26 THE QUEENS COURIER • JULY 27, 2017 FOR BREAKING NEWS VISIT WWW.QNS.COM
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Whose subway failure is it anyway?
We fi nally found the one thing more infuriating than the constant delays,
disruptions and service failures that subway riders in Queens have been dealing
with for months on end.
Th at thing is the very public feud between Governor Andrew Cuomo and
Mayor Bill de Blasio — both members of the same party — over responsibility
for fi xing the subways.
Last week, Cuomo and MTA Chairman Joe Lhota maintained that the city
bears the brunt of subway system repair costs. Th ey say de Blasio should have
used a $4 billion city surplus to better maintain the subways, which the city
owns and leases to the MTA in an agreement more than 50 years old.
De Blasio, however, countered that the MTA has plenty of money —
including $2.5 billion — that the city kicked in to make the repairs on its
own, and that because the state controls the MTA, it has the obligation to city
straphangers to improve the system with its own resources.
We’re stuck in the middle of an old-fashioned blame game between the
mayor and governor, city and state. It’s happened before in our history; it’ll
happen again. But this blame game threatens to paralyze the city and infuriate
voters to the point that they may choose to derail the political ambitions
of de Blasio and/or Cuomo at the polling booth.
Th e old saying is that voters make their decisions largely with their wallets.
But voters have a funny way of taking out their wrath on elected offi cials
when a more existential problem arises in their community.
Most polls indicate that de Blasio is heading to an overwhelming victory
in November. However, those poll numbers could erode quickly with every
new delay, every new derailment, every new episode of commuter chaos that
grips the city.
Cuomo is up for a third term in the governor’s mansion next year, but
there’s been speculation that he has an eye on a possible presidential run in
2020. Like de Blasio, his aspirations will take a hit every time there’s a problem
aff ecting the subways or the Long Island Rail Road. He can’t aff ord to
lose urban or suburban votes.
We see enough dysfunction coming out of Washington, D.C., these days. It
may sound like a cliche, but we need our state and city leaders to step up and
do something that the people in the White House and on Capitol Hill have
a hard time doing: taking responsibility for a problem and agreeing to work
jointly on fi nding a solution to it.
Maybe Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio should be forced to ride the
trains every day until they fi gure out how to get us — and themselves — out
of this mess.
STORY: Who would want to steal a 100-year-old tortoise from a
Douglaston educational center?
SUMMARY: A 100-year-old tortoise was stolen from its habitat at the
Alley Pond Environmental Center in Douglaston.
REACH: 13,334 people (as of 7/24/17)