MTA CEO Janno Lieber appeared unfazed over the fate of New York’s congestion pricing plan as the state follows a New Jersey lawsuit that could temporarily halt the program.
“We are pretty sure that we have followed the law to a T,” he said on CBS’s “The Point with Marcia Cramer” on Sunday. “And we are about to find out that every last aspect of it is satisfactory under the law. But we are confident that it’s passed the test.”
New York officials are pushing a first-in-the-nation congestion pricing plan that would begin tolling drivers who go south of 60th Street in Manhattan. In response, officials in neighboring New Jersey filed a lawsuit claiming the program would lead to drivers opting to go through the Garden State in order to avoid the tolls – which would lead to more congestion and pollution.
After oral arguments in U.S. District Court in Newark last week, a New Jersey federal judge said he plans to deliver a verdict by June – just before the congestion pricing plan was scheduled to begin.
Randy Mastro, a New Jersey lawyer representing the state in the suit, asserted in court that the congestion pricing plan would lead to disaster.
“The MTA has a voracious appetite for picking its neighbor’s pockets,” Mastro said last week.
But in addition to saying that he is “confident” that the lawsuit won’t derail the congestion pricing plan, Lieber pushed back by saying the MTA “always planned” to include New Jersey in its assessment.
He added that environmental effects were also being examined for the Bronx.
“Unlike New Jersey, there are people in the Bronx, in the environmental justice community, who are ready to work that out,” he said Sunday. “New Jersey had fewer environmental justice census tracts and they were moving around in the model, in the computer, so we said, ‘When those settle down, and it’s clear which communities are going to be impacted, we will address those in mitigation.’”
Lieber also said congestion pricing’s effects on the Bronx will also be helpful to New Jersey because the same trucks are going through both areas.
“There are real investments to New Jersey from the investments being contemplated that are being portrayed as ‘Bronx investments,’” he said.
