Mayor Bloomberg was peppered with questions about impending transit fare increases at the official press event for the NYC subway’s 100th birthday last week. What should have been a signal celebration of mass transit’s role in forging New York City into a global metropolis became a week filled with press conferences, protests, reports and columns focused on the sorry state of Metropolitan Transportation Authority finances and the missing-in-action status of Governor George Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

By week’s end, MTA leadership appeared to be leaning toward higher fare increases and fewer service cuts and layoffs to balance its 2005 budget. The annual budget will be approved by the MTA board on December 16. Public hearings on the proposed fare increases and service cuts will begin a week from today.

With a scheduled vote on the fare increases and service cuts just a few weeks off, the absence from the issue of the two main figures capable of leading the transit system out of crisis is striking.

Mayor Bloomberg seems nonplussed at suggestions he should be doing something more about the transit crisis. He has said he is unconvinced of the need for fare hikes, but his failure to acknowledge the reality and scale of the MTA’s budget gaps is somewhere on the spectrum from disingenuous to naive. While he doesn’t control the MTA, the mayor certainly has a pulpit that would be hard to ignore. In the 1980’s, Mayor Ed Koch proposed new real estate taxes to stave off a transit fare increase. Koch’s leadership led to action in Albany.

The mayor has a big stake in improving the transit picture. If the 2005 fare hikes take effect and the transit system limps into its far worse 2006 budget season and schedules more fare hike and service cut hearings for next November, the mayor’s re-election campaign will be the first in memory that is bracketed by back-to-back fare increases. Two likely 2005 mayoral challengers — City Council Speaker Gifford Miller and Congressman Anthony Weiner — attended Thursday’s MTA board meeting and blamed the mayor for not championing the interests of city transit riders.

Governor Pataki has been even more remote from transit issues. In the last week, a state house spokesperson has attempted to claim that the governor has little to do with the MTA or its actions, and then blamed the factors from workers’ contracts to the state legislature’s failure to act on the MTA’s agency reorganization plan.

The claims have no credibility. A New York Times piece a week ago showed that today’s debt-driven transit fiscal crisis was widely predicted when the huge bonding component of the MTA’s 2000-2004 capital program was approved by Governor Pataki, New York City and the state legislature (see also MTR #’s 476 and 266).

The piece quoted a former MTA planning chief, who said "This is primarily about the governor’s role. The governor controls the MTA, and he’s opposed to new taxes and subsidies for transit."

On Thursday, State Senator Eric Schneiderman recalled the predictions in 2000 and called the MTA’s current predicament a case of "willful misconduct by New York State government." He said the operating budget gap and un-funded capital program could only be fixed with a state bail-out.

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