New York

Federal Covid Cash Kept New York State Afloat. That Could End Soon.

Published

3 years ago

March 26, 2022

Federal Covid Cash Kept New York State Afloat. That Could End Soon.

12 months after yr, regardless of the president or the power of the economic system, New York’s fiscal relationship with Washington virtually at all times follows the identical sample: The state offers extra to the federal authorities — typically billions extra — than it will get again in federal spending.

That imbalance has lengthy been denounced by New York’s political leaders, who argue that a number of huge “donor” states like theirs are unfairly subsidizing companies for others. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a New York senator for greater than 20 years, even started producing his personal annual report within the Seventies to name consideration to a disparity that persevered properly previous his loss of life in 2003.

However in 2020, because the coronavirus pandemic took the lives of hundreds of individuals right here and decimated the state’s economic system, one thing outstanding occurred. For the primary time in a long time, New York discovered itself a internet beneficiary of the federal authorities, thanks largely to a gusher of aid funds from Washington.

For each greenback that New Yorkers contributed to the U.S. Treasury in taxes throughout the 2020 fiscal yr, the state obtained again $1.59, New York’s comptroller present in a latest examine, a pointy enhance from the 91 cents that trickled again the yr earlier than. The development is predicted to proceed for 2021 and presumably 2022, earlier than truly fizzling out as federal spending returns to regular ranges.

The impact on New York, because it prepares to set its funds for the approaching yr, has been transformative, and the state is much from alone in benefiting from two years of federal largess. State budgets throughout the nation have been fortified by the trillions of {dollars} of enhanced unemployment advantages, assist to small companies and hospitals, and direct grants to state and native governments at a time when most have struggled to remain solvent.

All 50 states had a good stability of funds with Washington in 2020, most of them bigger than New York’s, based on the New York State comptroller examine and one other by the Rockefeller Institute for Authorities.

However nowhere have the extremes been fairly so hanging as in New York, dwelling to the nation’s third largest economic system, the earliest spike of Covid deaths in america and regularly, the most important donor state to the federal authorities thanks largely to its sizable tax base.

By some estimates, greater than $270 billion has moved from Washington to New York via a collection of pandemic aid and stimulus payments for the reason that pandemic started. The cash has flooded stability sheets in Albany, New York Metropolis and on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, erasing deficits and ending discuss — for now — of the form of painful funds cuts that after appeared inevitable.

“It enabled us not solely to beat Covid, however to get out of the ditch and start to maneuver ahead once more,” mentioned Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the Senate majority chief, who helped steer spherical after spherical of funding towards his dwelling state.

It was not way back that Democratic leaders in control of New York Metropolis and state had been virtually begging for federal help, because the governor reluctantly weighed new tax levies and funds cuts to slender a state deficit as soon as estimated at $15 billion, and former Mayor Invoice de Blasio requested Albany for the authority to borrow as a lot as $5 billion.

How precisely New York takes benefit of its newfound solvency — and the way lengthy it lasts — stays an open query.

Price range analysts are already sounding alarms that policymakers, significantly progressive Democrats, are pushing to make use of the windfall to launch bold new social applications that the state or metropolis could not have the ability to afford as soon as the cash inevitably dries up.

Richard Ravitch, the previous state official who helped mastermind the rescue of New York Metropolis’s funds within the Seventies, mentioned in an interview that he feared New York might face a fiscal cliff if policymakers persuade themselves that the federal “fairy godmother” will descend once more to refill their coffers.

“All I do know is that when the federal cash runs out, it’s extremely doubtless that the state and the town are going to face funds crises of serious proportion,” Mr. Ravitch mentioned. “It’s simply within the nature of politicians in a democracy to wish to spend the cash you’ve obtained as a result of there are such a lot of in search of it for one factor or one other.”

Ms. Hochul, a Democrat, gave the impression to be guarding towards simply that final result when she proposed her $216 billion funds in January. The proposal was the most important within the state’s historical past and known as for spending billions of {dollars} to reward and retain well being care employees and academics.

