The MTA's money train

Daily Point

The MTA’s money maze

Have you bought a house? Rented a car? Filled your car with gas? Obtained a driver’s license? Hired an Uber or Lyft? Used the internet in your home?

Each time you do any of those things, you’re paying for the region’s public transit.

And depending on what Gov. Kathy Hochul and the State Legislature come up with in their ongoing budget negotiations, you might start paying into the operation of trains and buses if you use streaming services like Netflix, too.

As the debate over how to fund the Metropolitan Transportation Authority continues in Albany, even as the April 1 budget deadline came and went, one thing is clear: Any solution that brings new funding streams will simply add to the complex maze of money that goes into public transit.

The state comptroller’s office provided The Point with a detailed breakdown of the final estimates for 2022 that reveals just how much the state and city put into the MTA from more than a dozen different pots.

Even before Hochul began talking about increasing and expanding the Payroll Mobility Tax, it already played a significant role in MTA funding, providing nearly $1.8 billion in revenue to the agency. The tax, which is levied on the payrolls of some large businesses, has been particularly controversial on Long Island, due in part to its troubled political history a decade ago.

The MTA also already gets another $2.6 billion from other business taxes, including corporate surcharges and a petroleum business tax.

Then there’s the money that comes directly out of residents’ pockets. Sales taxes, including part of the internet sales tax, generate more than $1.6 billion for the MTA, though the internet sales tax portion is earmarked for the MTA’s capital budget. Vehicle license and registration fees, surcharges on taxis and services like Lyft and Uber, gas and diesel fuel taxes, and fees on auto rentals all go toward the MTA budget, too.

Also on the list: real estate. The MTA receives about $657 million from mortgage recording taxes for operating expenses, and another $495 million from the so-called mansion tax for capital expenses. Additional city commercial sales and mortgage recording taxes go directly to New York City Transit.

There also are so-called “general subsidies” the MTA gets from both the city and state, for operating and capital expenses, along with city subsidies for station maintenance, MTA bus and Staten Island Rail.

All of that, of course, is above and beyond fares, which make up more than 40% of the MTA’s total revenue. That’s a higher percentage than many other large transit systems, whose fare box contribution can hover closer to 30% of the total.

Officials with the comptroller’s office noted that New York’s wild mix of taxes and fees differs from many other states, which often rely on a single stream of sales taxes to fund transit. When a transit agency needs more in its coffers, it’s sometimes up to the state legislatures to vote on an increase in that sales tax, while elsewhere, voters get to have a say when those sales taxes increase.

But New York also is inherently more complex than some of those other jurisdictions. Here, some fees are paid only by businesses in the MTA’s service area. And in some cases, the revenue itself is split or earmarked for certain parts of the authority, so that some funds are allocated only to New York City Transit, or split between the subways and the commuter railroads. At other times, funds are split between the MTA’s downstate service area as a whole, and transit needs upstate that aren’t serviced by the MTA itself.

— Randi F. Marshall @RandiMarshall

Pencil Point

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