Nassau County approved its $2.6 billion budget late Saturday night on an 11-8 party line vote. Unfortunately for LI Bus riders, it offers them more of the same. Nassau’s contribution will remain $9.1 million, far less than the $25 million a year over four years that the MTA says it needs to continue to run the system.
With no increase in county support to LI Bus and with the MTA moving forward with its plan to cut $26 million from the system, this joint neglect could mean the end of the system as we know it.
County Executive Ed Mangano’s only proposed alternative is to privatize LI Bus, a move that could take the system back to the 1970’s, when LI Bus was formed because the free market failed to provide quality service to Nassau County residents.
And it’s still not clear how much interest Nassau County is receiving in its efforts to privatize the system. The deadline for companies to submit bids to take over the system was October 18th, but the county then extended the deadline to yesterday. Requests to the County to determine how many bids were received were not answered. The county is asking potential bidders to run the bus system for free and share fare revenue with Nassau.
Based on the amount of money Westchester and Suffolk County contribute to their privately operated bus systems, this may be an unrealistic ask. (Westchester pays $30 million annually for its Bee-Line Bus system; Suffolk contributes $24 million to Suffolk County Transit.)
The failure of the Legislature to act in support of LI Bus is particularly disheartening because TSTC and Vision Long Island provided a budget review memo to county officials last month that identified funding for LI Bus through re-prioritization of funds from other departments, delaying certain capital projects to save on debt service, and identifying new non-tax revenues that could be used to support the system. Much of this platform was supported by Legislator Dave Denenberg in a letter of support to the County Executive. Mangano, however, rejected these ideas out of hand in a letter.
Outside of a proposal from County Legislator Wayne Wink (D)–also supported by Legislator Denise Ford (R)–to dedicate future red light camera revenue to LI Bus, there are still no legitimate proposals from county leaders.
Actually, I would like to see the MTA turn into a setter of schedules and purchaser of services like a German or Swiss verkhersverbund. It would set the fares and schedules and purchase from various agencies and private companies the actual services. The Long Island Rail Road and at least the inner portions of Metro North could be turned into S-Bahn type services with at least half-hourly service between all local stops. This could be coordinated with the bus services.
Part of the reason there was not enough money to fund LIB was that the MTA used it as a cash cow.If you could get the rel numbers you would see that LIB tripled its management after the recent restucturing in 2008. They putlayers and layers of management just like they do at NYCT. WHen the starting salary for the LOWEST level manager Superintendent is $92,000 and you add benefits, payroll taxes on salaries and pension contributions by the MTA for each employee. For example medical benefits and payroll taxes are approx 22% of salary plus pension benefits is roughly on average $140,000 per manager. Multiply that by 50-75 managers being carried on the LIB payroll (not necessarily working there,they can be at another agency and still on the LIB payroll which is whats happening), you looking at another $7mil to 10mil a year. Its a scam.
Perhaps we should consider the Bauhaus-Bavarian Plan of the post-Weimar Republic era, which advocated subway service in the suburbs. In essence, we could create a Route 110 corridor U-Bahn.
[…] budget. Doing so would have allowed the MTA to continue to run the system. Unfortunately it was rejected out of hand by the county executive, who instead proposed to seek a privatized system with no public […]
[…] to increase its funding and restore service, said Lynch. Their only plan so far has been to somehow privatize the system without providing any subsidies and take a cut of the farebox revenues, a plan Lynch said […]
[…] million is exactly what the county needs to continue with an MTA-run bus system. For many years, the MTA provided a unique subsidy to Nassau […]