State Sen. Jack Martins blamed New York City legislators for preventing the repeal of the MTA payroll tax at a civic association meeting in New Hyde Park last week, but predicted Gov. Andrew Cuomo will assist in eliminating the tax in the coming year.
“Our issue in New York State is not one of partisan politics, our issue in New York State is one of geography.” Martins said last Wednesday at a joint meeting of the North Lakeville and Lakeville Estates civic association. “When we voted to repeal the MTA payroll tax, every member from New York City voted against it. It passed the Senate last year, but didn’t pass the Assembly. As we said when we proposed the bill, we were one Andrew Cuomo away from being able to repeal the MTA payroll tax. If he had gotten behind it and supported it I do believe it would have passed.”
“It’s the suburbs competing with the cities for resources,” the Mineola Republican added. “That is really what it comes down to.”
Martins, who was invited to speak at the joint meeting after canceling a speaking engagement there last month, focused his comments on the MTA payroll tax and mandate relief efforts for school districts.
The MTA payroll tax puts a tax on business owners, municipalities and school districts which require them toto pay 34 cents for every $100 of payroll. The tax affects all businesses and municipalities including school districts, nonprofit organizations that have a payroll and hospitals within the areas that are serviced by the MTA including Nassau County.
“After talks with the governors office, I believe he [Cuomo] will get behind this initiative this year,” Martins said. “I think that the repeal will go a long way towards offering relief towards Long Island, not only symbolically but otherwise as well. The idea is to phase it out over three years. We will eliminate it all together in respect to the suburbs immediately, then phase it out in New York City to reduce it to city employers with 25 or more employees.”
Currently there are 2.6 billion riders using the MTA each year. There are 160 million riders who use the Long Island Railroad and Metro North combined. Martins stated that if you are a large employer in New York City, then you don’t have to worry about infrastructure such as parking as much as the suburbs do and should pay a higher amount of tax.
“We in the suburbs have to incorporate infrastructure like parking into anything we do,” Martins said. “Large employers in the city should have to pay a premium for ridership, because we pay the premium here in the purpose taxes to support those [parking facilities] that we have in our communities.”
More than 52 taxes and fees fund the MTA budget, Martins said.
“The MTA has $13 billion budget, and the net loss effect of the repeal in the first year would be $260 million,” Martins said. “That is 2 percent of their budget. If you can’t absorb that through efficiencies – 2 percent of your own budget to share sacrifices – then something else is drastically wrong.”
Martins credited the state Legislature for approving relief to local schools from costs mandated by the state “effectively for the first time in the history of the state.”
“It was $178 million worth of mandate relief and it certainly wasn’t as extensive as we had originally hoped,” Martins said. “It was the first time that both houses of the state Legislature actually worked to untangle some of the often times all to present red tape when it comes to imposing costs on local governments and school districts.”
Originally the state had tried to come up with $1 billion in mandate relief, Martins said.
One change was the repeal of the bus ridership law, which required school districts to provide a bus seat for every available student within their district, regardless of actual ridership.
The result was school districts being forced to run buses at half capacity.
“We were able to introduce a bill that was eventually signed and passed that allowed the school districts through their own calculations based on their own historic data to determine how many busses and how to best and effectively deploy their busses,” Martins said. “One particular school district that was effected was the Port Washington School District that saved over $300,000 by being able to implement a different bus scheme for their students and were able to redirect those monies back into the school district.”
Martins said a future source of mandate relief is the Mandate Relief Council approved by the Legislature.
The council Martins said, will consist of two representatives from the Senate and Assembly, along with a number of nominees from the government.
“They are empowered as a panel to hear appeals from local government and school districts if there are regulations that specifically impact the districts, that allow them to ask the council for relief, either individually for them or globally with respect to revaluating certain regulations,” Martins said.
