Deadline Day For NYC Congestion Pricing Tax UPDATE: DOA

Today is the last day for the state to approve New York City's congestion pricing tax. At stake is $354 million in federal aid to implement the program. One has to wonder if that $354 million would be better spent on the Second Avenue Subway, the third rail tunnel between New Jersey and New York, or any number of bridge and tunnel repair work needed to keep the city's infrastructure intact.

Mayor Bloomberg is busy trying to get legislators on board with the tax on commuters into Manhattan, but he doesn't appear to have been doing a good enough job with one key legislator - Sheldon Silver, the Speaker of the Assembly who also happens to represent much of Lower Manhattan.

With Bloomberg saying that there will be no further changes to the plan, he's all but killed the tax plan on commuters, which would hit Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx and Long Island drivers hardest, especially those who would normally take the Lower East River crossings - the 69th/Queensborough, Williamsburg, Manhattan, and Brooklyn Bridges. Those bridges are currently free, but if Bloomberg had its way, any driver crossing into Manhattan from those bridges would be hit with an $8 fee if they're heading to Lower Manhattan. It's a back-door toll on those free bridges and everyone is slowly coming to that realization.

Right now, the best hope might be a complete reworking of the proposal, including turning it into a pilot project with a 2-3 year duration and a much smaller area of Manhattan affected, but Bloomberg quashed that idea claiming that you can't write complex legislation in such a short period of time. Well, he does has a point, but his plan is so flawed in its current form that he may have no choice but to accept serious changes if he wants the City and State to receive any of that federal aid.

Opponents of congestion pricing have hit upon the real purpose of the tax - to raise revenue and the realization that the plan has nothing to do with reducing congestion and everything to do with plugging holes in various budgets.

"We're here to make one final urge to Albany - just say no to congestion pricing," said Weprin. "It has since degenerated and has nothing to do with reducing congestion anymore in Manhattan. It's now all about the money to plug a potential capital budget deficit for the MTA or to provide for MTA's future capital needs."

Chinatown tofu maker David Ang said he is afraid his delivery drivers will take their business elsewhere.

"With congestion pricing tax it just won't happen anymore. It will be too expensive for them to come in," said Ang.

At 7 p.m. Sunday, Queens Councilman Tony Avella, a Democratic mayoral candidate, was scheduled among the speakers at an anti-congestion pricing forum at Xaverian High School in Brooklyn.

The MTA budget has been a mess for as long as I can remember - and there has never been full transparency of the agency's budget, which leads to situations where one week they'll claim that they're going to implement $30 million in improvements to get people on board with the congestion pricing plan, and the next they say that they're coming up short on real estate taxes and therefore can't afford to implement the improvements. The MTA is already screwing over commuters and Lower Manhattan by tearing up blocks around the Fulton Street terminal and has essentially killed that project's signature elements - to build an above street level glass structure enabling light to pour into the subway levels and untangle the maze of passageways that connect many of the major subway lines that intersect in Lower Manhattan.

The 7 Line extension is already being scaled back because of economic concerns, and one has to wonder just how long it will be before the MTA claims that they don't have the money to work on the Second Avenue line (again).

Bloomberg is using those projects as proof that congestion pricing taxes need to be implemented, but the plan as it is currently arranged has no way to assure taxpayers and commuters that money collected will actually go to capital improvements and not into the general fund or disappear into the bureaucratic ether.

The Post notes the sausage grinder of the process to get congestion pricing to this point, and that while reducing congestion and pollution are laudable goals, the plan is an unworkable mess.

UPDATE:
Silver speaks. It's dead, Mike. You just can't change the laws of Albany without first going and getting Silver's approval, and Silver just couldn't sign off on it because there wasn't enough pork in the proposal for Silver to bring home to his interests.