Fun and frolic won out over public duty yesterday for MTA board member Nancy Shevell, who skipped a controversial vote at the agency’s monthly meeting to jet off to Israel with Fab boyfriend Paul McCartney.
Shevell, a veteran Metropolitan Transportation Authority board member, traded a chance to save the city from having to pay bridge and tunnel tolls for emergency vehicles to sun with Sir Paul in Tel Aviv and visit the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
Today, she’s expected to be with McCartney as he performs before 50,000 at a giant outdoor concert, his first in Israel.
Back in New York, the MTA board wrangled during a tedious, two-hour meeting with a decision on whether bridge and tunnel tolls should apply to city emergency vehicles.
Shevell’s absence didn’t seem to bother her fellow board members, who, by a 7-6 vote, imposed the tolls, which will cost the city about $10 million a year.
Norman Seabrook, the president of the city correction-officers union and the most passionate opponent of the toll plan among the board members, said he was not upset that Shevell had skipped the meeting.
“At the end of the day, we don’t get paid to do this,” Seabrook said. “I don’t know what her personal circumstances are, and I would never question whether or not someone should or should not be here.”
It was unclear whether Shevell’s vote would have changed the outcome.
Shevell was at MTA headquarters Monday during an all-day round of meetings at which business was hashed out in advance of yesterday’s session.
The $10 million is barely a drop in the MTA’s fiscal bucket – the agency is considering service cuts to plug a $1 billion hole in its 2009 budget.
MTA Executive Director Lee Sander said he wasn’t worried that relations would sour with city government, which provides about 8.5 percent of the money the MTA spends on subways and buses. “We’re making every effort on our part to work through that,” he said.
Shevell, 48, began dating McCartney last November.