Watchdog Group: No Congestion Pricing Toll Exemptions for Cops!

It’s not fare!

One of the state’s leading good government groups has come out swinging against an Assembly member’s attempt to exempt cops from the congestion pricing toll — the first salvo in a campaign against more than a dozen bills exempting elite or placard-bearing drivers.

Reinvent Albany said on Wednesday that it “strongly opposes” a proposal by Assembly Member Stacey Pheffer Amato (D-Howard Beach) to exempt NYPD officers who drive their own cars into the central business district — even when they’re off-duty.

“This bill is an attempt by a special interest to win special treatment through political influence in the Legislature after the proposal was rejected by an independent panel and its staff experts,” Reinvent Albany said in a statement that referenced the no-exemption evaluation by the Traffic Mobility Review Board.

That state panel evaluated more than 120 requests for congestion toll exemptions in a process Reinvent Albany called fair because it was based on three fundamental principles: 

1. Serve the many, not the few. 
2. Act as fairly as possible.
3. Keep tolls as low as possible by limiting toll exemptions for special interests. 

That last one is no small matter. Exempting cops from the updated $9 congestion toll would reduce congestion pricing revenue by $22 million a year (rising, of course, as the toll gets scaled up to $12 and then to $15 between now and 2031), according to the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA.

And Pheffer Amato’s bill is one of more than a dozen seeking to exempt some special interest group, whether its first responders, residents of “transit deserts,” taxi cab owners, students or residents of Orange County, as Streetsblog reported.

All those exemptions would rob the public of $100 million a year — no small figure for a toll that is expected to raise $800 million to $900 million per year, according to Regional Plan Association.

“It would be contrary to notions of basic fairness to pass this bill and reward a powerful special interest with a $22 million handout that will ultimately be paid by other toll payers or taxpayers,” Reinvent Albany said.

The Assembly bill is being carried in the Senate by Sen. Jessica Scarcella-Spanton of Staten Island. Neither she nor Pfeffer Amato returned multiple requests for comment. Both have called congestion pricing unfair and both represent areas with high populations of cops and municipal workers who have free parking at their jobs thanks to placards.

As previously reported by Streetsblog, a huge portion of the drivers to the congestion relief zone are municipal employees.