However Ms. Hochul largely structured these and different pricey pandemic-related outlays as one-time bills, reasonably than recurring liabilities, and she or he proposed placing 15 p.c of the state’s working bills into reserve, a method that she projected would assist stability the funds via 2027.

In a letter accompanying the Rockefeller report, Robert Mujica, the governor’s funds director, warned that except there’s a main change in federal coverage, like elevating the $10,000 cap on state and native tax deductions in federal returns, instituted in 2018, “New York will as soon as once more reclaim the doubtful distinction of being the highest donor state.”

Ms. Hochul, a reasonable dealing with re-election this yr, is already below stress from Democrats who management the State Legislature to maneuver towards their extra expansive plans. Each the Senate and Meeting Democrats have proposed even bigger budgets that embrace expansions of state-funded baby care or the state’s public universities, long-held objectives that they imagine would considerably enhance the lives of New Yorkers however may also create new monetary liabilities yr after yr.

“I’m glad that we’re placing cash into our reserve fund at greater ranges than now we have in my time in Albany,” mentioned Liz Krueger, a Manhattan Democrat who chairs the State Senate’s Finance Committee. “However I additionally imagine that is the time to make transformative investments in the way forward for our state.”

An identical dynamic seems poised to play out in New York Metropolis. After years of rising expenditures below his predecessor, Mr. Adams’s preliminary $98.5 billion funds proposal known as for reducing prices by 3 p.c at many metropolis companies, and permitting for hundreds of positions to go unfilled to economize and set some apart for future years. However he faces a extra liberal Metropolis Council; members of its progressive caucus lately slammed the mayor’s proposal as an “austerity funds.”

Maybe nowhere has the impression of the federal assist been starker than on the M.T.A., which noticed ridership on New York Metropolis’s subways and commuter rail strains plummet, ravenous it of working income.

Since 2020, Congress has helped steer round $15 billion to the authority, which tasks the cash might help make up for misplaced farebox income and different anticipated shortfalls via 2025. The windfall has helped the company stave off a direct disaster, but additionally leaves the potential for a fiscal disaster within the years forward.

Whereas different states have benefited from the latest inflow of federal funds, there are additionally indications that New York has fared higher than it may need in any other case given the seniority of its representatives in Washington — significantly Mr. Schumer.

The senator mentioned in an interview that he had used his leverage throughout a collection of coronavirus aid payments, a $1 billion infrastructure invoice signed final yr,and different spending payments to extend federal funding for transit, schooling, nonprofits and performing arts venues in New York. At one level, Mr. Schumer held up the passage of a $2.2 trillion aid package deal in March 2020 till Republicans agreed so as to add extra money for hospitals on the entrance strains of preventing the virus.

A yr later, he led Democrats to approve lots of of billions of {dollars} in direct assist to state and native governments that Republicans had refused to move after they had been in energy; Republican leaders argued that doing so could be an pointless handout to blue states. Greater than $12 billion went on to the New York State authorities, greater than $6 billion to New York Metropolis and extra to different cities and cities throughout the state.

“There’s a time for partisan politics. Then there’s a time to set it apart and have a look at the advantages,” mentioned former Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato, a three-term Republican whom Mr. Schumer defeated in 1998. “Now we have benefited by his place of management: the state and the taxpayers.”

New York

Companies could pass on the cost of congestion pricing tolls to consumers.

Published

6 hours ago

January 6, 2025

Press Room

Companies could pass on the cost of congestion pricing tolls to consumers.

Congestion pricing arrived in New York City exactly one second after midnight on Sunday.

And despite the freezing temperatures, a crowd of about 100 people gathered at the corner of Lexington Avenue and 60th Street in Manhattan to mark the occasion.

It was mainly supporters who showed up to clap and chant, “Pay that toll! Pay that toll!” But one opponent tried to drown them out by banging a cowbell. And the exchanges grew a bit testy at times across the congestion pricing divide.

