NYC NOW - Morning Headlines: New COVID Variant Detected in NYC, Former NYPD Officer Pleads Guilty to Bribery Scheme, Knicks Force Game 6 Against Pacers, and Judge Blocks Federal Retaliation Over Congestion Pricing

Episode Date: May 30, 2025

A new COVID variant, NB.1.8.1, has been detected in New York after spreading across Asia and 22 other countries. Health officials say it doesn’t appear more severe than previous strains. Meanwhile, a former NYPD traffic officer and a Queens call center owner have pleaded guilty to a scheme that profited off crash victims by selling their personal information. Also, the Knicks beat the Pacers to keep their playoff hopes alive and push the series to a Game 6. Plus, on this week’s transportation segment: a federal judge grants the MTA a preliminary injunction, blocking the federal government from retaliating over congestion pricing while the case plays out. There’s also movement on a new Port Authority Bus Terminal, updates on the Penn Station redevelopment, and updated on 5G service on the G line.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. It's Friday, May 30th. Here's the morning headlines from Michael Hill. A new strain of COVID that's on the rise in Asia and other parts of the world has now landed in New York. WNIC's Caroline Lewis reports. The emerging variant, called NB181, has been reported in 22 countries so far. but the World Health Organization says it doesn't appear to be more severe than other strains of COVID going around. The CDC has confirmed that the variant was detected in the United States through an airport testing program,

but there are still fewer than 20 known cases in the U.S. The State Health Department says just two cases have been reported in New York. Each year, scientists seek to track the most dominant variants of COVID to develop updated vaccines. But federal officials have said they plan to restrict who can get the shots this year. An ex-NYPD traffic safety officer and a Queens call center owner have both pleaded guilty to a bribery scheme. WNYC's Julia Hayward has more on the charges. The pair, Officer Suzette Trimmingham, and call center owner, Mervyn Rimes, admitted a profiting off-car crash victims by passing around confidential police reports.

Prosecutors say the officer sent victim names and contact details to the call center owner, who then sold information to lawyers and doctors. They're accused of making about $900,000 from the scheme, which lasted more than four years. The NYPD says Officer Trimingham retired in 2024, but declined to comment further. Their attorney information was not immediately available. The New York Knicks are still alive, and they're going back to Indiana. The Knicks beat the Indiana Pacers last night in the Eastern Conference finals. 11 to 94.

It means Indiana now has three wins to the Knicks. Two wins. The Knicks will try to stave off elimination again tomorrow night in game six in Indianapolis. If the Knicks win, it'll set up a winner take-all game seven Monday night at the garden. Fingers crossed, as they said. Taking a look now at your forecast. 62 with showers and clouds out there. We have a chance of showers, maybe with late.

afternoon thunderstorms as well, becoming mostly sunny, mid-70s on the Friday, and then tomorrow, off and on showers likely, maybe thunderstorms into the afternoon, mostly cloudy and 72, winds guessting to 20 miles an hour on Saturday. Sunday is looking dry and cooler, upper 60s with sunshine. 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. I'm Sean Carlson for WNYC. It's time for On the Way, our weekly segment on all things considered breaking out in the week's transit news, joining us as WNYC's transportation reporters, Stephen Nesson and Ramsey-Kleaf and editor Clayton Guseh. Let's start off with our favorite topic, congestion pricing.

A judge granted the MTA a preliminary injunction. It's a major win for the transit agency in their lawsuit against the federal DOT. Stephen, what does this mean? Well, what it basically means is the federal government can't. retaliate against the state until the court case is resolved. As you recall, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sent a letter to Governor Hockel saying the feds were going to withhold highway funding if congestion pricing continues. Now they can't do that.

They have the legal backing or the legal mandate not to do that. In court this week, Judge Lewis Lyman really grilled lawyers, a lawyer, I should say, for the feds about their argument. Their claim is that the program, the Biden administration, signed off on doesn't allow for this type of congestion pricing tolling. But the judge really cast doubt on that and seemed to indicate that the feds were simply revoking their approval because they felt like it. Like there isn't even an actual shift in policy behind it. Basically, he said and wrote a 109-page opinion that Duffy and Trump are being arbitrary and

capricious. And he seems to lean toward the view that congestion pricing is legal and the feds don't have the authority to stop it. The added complication is that it's already up and running. So Judge Lyman said, you know, ending it now would actually harm the public by depriving it of the benefits of tolling, which is, of course, you know, improvements to traffic and the money that the MTA is counting on and already bonding against four transit improvements. Kind of two observations here. This doesn't necessarily end the case, but it, you know, prohibits the Trump administration from forcing the MTA to end congestion pricing. That doesn't mean that the Trump administration won't try and circumvents the courts. Of course, that's happening all over in cases across the country. But one interesting thing, the judge's argument really resembles one that we've seen before that was accidentally published last month by lawyers from the Southern District.

Right. The Southern District of New York attorneys accidentally to the docket published this memo laying out flaws in the case. It was later taken offline. And they were supposed to be representing the federal government. Right. It led to the federal, the Trump administration to say, I think that the SD&Y lawyers did, that on purpose, they had been in controversy with the Trump administration over their dropping of the charges against Merrick Adams. They took SD&Y off the case. Now they have many fewer lawyers

representing them, less legal kind of firepower in New York on this case. But really, that memo that they weren't supposed to publish, that was just supposed to be internal, was really similar to what Judge Lyman had said, like laying out that the federal case was on shaky ground. And while this has all been happening, MTA officials have continued to, you know, do a victory lap over the early benefits of congestion pricing just based on the first four months of data available to the public, bus speeds traveling into the zone of increased. Travel times within the zone, cross-town, particularly have gotten better. Less cars are entering the zone compared to figures last year during the same period. And the MTA is hitting their revenue goals.

