well? Hell, look, and this might be an
athema here. I think if Amazon had gone to New Wark,
it would have been even better. Also way too much,
you know, actually kind of spreading those jobs around so
that we take advantage the trains run in both directions,
and we ought to be taking full advantage of the
capacity that we have by balancing growth. And yes, the
(37:29):
Bronx is the place where be even better for them
to go than the Amazon should still come to New
York City. I want them to come. There is office
space available down in Lower Manhattan at the World Trade Center.
There is office space available at Hudson Yards. It hasn't
been leased up yet. There is office space available. It's
going to be available in Midtown East where we just
rezoned it for more class A office space. There is
(37:50):
a glut of office space available. Amazon should come to
New York City. They should play by the same rules
as everyone else, Google and other Fortune five companies that
don't get a hunger games like sweetheart deal. The European
Union bans these type of contests. They should come here,
and they should come and they should say, wherever we're going,
we want to invest in that local subway station and
(38:11):
improve it and make it better for our workers. We
want to be a good corporate citizen in New York City.
I'm not against Amazon coming in New York City. I'm
I'm against setting up this hunger Games like contest which
doesn't benefit the city real quickly give me uh the
next mayor. In terms of the problems with the m
t A, the next mayor should do what's their first
priority or two. The next mayor's got to come and
(38:34):
make sure congestion pricing gets implemented in the right way,
and make sure that we fully fund Andy Byford's fast
Forward plan, because that's the right plan. He needs forty
billion dollars to do it, and we can't be nickel
and diming him on that s your idea, I think,
someone who is contemplating a run from mayor, I think
you need to come up with big, bold, creative, outside
(38:55):
the box ideas. Bloomberg did it when he called for
mayor control the school system, to Blasio did it when
he called for universal pre k. I think the future
of New York City, the lifeblood of our economy, is stabilizing, transforming,
expanding our mass transit system. And so I think we
need now a better governance model, singular accountability, not a
(39:16):
deflective model, which is what the m T. A. Garners
right now by the way it's set up. And so
I think we have talked about municipal control of the
subways and busses tied in to a master plan of
the streets of New York City. In London, the person
that oversees the tubes and the buses is also the
Department of Transportation commissioner who oversees the city street. How
(39:37):
would you plan to do that with when you become there? Well,
typically it's okay. In two thousand and one, when Bloomberg one,
he got mayoral control in the first six months of
his first term. When to I think there's a little
bit of a mandate that is given to a new
mayor after they've won if they have run on a
(39:58):
big idea, and if this is also a part if
they have convinced the public it is the right thing
to do ahead of time, which typically they have if
they've won the mayorw election. And I think that's one
of the big things. So I'm gonna keep talking about
municipal control, transforming our streets, breaking our call culture, focusing
on pedestrians and cyclists, and having a livabol city. And
(40:18):
I saw that. I have to mention that I saw
that on your phone. You were getting a call from
Andy Biford, who we begged to do the show, who
stiffed us, but being British, he did it in the
most elegant where he stiffed us in a really plummy
and very very English way. You're big ideas for the
m T and Nicole. The next mayor should be riding
the subways and the buses every day and should be
(40:39):
walking the streets. We we need much faster bus service,
which means we need zero tolerance for double park cars,
double park trucks. Every single one of these vehicles should
be slapped with a ticket every single time they violate
the bust lane. We need more bike lanes to the
extent that we can get people. Road closure. Well that yeah,
(41:01):
that's another process. Yeah. I think parts of Fifth Avenue,
Madison Avenue, Sixth Avenue, these avenues should be for buses,
bicycles and for Yellow times Yellow taxis because Yellow taxis
already paid the congestion fee and in terms of paying
a million dollars in some cases for the medallion. And also,
at some point, you know, fifteen years in the future,
(41:23):
a free autonomous bus that does a fixed route that
comes every minute, so if you're going by Rockefeller Center,
no private cars and things like we pedestrianized Times Square.
That's been a success. If we hadn't pedestrianized Times Square,
we would have to do it today because of the
risk of vehicle terrorism. We should be doing more of
that in Rockefeller Center in Lower Manhattan. But coming back
(41:46):
to the mt A, the one thing that the mayor
controls now is the streets. Use the streets for much better,
faster bus service, and if the MTA doesn't provide it,
hold them accountable. I would have alternate side of the
street delivery. So if you're on the east side of
the street or the north side of the street, it's Monday, Wednesday, Friday,
and your deliveries on the other side there's Tuesday, there
is a Saturday. To cut down there. We want people
(42:08):
to have their goods delivered, but they can't do it
whenever they want to. I mean the double parking. I mean,
I'll name one company who's more egregious than UPS. They
pull their truck over the open grave while you're at
your mother's funeral. If they could, they would like to
move to a district system and and look UPS could
actually be part of the solution there. I'll throw that
(42:28):
out there. UPS would like to be biking the everything
within a couple of blocks, but they got to work
with the city and the management of the streets just
hasn't been there. But I want to just finish by saying, obviously,
thank you, to all three of you. We could have
gone on and on and and and and served into
other topics. But thank you well because in my lifetime
I have never seen people in New York more demoralized
(42:50):
it used to be. There was it seemed that there
was a plan when you built buildings. Were at another
one of those stages where we're tearing down ten or
fifteen percent of the city. I'm an exaggerate perhaps to
build new things, but knew what since you brought up
the construction. That's another problem with the streets. These construction
companies that are building these super tall towers, they only
(43:12):
pay a hundred and fifty dollars a month to close
off the whole lane of the street, sometimes for two
and three years briskly. They should be paying market price
for closing that lane of street and get the building
build faster. If you can't do it faster, than you've
got to pay this money, and a good chunk of
that money should go towards the transit. I think if
you become the mayor of New York, she should have
(43:34):
some huge position and he should be yours. That was
Corey Johnson, Nicole Jollinas, and Tom Wright. This is Alec Baldwin,
and you're listening to Here's the Thing
Host
Alec Baldwin
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