The tolling program, the first of its kind in the nation, finally became reality on New York streets after decades of battles over efforts to unclog some of the most traffic-saturated streets in the world. In the weeks leading up to its start, the program survived multiple legal challenges seeking to derail it at the last minute, including from the State of New Jersey.

It will most likely be some time, however, before it becomes clear whether congestion pricing works, or whether it can withstand continuing attempts to overturn it by a broad array of opponents, including President-elect Donald J. Trump, who takes office later this month.

Noel Hidalgo, 45, who lives in Brooklyn, was among the first drivers to pay the toll. As he drove his Mini Cooper across the threshold, toll supporters cheered and clapped from the curb.

Another driver posted a photo on social media of a silver car with metal cans dangling from the rear bumper. “Just tolled” was written on the rear windshield.

Most passenger cars are now being charged $9 once a day at detection points set up along the borders of the new tolling zone, from 60th Street to the southern tip of Manhattan.

Congestion pricing scanners above First Avenue at East 60th Street in Midtown Manhattan on Sunday morning. Drivers will be tolled via E-ZPass or license plate readers.Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Shortly after noon, about 12 hours after tolling began, transportation leaders declared that the plan had rolled out without a hitch, but cautioned that the tolling system was complicated and that it was too soon to know how it was faring.

“We will start to know specific numbers and have some comparatives within a few days, and we’re going to share that information publicly,” said Janno Lieber, the chief executive of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency overseeing the program.

So far, the M.T.A. does not intend to make any adjustments to the program, Mr. Lieber said.

Traffic data for the congestion zone was mixed on Day 1. The average travel speed initially inched upward 3 percent to 15.1 miles per hour at 8 a.m. Sunday, compared with 14.6 m.p.h. at the same time on the first Sunday in January last year, according to INRIX, a transportation analytics firm. But by noon, the travel speed had fallen to 13 m.p.h., slightly slower than in 2024.

The congestion pricing zone extends from 60th Street to the southern tip of Manhattan.Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Still, the real test for the tolling program will come during the workweek. The M.T.A. said it had chosen to introduce the program on a Sunday to be able to work out any kinks while traffic was sparse. Light snow was forecast for the region on Monday, which could affect commuter data if fewer people choose to drive.

On a typical weekday, at least half a million vehicles enter the congestion pricing zone, a metric that officials will be tracking “very, very closely,” Mr. Lieber said.

Manoj Bhandari’s car will no longer be among them. Though he normally drives into his Midtown office at least twice a week from New Jersey, he said he would now only take the train. “It’s expensive for me and it’s expensive for everybody,” said Mr. Bhandari, 54, who was parked outside the Lincoln Tunnel on Sunday. “We won’t be using our car anymore.”

Transportation officials have projected that congestion pricing will reduce the number of vehicles entering the congestion zone by at least 13 percent.

Other drivers seemed to accept that there was no way around the new tolls. Oscar Velasquez, 54, a carpenter who lives on Long Island, said he was going to have to pay more now to haul his tools to jobs around the city. “One of these days, they’re going to charge you for walking,” Mr. Velasquez said as he idled on West 66th Street in his Chevy pickup truck.

The tolls are expected to help generate $15 billion to pay for crucial repairs and improvements to New York’s aging subway system, buses and two commuter rail lines. The work includes modernizing subway signals, making stations more accessible for riders with disabilities and expanding the city’s electric bus fleet.

Those upgrades could improve the commute for Emily Rose Prats, 36, of Brooklyn, who supports congestion pricing. She has spinal degradation and standing for long periods can cause her great discomfort, so she has avoided the subway and the bus, which can be unreliable.

“The improvements from congestion pricing are supposed to be an upgrade to the signals, which will mean faster trains, shorter headways, shorter commutes, less wait times,” Ms. Prats said. “All of that is something that will help me be able to take advantage of a public amenity that we pay for.”

