President Trump’s designation of New York City as an “anarchist jurisdiction” led the MTA to shy away from including NYC Transit in an application for $10 million in federal money for a COVID-19 study, the Daily News has learned.
The agency applied for money to study COVID-19′s effect on the Long Island and Metro-North railroads, which predominately serve the suburbs.
“We thought that railroads applying maximized our chances of receiving the FTA grant," said Metropolitan Transportation Authority spokesman Ken Lovett.
The grant, issued by the Federal Transit Administration, is intended to help “identify solutions to address the operational challenges that they (public transit agencies) are facing as a result of COVID-19.”
MTA officials said the railroads want to use the money to study how aerosols move in train cars and stations.
The $10 million grant is a drop in the bucket of the MTA’s $17 billion annual budget. But the study is expected to help the agency find better ways to respond to the pandemic.
MTA bosses say the agency needs $12 billion in COVID-19 relief from Congress by 2021 or else they’ll be forced to slash service by up to 40%.
The feds' Oct. 8 notice that the grant money is available is so far the only known official government action to deny federal money based on Trump’s Sept. 2 memo requiring the Office of Management and Budget to review all funding to cities “that allow themselves to deteriorate into lawless zones.”
Trump’s memo specifically references New York City, Seattle and Portland, all of which saw days of protests and looting over the summer in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.
The deadline to apply for the grant was 11:59 p.m. on Nov. 2, the eve of Election Day.
Instead of risking bias from the Trump Administration by including NYC Transit — which runs New York City’s subways, buses and paratransit — MTA honchos instead folded their cards and left the agency’s largest subsidiary out of the grant application.
There’s still some risk the government might deny on the money based on the fact that Metro-North and the LIRR both operate in the city and serve Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station.
“It shows what a mess this is on the federal side," said Riders Alliance spokesman Danny Pearlstein. “It’s absurd to have to make a runaround like that just because of the president’s whim.”
Leaving NYC Transit out of studies of COVID-19′s spread may hurt the feds' ability to understand the impact of the pandemic on American mass transit.
Even though the pandemic has caused the MTA’s ridership to fall by roughly 70% from 2019, it still carries a majority of the nation’s transit riders. The LIRR and Metro-North last week accounted for just 5% of the agency’s total transit trips.
What’s more, COVID-19 has taken a devastating toll on NYC Transit’s workforce. The MTA reports at least 127 of its employees have died from the disease — and all but five of them worked for NYC Transit.
MTA spokesman Abbey Collins on Sunday said the agency was “hopeful” the incoming Biden Administration would provide more funding and aid to New York’s mass transit.
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