Among the many sources of scandal and corruption for our state and city legislators has been “member items” — taxpayer dollars given to each member to dole out to local community groups wit♛h no vote and zero accountability.
Turns out the Port A༺ꦚuthority of New York and New Jersey has something very similar.
It’s a group of funds known collectively as𒅌 “regional banks.”
Over the past three decades, governors of both states and both parties have used these funds to hand out $1.5 billion in donations to n♎on-profits — most of them completely unrelated to 🍒the PA’s core mission of transportation.
For eꦆxample, according to The Record, the PA gave $10 million to the New York Botanical Garden, $1 million to Ballet Hispanico, $5 million to the Museum of Modern Art, $3.5 million to Jazz at Lincoln Center and $5 million to the Jersey City Medical Center, among many others.
All worthy causes, no doubt — but none having anything to do with transportation. And the banks, which we🔜re recentℱly replenished to the tune of $950 million, get their spending money from tolls and fares.
2011 was a particularly outrageous year.
That year, motorists endured the largest toll hikes they’d ever seen. At the same time, the agency scuttled plans for a badly needed upgrade to ♏the Port Authority Bus Terminal in midtown Manhattan. Yet the pet nonprofits continued to get their dollars from the PA.
This lꦗatest example of a Port Authority in need of a total overhaul only underscores the need for two fundamental reforms.
The first ᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚis to get this agency back to its core mission — transportation infrastructure — by vastly shrinking it in size and scope. There’s no good reason the Port Authority sho𓄧uld be funding, say, buildings in Newark or at Ground Zero.
The second is to have more direct funding, so that ꦫbridge tolls, for example, are used to fund repair and maintenance of bridges and feeder roads, instead of going to someone’s pet project.
In short, what we 𒉰have here is a slush fund. Drivers paying a $13 toll to come into the city should not have their toll dollars going to fund ballet.
Something for har🔜d-working taxpayers to think a༒bout next time they go through the toll booths of the George Washington Bridge.