Congestion pricing is being introduced in New York at a time when traffic has surged on city streets since nearly disappearing five years ago in 2020 at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. New York was named the world’s most congested city, beating out London, Paris and Mexico City, in a 2023 traffic scorecard compiled by INRIX.

Though congestion policy has successfully reduced traffic in other global cities, including London, Stockholm and Singapore, it has never gotten far in this country. Besides New York, a handful of other cities, like Washington and San Francisco, have explored the concept.

The program has been unpopular in the polls, and some transit experts noted that neither Mayor Eric Adams nor Gov. Kathy Hochul had commented on the start of congestion pricing by Sunday afternoon even though it will have a major impact on the city and state.

Mr. Adams has supported the plan while expressing reservations about it, and is running for re-election this year. Ms. Hochul paused the program in June over concerns that it would hurt the city’s recovery and brought it back in November with a 40 percent reduction in the tolls, down to $9 from $15.

The tolls will increase to $12 by 2028, and to $15 by 2031. The new plan is set to generate about $500 million per year during its first three years, and then $700 million when fees first go up, then close to $1 billion when the original toll is restored. The money will be used to secure $15 billion through bond financing, which would be paid back with tolling revenue.

Revenue from the tolling plan will be used to finance crucial improvements and upgrades to New York City’s aging public transit system.Credit…Dave Sanders for The New York Times

Mr. Lieber of the M.T.A. said that officials did not expect New Yorkers to change their behavior overnight.

“Everybody’s going to have to adjust to this as more and more people become aware of it and start to factor it into their planning,” he said.

At a coffee shop near Lincoln Center, Terry Kotnour, a retired consultant, praised congestion pricing. “That’s the cost of living here,” said Mr. Kotnour, 82, who gave up his car long ago. “We have fairly good mass transit, so use it instead.”

Another supporter, Kevin Chau, 27, a software engineer from Queens who rides Citi Bike, said that he hoped Manhattan would become safer for cyclists. “Less cars on the road means it’s less dangerous for sure,” he said.

But many critics, including suburban commuters, said the program will do little to reduce traffic while punishing drivers who live outside Manhattan.

On the same day that congestion pricing began, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey also began to charge drivers higher fees to travel between New Jersey and New York on bridges and tunnels, which it controls. (The rate is now $16.06 for passenger vehicles during peak hours, up by 68 cents from the previous fee.)

Empty lanes at the New Jersey entrance of the Holland Tunnel. New Jersey residents have been among the loudest critics of congestion pricing.Credit…Bryan Anselm for The New York Times

Roselyn Cano, 21, just bought a car last week to commute from the Bronx to her job at an exercise studio on East 59th Street in Manhattan because she did not feel safe taking the subway. “And then a couple of days later we get hit with the congestion toll,” said Ms. Cano, who sat at a reception desk at the studio tallying up the costs of the new toll along with her car payment, auto insurance, parking and the toll she already pays crossing from the Bronx into Manhattan.

Some New Yorkers were already devising workarounds to avoid paying the new tolls.

Cynthia Jones, who lives on the Upper West Side, was taking an exercise class at the studio. Her husband had dropped her off at 61st Street, one block north of the tolling zone. “I walked the rest of the way here,” she said.

Reporting was contributed by Wesley Parnell, Bernard Mokam, Nate Schweber, Olivia Bensimon, Anusha Bayya, Camille Baker, Sean Piccoli and Emma Fitzsimmons.

New York

Tom Johnson, Minimalist Composer and Village Voice Critic, Dies at 85

Published

14 hours ago

January 5, 2025

Press Room

Tom Johnson, Minimalist Composer and Village Voice Critic, Dies at 85

Tom Johnson, a composer and critic whose Village Voice columns documented the renaissance of avant-garde music in downtown New York during the 1970s, and whose own compositions embraced minimalism and mathematical clarity, died on Tuesday at his home in Paris. He was 85.

His wife and only immediate survivor, the performance artist Esther Ferrer, said the cause was a stroke following long-term emphysema.

