We expect Marc Molinaro, the former Dutchess County executive and Hudson Valley congressman, to sail through his Senate confirmation hearing today to lead the Federal Transit Administration, a subdivision of the Department of Transportation. Once he’s confirmed and we hope that is very soon, Molinaro will have a great opportunity to increase accountability and transparency in how billions are spent.
As a suburban Republican lawmaker, Molinaro is against congestion pricing, as are his two bosses, President Trump and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. We disagree, as the tolling program for vehicles driving below 60th St. has proven to be a smashing success by increasing economic activity in Midtown and Downtown while reducing traffic, air pollution and crashes. It also raises needed revenues for transit.
However, the congestion pricing approvals for the MTA are handled not by the FTA, but a sister agency, the Federal Highway Administration, for which Trump has just nominated Sean McMaster. Also, the feds can’t revoke an approval like this and MTA has taken the matter to court, which will side with New York.
But at the FTA itself, there is much for Molinaro to do once he’s in office. The easiest move is for him to immediately order the publication on the FTA’s website in an orderly fashion akin to a library of what are called the Project Management Oversight Contractor reports. These are monthly reviews required by law on every transit project costing $300 million or more overall and using $100 million or more in FTA funds. Think the Second Ave. subway or the boondoggle Gateway rail tunnel under the Hudson.
An independent outside contractor is hired by the FTA to keep close tabs on the progress in terms of dollars and digging. Each month, the PMOC report is sent to the FTA and the project sponsor, like the MTA for the subway extension or the bistate Gateway Development Commission for the Hudson tunnel.
But the public, the people paying for all this, don’t get to see the PMOC reports. We have asked top MTA and GDC officials to make the documents public every month as they come in without success.
Molinaro should just set a permanent new policy that the PMOC reports for every project in the country are automatically added to the library every month. The same should go for the Quarterly Progress Report prepared by the sponsor on all change orders exceeding $100,000.
We know about these arcane FTA things from Larry Penner, a name regular readers of the Voice the People and our op-ed pages will recognize.
Larry, who died in January, was a 31-year veteran of the New York office of FTA and its predecessor, the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (UMTA), who began as a political appointee in 1981 under the Reagan administration and stayed, switching over to being in the career civil service.
While Larry had been a national leader of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom and was a very active Republican in Brooklyn and Long Island, he never did mixed politics with government work and was completely nonpartisan while at FTA.
His final writing appeared in our op-ed pages on Jan. 12, just four days before he died from pancreatic cancer. He warned about the problems ahead from Amtrak’s foolish plan to close the East River tubes used by the LIRR. We’ll have more to say about how Molinaro can prevent that.
