A Mayor, a Governor, and the Feud That Keeps New York Down

Perhaps it was merely for the purpose of getting from one place to the other, and if so, the use of mass transit rather than the customary mayoral SUV does not seem to have done him any harm.

If it was for political reasons, it does not seem to have done him much good.

All Tuesday, surrogates for de Blasio and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo spoke to reporters, kicking the blame ball back and forth in a game that gets more pointless by the day.

Last week, the governor floated two ideas that would amount to profound changes in the city without consulting the people actually elected to run it. Both of the proposals, it should be said, have a lot going for them. One is a fee on vehicles in the busiest parts of Manhattan, and the other is the creation of special tax districts on property around new transit projects.

The mayor and his surrogates have more or less been stamping their feet and saying this amounted to usurpation of local taxing power, the city already pays a big share, the governor’s forces do not speak with them, and besides, the transit system blows a lot of money on wasteful projects. These points have some truth in them.

So does the rebuttal from the governor’s camp: that the mayor already has the power to veto big transit spending.

The governor’s command of detail has given him a portfolio of accomplishments throughout his public life. But micromanaging can curdle. It turns out that last summer, the governor’s office fiddled with statistics on the reasons for transit delays, as Dan Rivoli reported in The Daily News. In a cache of emails, senior officials struggled to blame more delays on Con Edison than the utility was genuinely responsible for, which an analyst had put at 3,422 annually.

“How would you massage that language?” a press secretary for the governor wrote to a transit official. “Could we say ‘power-related issues caused more than 32,000 delays?'”

Sure, you could say that. It would be no less than 99 percent dishonest, but you could say it.

If someone fell or jumped on the track and the power was turned off, the trains that could not run on time would be categorized as “power-related delays.” If a piece of track equipment failed and the power had to be shut off while repairing it, that, too, could be counted as a “power-related delay” — and not the fault of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

By this logic, people who kick out the cord to the television in their living rooms could curse Con Edison, rather than blame their own clumsiness.

Thanks to this abuse of language and arithmetic, the figure of 3,422 Con Edison delays was swollen beyond recognition when the governor walked the tracks and spoke to reporters on Aug. 9 in the Columbus Circle station.

“We’re looking at the largest single cluster of delays, which are 32,000 power-related delays,” Cuomo said that day. “What people tend to forget is the MTA runs on power.”

Asked about this on Monday, after The News’ exposé, Cuomo said he had relied on figures sent to him by the MTA. Thereafter, transit officials did back flips trying to say that the naked manipulation of data was not naked manipulation of data. It was. It is. Andy Byford, the new president of the subway system, declined to endorse the counting techniques used by his agency.

When Byford was introduced as the transit leader in November, I asked him what he thought about the governor’s practice of bypassing the chain of command to directly call superintendents within the system. “That’s the governor’s prerogative,” Byford said. “He’s the governor.”

But he’s not the mayor.

New York City’s wealth, its role as an economic engine for the state and the nation, depend on mobility.

A show of hands, please, from all those who believe that it is possible to improve, or at least passably fix, New York’s transit unless the governor and the mayor figure out how to work together.

Anyone?