12 JULY 27, 2017 RIDGEWOOD TIMES WWW.QNS.COM
EDITORIAL
Whose subway failure is it anyway?
We finally found the one
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Who would want to steal a
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A 100-year-old tortoise was
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(subject: Queens Snaps).
thing more infuriating
than the constant delays,
disruptions and service failures that
subway riders in Queens have been
dealing with for months on end.
That 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. They 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 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.
The 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 officials 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.