Mr. Johnson was a young New York composer in need of income in 1971 when he noticed that the exciting performances he heard downtown were not being covered by local news outlets. He offered to write about the contemporary music scene for The Voice, and he soon began a weekly column.

It was an opportune moment: Art galleries, lofts and venues like the Kitchen were presenting concerts by young experimenters like Steve Reich and Meredith Monk, and Mr. Johnson became the emerging scene’s chief chronicler.

“No one realized at the time that one of the most significant genres of serious music of the century was developing, a genre that was to become known as American minimalism, and which would find imitators all over the world,” he wrote in 1983, in his final Voice column.

He charted the rise of musical minimalism, including the transformation of the local composer Phil Glass to an international phenomenon, but he also documented radical work by lesser-known figures: Yoshi Wada, who sang through massive plumbing pipes; Jim Burton, who amplified bicycle wheels; and Eliane Radigue, who created uncanny drones on a synthesizer.

“I learned some interesting things about gongs on May 30 at a Centre Street loft concert,” Mr. Johnson wrote of a 1973 show by the young composer Rhys Chatham. “That gongs have many different pitches, most of which don’t make much sense in terms of the overtone series; that different tones stand out, depending on how the gong is struck; that when a gong makes a crescendo, a wonderful whoosh of high sound streams into the room; that loud gongs vibrate the floor in a special way and put an odd charge in the air; that listening to gongs, played alone for over an hour, is an extraordinary experience.”

By describing such outré happenings in matter-of-fact, observational prose, Mr. Johnson provided a national readership with access to performances that might be attended by only a dozen listeners, and possibly never heard again. He saw himself as a participant within the scene, and he provided such generous coverage that he became known among composers as “Saint Tom.” His writings, collected in the 1989 book “The Voice of New Music,” offer a uniquely intimate portrait of a galvanizing musical era; for one memorable column, Mr. Johnson sang in the chorus for a rehearsal of Mr. Glass’s landmark opera “Einstein on the Beach.”

But Mr. Johnson was also unafraid to critique concerts that he thought didn’t work conceptually, or note when he fell asleep. Some columns took formal risks. He once devoted a thousand words to reviewing “one of the most impressive performances I ever heard”: the warbling of a mockingbird on Long Island.

He was among the first writers to begin using the term “minimal” to describe much of the repetitive music he heard, and he applied the word to his own compositions, such as the hypnotic 1971 work “An Hour for Piano.” “I have always been very proud of it, because that’s the only word that really describes what I’m doing,” he said in a 2014 interview. “I always worked with reduced materials and tried to do simple music.”

In Mr. Johnson’s dryly postmodern “Four Note Opera,” a quartet sings arias about arias — on only the notes A, B, D and E. The first performance, in 1972, had an audience of about 10 people; the opera has since received more than 100 productions. For “Nine Bells” (1979), he walked among a grid of suspended burglar alarm bells for nearly an hour, chiming them in predetermined sequences, a feat of geometric precision and physical exertion.

In the 1980s, he immersed himself in Euclid’s number theories and Mandelbrot’s fractals, eager to find new musical structures. His compositions of this period include “Rational Melodies,” a series of entrancing miniatures built from simple, symmetrical patterns, and “The Chord Catalog,” a methodical two-hour presentation of the 8,178 chords that can be found in a single octave.

Though undergirded by his mathematical exercises, Mr. Johnson’s music is visceral and intelligible — and, often, deliberately predictable — rather than abstruse. “There is something particularly satisfying about projects where the logic (the music) seems to arise naturally from some discovery outside of myself, and where everything comes together with a minimum of tampering (of composing),” he once wrote.

Thomas Floyd Johnson was born on Nov. 18, 1939, in Greeley, Colo., a small farming community. His parents, Harold Francis Johnson and Irene (Barber) Johnson, were teachers.

When he was about 7, Tom began playing the piano intermittently, and he found his passion for music at age 13 under the tutelage of a local piano teacher, Rita Hutcherson, who also encouraged his composing.

