Cuomo Steals $500 Million From CUNY To Pay For Subways

Nicole Gelinas in the NY Post:

The subways, commuter rails, buses, bridges and tunnels need $29 billion every five years in repairs and upgrades to barely keep up with a growing city. The fares you pay don’t cover this cost — they don’t even cover paying the people who run the trains to come to work.

So where to get the money?

Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio said late last year that, don’t worry, they’d find it. To fill the gap left over after the MTA borrows money and Washington sends us their share, the state would put in $8.3 billion over five years, and the city would put in $2.5 billion.

People wondered last year where Cuomo and de Blasio would get this money, and were told to wait till next year.

Well, it’s next year — and the governor’s new budget makes the answer clear.

The grandchildren of the L-train hipsters will pay. Instead of putting in $8.3 billion, Cuomo has reserved only $1.4 billion over five years — a little less than $300 million a year.

Worse: To pay for this, he’s slashing the state’s funding of the City of University of New York — by about $500 million a year.

The rest of the costs get shunted off to the future, when Governor Cuomo is long gone from power and people won't blame him for the mess he has made.

As for CUNY, the Post reported yesterday that Cuomo has hatched a secret plan to subsume CUNY into SUNY, in part because he doesn't control CUNY and doesn't like anything he doesn't control and in part because the CUNY board members don't suck up to him the way the SUNY board members do and he hates not having suck-ups on the CUNY board.

So it's all good, you know - for Cuomo, at any rate.

As for the rest of us, the city's university system is on the chopping the block, the transit system is falling into third world status and the "luxury" buildings keep going up without the needed infrastructure to support the increased population numbers going up with them.

Quite an agenda from our governor.