The MTA board yesterday approved deep service cuts to close a projected $343 million budget deficit — and City Council members were outraged.
Ain’t they always.
Take Leroy Comrie of Queens, who told the board: “We have a serious problem throughout this state. We’re trying to find revenues. We’re trying to find an ability to make up shortfalls.”
But Comrie and his fellow council members had an opportunity Monday to do just that — but voted instead to kill the Kingsbridge mall project in The Bronx, and the thousands of tax-revenue-producing jobs that went with it.
Instead, listening slavishly to the retail-workers union — which insisted that all jobs for the project pay substantially higher than market wages — the council iced the undertaking.
By deciding that no new jobs in the city’s poorest community is better than market-wage jobs, the council did its bit to further degrade the city’s already recession-wracked economy.
Of course, if Council Speaker Christine Quinn had her way, the damage to the city would be even worse.
She actually proposed filling the MTA budget hole with cash from the agency’s capital fund — that is, funding the transit workers’ lush pension payments and other amenities with money set aside to prevent track fires and keep the subway-car doors from falling off.
Hello! Doesn’t she remember how that worked the last time it was tried?
Hint: The system almost collapsed.
All this clarifies the council’s priorities. They are the same as the city’s unions.
Outrageous.