I never would have thought the words drama and congestion pricing would fit in the same sense. Really, Sean? We've been doing this for almost a year now. All right, moving along here. The Port Authority broke ground on a new bus terminal at 42nd Street. I'll be honestly, I'm a Jersey kid. I feel like I've spent many, many years in the Port Authority bus terminal never thought this was actually going to happen. I don't know if I believe it.

Is it actually happening? I saw shovels hitting ground today. Officials through dirt. Okay. But this comes after the Port Authority secured a $2 billion loan from the federal government in President Biden. Biden's last week, one of his last moves as president, was to secure the funding for this project. And just a reminder, you know, this is an extremely complicated thing to build a new bus terminal while the world's bus terminal is still operating.

But that old Port Authority bus terminal is 74 years old. It's decrepit, dingy. It is the butt of all jokes. Yeah. Even the executive director of the Port Authority himself, Rick Cotton, thinks it is a disgrace. Here he is today. The worst place on planet Earth was how one comedian famously described our current bus terminal. And that might even be an understatement.

It's bad enough that the bus terminal has become one of the most reviled buildings in America. But it's located in the heart of Manhattan. So, yeah, this is complicated, though. First, the Port Authority needs to build a temporary roadway. That's what they started doing today. then they'll build a temporary terminal so it can still run that service and not disrupt people too bad.

There's something like 600 buses a day that use it. And once that's complete, it will tear down the old terminal and build this gleaming new building drenched in sunlight with modern restaurants and spaces and all that. And then that temporary roadway they started today.

We'll turn into a 3.5 acre open space park, something that the community really wanted to be included in this project. And of course, you know, we'll be talking about this for years to come because it isn't expected to be completed for at least, you know, nearly a decade. Okay. I'll look forward to it. The news broke last week just after our last on the way segment.

But Andy Biford, the former head of New York City Transit, is back in the Big Apple to lead the redevelopment of Penn Station. The Trump administration took the redevelopment off the hands of the MCA. What does it mean for Penn Station? And why is there any tension between the city's transit executives? So what it means for Penn Station is that the federal government, meaning Amtrak in this case, now has a man in charge of the project after they kicked the MTA off the plan. And that man is Andy Biford, who some of our listeners might know as Train Daddy. And just the stakes here, you know, for years, you know, power brokers and interested parties in New York have tried and failed to create a plan to make the ramshackle Penn Station a nice place to be. It's been buried under Madison

Square Garden since the 60s, right, when the Pennsylvania Railroad sold the air rights to the space. and Biford ran New York City Transit from 2018 to 2020 when former Governor Cuomo was in office and he was widely celebrated. He helped get congestion pricing passed. He formed the basis for what would be a major capital plan, the previous one for the MTA that's kind of still under construction, still underway. But he resigned in protest after Cuomo pushed through a reorganization of the MTA. But he doesn't just have beef with Andrew Cuomo. Andy Byford also has beef with Jan Aliebara, the current MTA chair. and I think if we break this down

in like kind of children's terms like Byford when he was at the MTA he had his train sets and the support of the public to play with them. Cuomo took his train sets away and gave them to Jano Lieber. Okay. Now Janow Leaver's chair and Janow had been overseeing the redevelopment

of Penn Station. But as of last month, Trump took away his Penn Station train set and gave it to Byford. Okay. So, needless to say, these two guys have bad blood, but But they'll have to find a way to work together. Long Island Railroad, MTA is the largest tenant at Penn Station. Here's Lieber trying to play nice yesterday, Wednesday at the MTA's board

meeting. When the federal government announced that they were taking control of the Penn Station project, there were a lot of people who said, do you think anything will happen? Well, now, still uncertain where it's going to head, but you've got somebody who has worked in rail and in transit. and is clearly capable of understanding the importance of that facility to subway customers as well as to rail passengers. So Biford and Lieber's beef aside, this is going to be ostensibly a public-private partnership, which means that Biford will have to be kind of the broker of the power brokers. So I'll have to be the negotiator on behalf of the Trump administration between all these New York public and private interests. I'll just name some of them, James Dolan,

MSG, President, CEO, Stephen Roth. He's a CEO of Vornado, which owns a lot of the real estate around Penn, and has been a long-time business partner and donor to Trump. There's also interestingly specter of Andrew Cuomo getting back into the mix because he's the front runner for mayor. The next mayor will have sway over the air rights or the permit to operate MSG above Penn Station. That permit expires in 2028. A lot of money here, a lot of guys with a lot of beef. Bifert's going to be tasked with navigating that much. minefield. And there are a handful of proposals on the table already, including one that

turned some heads. We've mentioned it before that would completely demolish Madison Square Garden and move it across the street of 7th Avenue. So that plan is backed by another major Trump donor's name is Thomas Kliginstein who supports the style of neoclassical architecture, something that Trump has said he likes as well. That would include, you know, Roman columns and marble and the like. So now that Trump and the feds are leading the charge for this redesign, who's to say that plan isn't viable or isn't a desirable option for the federal duty to select during that bidding process. Well, thanks, as always, to transportation reporters Ramsey Khalifa and Steven Nesson and editor Clayton Goosa.

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 slash on the way, my friends. Thanks so much. Thanks, Sean. Thank you. Thanks for listening. This is NYC now from WMYC. Check us out for updates every weekday, three times a date for the latest news headlines and occasional deep dives, and subscribe wherever you get your podcast.

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