NYC NOW - June 21, 2024: Morning Headlines

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

Get up and get informed! Here's all the local news you need to start your day: Manhattan families will soon have priority for competitive seats at a few of the borough’s top high schools. In other news, a plurality of New York State voters support Governor Hochul's pause on Manhattan congestion pricing tolls. But WNYC's Jon Campbell reports, they don't support her overall. Meanwhile, with New York City's next budget due in just over a week, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams says negotiations focus on restoring Mayor Adams' November cuts. Finally, on this week’s segment of On The Way, WNYC reporter Stephen Nessen and editor Clayton Guse discuss the impact of Governor Hochul’s decision to halt congestion pricing, including a stop-work order on the Second Avenue subway station, insights from a recent Siena poll, and a listener question on why trains sometimes slow down.

Welcome to NYC Now. Your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. It's Friday, June 21st. Here's the morning headlines from Michael Hill. Manhattan families soon will have priority for competitive seats at a handful of the borough's most sought after high schools. WNBC's Jessica Gould explains. Schools Chancellor David Banks says the new policy aims to thread a needle. Parents in the largely affluent district two say they've been locked out of nearby schools ever since the De Blasio administration got rid of a policy that gave them a leg up.

But advocates of desegregating the city's public schools favor the current policy, where all kids compete for seats, regardless of where they live. The new policy gives all Manhattan residents first dibs for most seats at six sought-after schools. Banks says the move will not significantly change the number of low-income students enrolled in those schools. School integration advocates say it brings more models of scarcity into admissions. A plurality of New York state voters are a fan of Governor Hockel's pause on congestion pricing tolls in Manhattan, but W&MIC's John Campbell reports they're just not a fan of her. According to a new Sienna College poll, 45% of voters across the state say they support putting congestion pricing on hold. Steve Greenberg is a spokesperson for the polling institute.

Not surprisingly, the largest. support was in the downstate suburbs, which are the areas which would presumably be most affected. But just 38% of voters have a favorable view of the governor. That's her lowest rating since taking office. Forty-nine percent said they have an unfavorable view of her. The governor indefinitely delayed the congestion pricing plan earlier this month, saying she was concerned about the additional cost to New Yorkers. New York City's next budget is due in just more than a week, and City Council Speaker Adrian Adams says negotiations have focused on restoring cuts that Mayor Adams made in November. We're continuing to restore items that were cut that the council beliefs should have never been cut in the first place.

So we are becoming the Council of Restoration instead of the Council of Building. Schools, parks, and libraries are among the areas that council members are seeking to shore up. The Council says the mayoral administration is underestimating projected revenues for the city by about a billion dollars. A spokesperson for the mayor says he looks forward to adopting a budget that helps, quote, the working class people of New York before the deadline. 76 and Sunday now, another hot one today, 92 but feeling hotter than that with a heat advisory and an air quality alert across the region. It's Friday.

That means it's time for a weekly segment of On the Way. Covering all things transportation, that's after the break. It is time for On the Way, our weekly segment unpacking all things transit in New York City, joining us as WNIC's Transportation Reporter, Stephen Nesson and editor Clayton Goosa. The ongoing fallout over Governor Hokel pulling the plug on congestion pricing at the very last minute. It happened two weeks ago, and state officials are still trying to plug the whole Hockel blue in the MTA's budget with the indefinite pause on the tolling plan that was supposed to generate revenue for the transit system. Stephen, what is the latest?

So the biggest admission this week, Sean, is. news that there's a stop work order on the 2nd Avenue subway project. You know, the MTA warned it would have to start making cuts, shrinking its capital plan, since it can't rely on congestion pricing funds coming anytime soon. But to hear the work is halted already was really a surprise, especially since hours before this reveal, Hockel said the complete opposite. She insisted somehow the state will find a way to replace the $15 billion from congestion pricing. Does not mean that we will not find funding for the 2nd Avenue subway or the wheelchair accessibility, all the ADA work that we're going to be doing, the signalization we're doing, the Internet, the Interboro Express.

None of those stopped. And the money that wouldn't have been raised would have taken about a whole year to raise about $400 million, right? So we wouldn't even have had a billion dollars this year. So I'm just saying, let's dial down the temperature. But hours later, the head of construction at the MTA. Jamie Torres Springer was singing a different tune. We have in a couple of cases issued stop work orders on projects that do not strictly meet that state of good repair requirement. We'll provide some more information on that next week.

But yes, we have stopped work on Second Avenue subway. That's a mic drop moment if there ever was one. Yeah, for sure. Can you just remind us why halting work on the Second Avenue subway is such a big deal? Like it stands the reason, right? If there's not any money coming in, some unessential projects have to be stopped for now, right? Well, yeah, it's a big deal for a lot of reasons. One, that they've already issued one contract to relocate utilities for this East Harlem extension of the line.

