How De Blasio Is Guaranteeing Future Subway Delays

Mayor de Blasio had a shocking experience on a downtown subway platform last week. His train never arrived. This, as New Yorkers will tell you, happens. But the decisions the mayor is making with the taxpayers' money mean that future New Yorkers will confront this type of crisis far more frequently — and with no police detail to bail them out.

The mayor unveiled his budget last week — and on the surface, it's mostly good news.

Yes, New York will spend $79.9 billion during the fiscal year that starts July 1, including $59 billion in city taxpayer funds (the rest comes mostly from the feds and Albany). That's a 6.6 percent increase in taxpayer spending from the final Bloomberg budget — even though inflation's only run less than 1 percent since then.

But we can afford it: The city's economy is doing great. Over the past decade, more people have moved to New York than have moved to Boston, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, DC, combined. And New York has a record number of private jobs — surpassing our '60s heyday, before the '70s crisis hit.

And since Wall Street keeps doing so well, minting nice profits for the 1 percent, tax revenues are up, too — $843 million higher than the mayor expected three months ago.

So we have a tidy surplus — about $3 billion. And give the mayor some credit: He's not blowing it all.

De Blasio will sock away $1.8 billion in reserves for a future downturn. City agencies are doing a few small things to be more efficient. The medical examiner plans to save a few hundred thousand dollars by cutting overtime — and hopefully, the customers won't complain.

The mayor says he's being so prudent for a good reason: He wants to make “targeted investments” in growth, including investing in the subways.

As de Blasio said, London is in the middle of building a $23 billion rail line that will increase capacity by 10 percent — and we should be doing more stuff like that (if we don't, there's no way we can keep adding people and tax dollars).

The mayor's similar — if more modest — idea is a Utica Avenue subway in Brooklyn.

The problem is, though, that de Blasio's actions are nowhere near enough to get anything built.

Consider: In his budget, the mayor made a big deal about increasing the city's annual contribution to the state-run MTA to $629 million over the next five years, from a planned $500 million.

This money will pay for new subway cars and buses as well as some track work.

But it won't even pay for most of that work — which will cost $4.2 billion. It sure won't help the MTA build something new, London-style. The MTA does want to start work on the next few stations of the Second Avenue Subway — but it doesn't have a dime for the $1.5 billion it will cost over the next five years. The mayor's new contribution doesn't help here, since the MTA was already expecting it.

Oh, and the only way de Blasio can make the extra cash work in his 10-year, $83.8 billion budget for investing in things like trains, school buildings and water treatment is to slash the MTA's take starting in 2021 — to $40 million. This budget gimmick is common practice — but so is ignoring our critical physical assets like subways.

But it's not like the subways will have built themselves by then.

Worse: Because of bad state politics, much of the MTA's investments are going outside of New York City.

Thanks to Gov. Cuomo and past governors, 72 percent of the MTA's hoped-for $5.5 billion in new transit projects over the next five years will go to projects that serve mostly suburbanites: bringing the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central, and bringing Metro-North to Penn Station.

What's de Blasio's solution? Get more federal funding. He said that London is only building Crossrail because it has a “national government that [is] truly [a] partner.” But — fair or not — Washington is just not going to give the richest city in the country more billions for transit.

So if de Blasio does want to make a lasting investment in the city, he's going to have to do it himself. Which means being honest about the fact that we just can't afford to spend $18 billion every single year — the cost of two new subways! — on pensions and health care for city workers.

Until then, he'd better keep his police detail waiting.

This piece originally appeared in New York Post

This piece originally appeared in New York Post