These Three People Say They Can Fix the Subway

transportation system. New York City Council speaker and two thousand 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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

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.

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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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.

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

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

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 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, 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 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. 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, 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

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 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. 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 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 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

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. 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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

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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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,

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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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