They were ready to put the contract to tunnel. They've stopped that. That's effectively what this means. But the other part of this is that this is, you know, $7,8 billion for this extension. The federal government last year said, hey, we'll pay for almost half of it. But the MTA, you got to pay for the rest. Now they don't really have that money, it seems, to pay for it, at least for now. And, you know, kind of what Hokel's saying here is like, give me more time, give me more time, we'll find the money.

The MTA is saying, hey, we don't have any more time. We can pay people or we can't. This mixed messaging points to a lot of things, but it points to the fact that the MTA is really prepared to, you know, do some really drastic cuts to its plan. We said it last week. We keep saying it. This is what we're hearing. That they're really going to take away a lot of projects. And the other big reason why this matters is because the MTA and other entities,

have been trying to build a Second Avenue subway in East Harlem Uptown for decades and decades. This line, this extension, they were going to run it through a tunnel that they first dug out in the 1970s. I mean, this is a cursed project, and it seems to be cursed again. And, you know, there's a group called the Regional Plan Association, and they put out a letter this week warning that actually $10 billion in federal funds could be lost with this move, not just Second Avenue subway, but the MTA's plan to buy more electric buses, new train cars. All of that could be at risk if the MTA can't cover its share. Well, when are we actually going to find out what is on the chopping block? So last week and this week, folks at the MTA have been scrambling to put together a capital plan that is now in shambles because of Hockel's move. Not the least of which is because they have nearly $29 billion worth of projects that they want to do.

But now they only have $13.5 billion to spend on it. So the full MTA board is meeting next week. We're expecting a highly radioactive report. laying out all those cuts to the capital plan. It's not going to be pretty. Remember, congestion pricing was passed in 2019 after subway service fell apart. The MTA diverted money away from maintenance. But it created this political support to pass congestion pricing.

And then it allowed the MTA to form this big construction plan that they said would save the subway and bring it in a state of good repair in the 21st century. Now they're scaling that back. And at the MTA in so many words, you know, quietly, politically, is putting those. blame for that at Hockel's feet. This is something I've been waiting to see. Staying on Hockel and the politics of all of this, a Siena poll came out to that looked into the support of Hockel's decision to stop congestion pricing. What does it show? I'm so curious. Right. It paints her as a winner. I mean, the question was, or at least in the public opinion, the question was, do you support or oppose the governor's decision to put the congestion pricing plan on hold? And 45% of the people

who responded in the city said, yeah, I support the move. I don't want the tolls. 23% said, no, no, no, no, I wanted the tolls. And another 17 or so said, I don't, I don't know. I don't know what you're talking about or refuse to answer. So it's, it's an interesting breakdown that says, hey, she has some public support around this, at least in terms of people not wanting to pay the toll. But you know, when it comes to congestion pricing, New York is obviously not the first city to try this. Right. Stockholm did this. And they have a fascinating case for us to look at. Before they implemented it, two thirds of the public were against congestion pricing. This is back in 2000. But the city wanted to be fair, and they made a bet that people would like it. So they agreed to hold a referendum. Let the public vote on it, whether to make the tolls permanent. So they did the seven-month trial, and overnight, the number of vehicles dropped by 20% in their downtown. 20%, Sean, is like the difference between gridlock and free-flowing traffic, I'm told. And then they stopped charging, and they let traffic return to how it was before the tolls.

And a year later, more than half the voters approved the tolls. Interesting. A few years after that, it was even more. Two-thirds of residents now supported congestion pricing. So I guess the takeaway for us, the lesson is it's always darkest before the storm. And once people see the impacts, the majority will be in favor of having fewer vehicles on city streets. Okay, so most weeks on the segment, we answer a question from a curious commuter. This week, we have one from Martin Brooklyn, who asks, why do my trains run at such?

slow speed sometimes? It feels like an amusement park monorail sometimes, but other days it's normal. Yeah, I mean, one reason you talk to subway operators. And train crews, it's that during rush hour, you have a lot of congestion on the tracks. The way that the subway's built makes so that you can't run a lot of trains close together at high speeds. And that's one big reason. Another reason, right, is that construction. The very people who were working on the tracks to speed up your... commute are a big reason why it's slow because when they're on the tracks and they have a

flagging team out there, they have all the guys out there, guys and women out there, the train can't run more than 10 miles an hour past a work zone. So they're out there replacing signals. They're out there replacing track. They're out there trying to keep your subway moving. But while they're out there, you're crawling along. And one thing we should add, just to bring it back to congestion pricing, the money from that was supposed to pay for new signals that lets trains run closer to get.

You can run more trains when they're closer together. You don't have to worry about them bumping into each other because there are digital signals that will immediately alert you if you're too close, whereas the signal system now is the Roosevelt era system where they just need more space between trains for safety. That's FDR, not Teddy Roosevelt. That's WNIC editor, Clayton Goosa, and transportation reporter Stephen Nesson. You can stay in the know on all things transit or ask a question of your own by signing up for our weekly newsletter at gothamis.com. on the way. Thanks for listening. This is NYC now from WNYC.

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