Updated – Posting the full article
The Chief
9 lawsuits remain active
BY RICHARD KHAVKINE | November 22, 2024
Despite reduced tolls tied to the MTA’s congestion pricing plan approved by the agency’s board Monday, staunch opposition to the toll endures. At least nine lawsuits challenging aspects of the plan remain active, and opponents will be hopeful to delay or even altogether thwart its start, now slated for midnight, Jan. 5.
One of those, challenging the plan’s “regressive and discriminatory pricing” and other aspects, was jointly filed by the United Federation of Teachers, the Staten Island Borough President Vito Fossella Jr. and seven Department of Education teachers.
The UFT’s president, Michael Mulgrew, last week reiterated his opposition, chiefly on the grounds that while the toll plan would theoretically reduce traffic in Manhattan, it will create bottlenecks in the outer boroughs, with harmful consequences for residents there.
“They’re just moving pollution from Midtown Manhattan and pushing it into the South Bronx, eastern Queens, eastern Brooklyn and northern Staten Island,” he said in a phone interview Friday. “Just straight up, I really got a big problem with the major benefit, the better air quality, the better quality of life going to the most affluent district in our city, and the neighborhoods that are bad get worse air quality, they get more congestion and worse quality of life or some of the forest. I’m sorry, I got a problem with that. If I didn’t have a problem with that, that would be a problem for me because, you know, I’m a teacher.”
Mulgrew noted that although proponents of the plan within the MTA said reduced traffic would bring down ambulance response times that have steadily increased in the last few years, they would theoretically come down only in Manhattan. “So there’s now more congestion in the Bronx, where on a weekly basis, we have multiple emergencies of children having asthma attacks, and we have to call an ambulance,” he said. “And now the child, instead of waiting maybe 20 minutes for an ambulance, maybe we’ll be waiting 30 or 40 minutes.”
But Oren Barzilay, the president of EMS Local 2057, which represents FDNY EMTs, paramedics and fire inspectors, said he expected the toll program would worsen response times everywhere, including Manhattan, since it would likely lead to an exodus of his members.
“It’s just another reason why people will leave this job. It’s coming now to a point where you have to pay more than you’re earning to come to this place,” he said. He noted that emergency medical personnel who drive in to the three Manhattan EMS stations already have to pay bridge and tunnel tolls.
Barzilay estimated that about 300 emergency personnel are assigned to the three stations, with most likely taking public transportation to get to work. But even a relatively small number of departures would further compromise an EMS corps that’s already stretched thin, he said.
“If you have nobody showing up to work, sitting in those ambulances, the response times will increase as units who sit uptown Manhattan or in the borough of Queens by the 59th Street Bridge or in Brooklyn will start ending up in Manhattan because there’s nobody working in those stations,” he said.
Although Governor Kathy Hochul reportedly considered exempting municipal employees from the tolls, no such proposals are included in the new plan. Barzilay said he would continue to make the case for exempting his members, who he has repeatedly said are among the city’s lowest-paid municipal workers, particularly given their responsibilities. Emergency medical specialists-EMTs earn just over $48,000 a year to start.
“We’re working, already meeting with them, so hopefully they will listen to us and have some compassion for the people who are already struggling and living in poverty wages,” he said of the governor’s aides.
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, who sued to stop the plan’s previous incarnation, said the new plan failed to heed the message conveyed by results of the presidential election — that “the vast majority of Americans are experiencing severe economic strains.”
“There could not be a worse time” to be imposing a new toll on people coming into Manhattan, he said.
Elected officials, particularly among Republican members of Congress on Long Island, the Hudson Valley and even the city, are also vowing to block the toll through legislation of their own. In anticipation of Hochul’s announcement, five New York Republican members of Congress wrote President-elect Donald Trump asking him to squash “this absurd congestion pricing cash grab once and for all.” The Congress members did request that Trump “examine other revenue options for improving both MTA service and MTA facilities.”
Trump has several times signaled his disapproval of the tolling program, most recently following Hochul’s announcement. “It will put New York City at a disadvantage over competing cities and states, and businesses will flee,” he said in a statement. The president-elect owns portions of properties within the congestion pricing zone, including his apartment at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.
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