Though many of his peers attended nearby universities, Ms. Hutcherson urged Mr. Johnson to apply to Yale, where he received a bachelor’s degree in arts in 1961 and a master’s in music in 1967. As an undergraduate, he took a seminar with the prestigious composer Elliott Carter and dabbled in 12-tone composition, the lingua franca of the musical academy, but he found himself embracing repetition and stasis instead of cerebral complexity. He moved to New York in 1967 to study privately with the experimental composer Morton Feldman, who helped him find his artistic voice.

After documenting the New York scene for The Voice but struggling to have his own work performed, Mr. Johnson decamped to Paris in 1983, where fresh opportunities awaited, as European audiences were newly drawn to the American avant-garde. There he remained a prolific writer, theorizing about his own music in several books. He had been publishing his own scores since the 1970s, and he maintained an active web presence with a video series elucidating his music.

His major works have included the satirical “Riemannoper,” based on excerpts from a famed German music lexicon, which has received more than 30 productions; and a more serious oratorio drawing on the writings of the German dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But much of Mr. Johnson’s output remained resolutely abstract, including an orchestral work that lays out a sequence of 360 chords and a series of recent pieces that systematically explore various rhythmic combinations.

Mr. Johnson’s marriage to the choreographer Kathy Duncan ended in divorce. He married Ms. Ferrer in 1986.

One of Mr. Johnson’s compositions has become canonic in the double-bass community: “Failing” (1975), a fiendishly difficult and hilarious exercise in which a soloist is instructed to bow tricky passages while reading a lengthy text aloud that self-reflexively comments on the music. “These pieces all had to do with making music as real life,” Mr. Johnson said of the work in a 2020 interview. “I wanted the performer to confront an unknown situation and deal with it as well as possible in a one-time-only context.”

New York

Here is what to know about congestion pricing.

Published

21 hours ago

January 5, 2025

Press Room

Here is what to know about congestion pricing.

Congestion pricing was first proposed in the 1950s to manage crowded roads and subways.Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Congestion pricing has spread around the world to cities including London, Stockholm, and Singapore. But the idea was born in New York City in the 1950s.

William Vickrey, an economics professor at Columbia University who won the Nobel Prize in 1996, has been called the “father of congestion pricing.” He proposed the use of economic incentives to better manage crowded roads — as well as the packed subway system.

As early as 1952, Mr. Vickrey recommended charging higher fares on the New York City subway for the most crowded times and sections. “Just like hotels charge more during Christmas, and planes charge more for longer flights, he said the subways ought to do that,” said Samuel I. Schwartz, a former city traffic commissioner and a longtime proponent of congestion pricing.

But congestion pricing for the subway did not catch on. City leaders “considered it risky, and the technology was not ready,” according to a 1997 report in the Columbia University Record.

Mr. Vickrey later turned his attention to the city’s perpetual gridlock. He called for varying road tolls to reduce congestion during peak times and keep traffic flowing.

In the late 1970s, Mr. Vickrey used to show up at public meetings and push for congestion pricing, said Mr. Schwartz, who was an assistant city traffic commissioner back then. “He pestered me,” Mr. Schwartz said. “He kept saying a lot of our approach to traffic congestion wouldn’t work — and that we had to use pricing.”

Though Mr. Vickrey died in 1996, his idea has lived on. Mr. Schwartz and many others — including business, civic, and transportation and environmental advocates — have fought for decades to bring congestion pricing to New York’s streets.

In 2007, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg proposed a congestion-pricing plan as part of his efforts to improve the environment. But the plan faltered the next year in Albany amid staunch opposition from state legislators.

A decade later, facing a breakdown in subway service, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo resurrected congestion pricing to finance repairs to the aging subway system. “Congestion pricing is an idea whose time has come,” he said at that time. (Mr. Cuomo has since questioned whether it is the right time to start congestion pricing.)

It was another two years before congestion pricing was finally approved by the State Legislature in 2019 as part of the state budget.