Officials, Advocates Float Legal Action Over Congestion Pricing Pause

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s last-minute derailment of congestion pricing now has her facing a stack of potential lawsuits from opponents who want to force the vehicle-tolling plan back on track.

A newly formed coalition of environmental groups, disability rights advocates and businesses in the so-called congestion zone south of 60th Street in Manhattan on Wednesday threatened Hochul with legal challenges aimed at starting congestion pricing by its previously planned June 30 launch date.

Hochul last week ordered the MTA to “indefinitely pause” a plan that had been years in the making, catching transit officials and advocates off guard.

“We believe that Governor Hochul has violated several state laws and we are preparing lawsuits to ask the court to reverse her decision,” said Michael Gerrard, an environmental and energy law professor at Columbia Law School.

He joined dozens of potential plaintiffs in front of the Municipal Building at 1 Centre St. to question the legality of Hochul’s sudden turn on the vehicle-tolling plan that she championed for years, often alongside MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber.

Gerrard, the director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia, said he expects to file at least one lawsuit this month.

The vehicle-tolling plan was designed to curb congestion and raise billions of dollars for the MTA’s five-year capital plan to maintain, improve and expand the transit system. New York would have been the first U.S. city to follow in the footsteps of Stockholm, London and Singapore who have similar  policies.

But those long-planned upgrades are now in flux , with MTA officials this week saying they will be forced to “reprioritize and shrink” the $55 billion five-year plan that funds projects like signal modernization, the purchase of new trains and buses and legally mandated accessibility improvements in subway and Staten Island Railway stations.

“The governor’s sudden and potentially illegal reversal wronged a host of New Yorkers who have a right to what was long promised to all of New York — a world class mass transit system that works for everyone,” said City Comptroller Brad Lander, who helped bring together the coalition.

He noted that a failure to implement congestion pricing could be a violation of state law, the 2021 Green Amendment and the 2022 settlement of a class-action lawsuit in which the MTA agreed to make 95% of all stations accessible to people with disabilities within three decades.

It could also impact businesses south of 60th Street that are adversely affected by congestion, those who live in the zone and suffer from respiratory illnesses, and MTA bondholders whose bonds are backed by congestion pricing’s expected revenues.

Contracts Off Track

The MTA had been counting on the tolling structure to generate billions of dollars in recurring revenue for long-planned transit upgrades , but the awarding of contracts on those projects has now been frozen as the agency recalibrates its plans.

“Legal minds are looking at whether the [MTA] board has the final say or any say in this,” Andrew Albert, who represents the New York City Transit Riders Council on the MTA board, told THE CITY. “The board has a fiduciary responsibility to the MTA, so absent another funding source, how do we sell bonds, how do we move forward, how does this not affect service quality?”

Hochul has framed her about-face on congestion pricing as a move made for working people who did not want to pay to drive into Manhattan’s congestion zone, citing how patrons and owners of diners gave her “a real pulse on what New Yorkers are thinking.”

“Like the majority of New Yorkers, Governor Hochul believes this is not the right time to implement congestion pricing,” Avi Small, a Hochul spokesperson, said in a statement Wednesday. “We can’t comment on pending or hypothetical litigation.”

At a press briefing in Queens on Wednesday, Lieber declined to comment on any potential legal maneuvers made in favor of congestion pricing. The MTA was already facing multiple lawsuits from opponents of the vehicle-tolling plan, including New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and the United Federation of Teachers.

“We’re a professional organization, we deal with the facts on the ground and where we’re focused right now is how do we retool, reprioritize and shrink the capital plan to deal with the money that we know we have,” Lieber said. “There’s $28.5 billion of work left in this capital program and we now have $13 billion to do it, so we have to make some hard choices.”

Lieber was far more clipped when asked by a reporter if he could “talk a little bit about what [he’s] learned about Governor Hochul over the last couple of weeks.”

“No,” he said.

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