MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota will resign Friday to announce plans to run for mayor, sources said yesterday.
Lhota, a Republican who was deputy mayor under Rudy Giuliani, has been widely praised for quickly getting the MTA up and running after Hurricane Sandy.
That praise — rare for the head of the often-reviled agency — prompted a drumbeat of support from the business community, which fears the mayoral race will tilt dramatically left without a strong Republican in the running.
Lhota’s pals from the Giuliani administration are confident they can raise more than $10 million, enough to keep the campaign competitive, sources said.
His wife, Tamra, was a major fund-raiser for Giuliani.
On the negative side, his announcement will likely come only two days after fare and toll hikes are approved.
The MTA’s board is expected to vote for the hikes today.
Even without raising subway fares, be elected as a Republican is often an uphill battle in heavily Democratic New York City.
Lhota was trounced by an unnamed Democrat for mayor in a Quinnipiac University poll, 60 percent to 9 percent.
Former Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión — who also is mulling a run as a Republican — got 11 percent of the vote in the same poll.
The Democratic field is likely to include City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, former City Comptroller Bill Thompson and current Comptroller John Liu.
In a sign of things to come, Josh Isay, Quinn’s political consultant, sniped yesterday, “New Yorkers aren’t going to forget that MTA Chairman Lhota is saddling us with a bus and subway fare hike right before he runs for mayor.”
The MTA refused to comment on Lhota’s impending departure.
Lhota, too, declined to comment.
The law forbids him from planning a run for public office while heading a state authority.
Sources said Lhota will make Fernando Ferrer — a current MTA board member and former Bronx borough president — the vice chairman of the board at the panel’s monthly meeting today.
The move will enable Ferrer, who lost the 2005 mayoral race to Mayor Bloomberg, to take over as acting chairman.
Thomas Prendergast, president of New York City Transit, the MTA division that runs buses, subways and Staten Island Railway, is expected to take over as acting executive director of the agency, which is Lhota’s other title.