Sam Schwartz

MTA Chairman Tom Prendergast faces a huge challenge as the MTA needs a new round of capital funding starting in 2015. At the CityLaw Breakfast on November 21, 2014 Chairman Prendergast laid out a well-thought out five year plan designed to maintain the system, modernize it, make it more resilient and extend it geographically. The price tag: $32 billion. In the intensive competition for public money, elected leaders find funds in that range only when engineers and managers in charge of infrastructure publicize the actual costs required to maintain these services. Chairman Prendergast has done a great public service by setting out costs realistically even if he cannot now identify where all the money will come from. (more…)