Gov. Kathy Hochul spoke ahead of President Joe Biden on the opening night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Monday, which was quite an ironic twist.
Biden has always been a friend of public transportation, having relied on Amtrak all those years to commute from Washington, DC to his home state of Delaware as a senator. He put his money where his mouth was as president, getting through Congress a massive Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to rebuild roads, bridges and trains across America.
And during his administration, Biden also lifted the last bureaucratic hurdles standing in the way of congestion pricing, the Manhattan central business district tolling program designed to cut down on traffic while also raising critical infrastructure improvement dollars for the MTA.
Then along came Hochul, who was for congestion pricing before she was against it. Just weeks before congestion pricing was to be activated on June 30, she suddenly put the whole thing on ice because, in her view, the costs were too much for New York drivers and delivery workers to bear.
Whereas Biden found a way to spend trillions on infrastructure, Hochul did not find alternative funding for the MTA that she promised to do upon pausing congestion pricing. The state Legislature ended its session without approving an alternative plan, and the governor has not indicated she would call it back into special session to consider one before November.
Hochul, obviously, didn’t mention the situation in her booster speech to fellow Democrats on Monday night. But sources close to her, in a New York Post report, indicated that she was mulling an end to the pause sooner rather than later — provided that the proposed $15 toll on drivers be lowered, and more exemptions be made to city employees.
Nothing, however, is concrete. “Sources close to the governor” are not the decision-makers here. Only Hochul has the power to lift the pause, and the capacity as governor to bring parties to the table to either change congestion pricing one more time, or scrap it and find a new funding source for the MTA.
Simply put, Hochul needs to take a few pages out of the Biden playbook and step up. She needs to demonstrate some political courage in solving the congestion pricing dilemma — either by ending the pause, or by getting the state’s powerbrokers to the table to find alternative funding for the MTA without these tolls. This needed to be done yesterday, but it must happen now.
New York City and the MTA are caught in purgatory with the uncertainty of congestion pricing’s future. Hochul got us into this mess; she must guide us out of it.
