A top ally of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Larry Schwartz, demanded an emergency MTA board meeting to examine the troubled authority’s ballooning overtime costs, following a string of reports in The Post that highlighted the issue.
The MTA spent $1.3 billion in overtime in 2018, up more than $100 million from $1.2 billion the year before, with some employees at the Long Island Rail Road making more than $300,000 a year in overtime alone last year.
“Given the new legislative authority and management responsibility passed in the recent state budget and the forensic audits we must perform, I think it is imperative that we call an emergency board meeting to take place in the next several days to be briefed on the matter and decide a path forward,” Schwartz, a member of the MTA board, wrote Wednesday in a letter to the agency’s newly minted chairman Pat Foye.
He added: “The NYCTA [New York City Transit Authority] and LIRR have had basic internal system flaws in the past, which I believed to have been rectified, but clearly they persist and we must determine the parameters of this issue.”
The emergency meeting is set for Friday, the agency confirmed. It comes despite the MTA board already being scheduled to meet on May 20.
“The issues of excessive overtime and the inadequacy of the MTA time and attendance systems must be addressed,” said Foye. “Overtime is an important and useful tool as we urgently seek to modernize our entire system but we must be sure it is being used effectively, accurately and appropriately.”
Pressure is growing on the MTA from transit advocates and local politicians to tackle its ballooning labor costs.
The entire state Senate delegation from Long Island has called for hearings on the LIRR’s runaway overtime spending.
Foye responded last week, ordering the authority’s section heads to examine their labor practices and overtime awarded during 2018. And, he asked the inspector general to probe into the MTA’s overtime spending.
The MTA’s division heads are due to report back in July.
But experts and activists say the buck stops with Cuomo — who appoints the MTA’s chairman, the plurality of its board and claimed credit for negotiating the contracts in 2014 that ended long standoffs with labor at the transit authority.
“The governor can’t have it both ways. If he wants to own the contract when a strike is averted, he has to own the contract when overtime costs soar out of control too,” said Ben Fried, the spokesman for Transit Center.
The Post exposed how some LIRR employees have cashed in on the overtime spending spree, clocking in for weekend-long shifts that allow them to earn more than 3,000 hours of overtime in a year.
Chief measurement operator Thomas Caputo made more than anyone else at the agency, earning $461,646 last year thanks to $344,147 in overtime. He reportedly clocked more than 3,800 hours of overtime alone.
A LIRR track worker, Marco Pazmino, more than quadrupled his base salary and took home $256,177 by working an astonishing 4,157 hours in overtime alone. That would average to 11.4 hours of overtime worked every single day of the year.
Nine of the ten top overtime earners at the MTA work for the LIRR and more than half of the commuter railroad’s workforce takes home a six-figure paycheck, according to the data released by the conservative Empire Center think tank.
Meanwhile, other aspects of the Long Island commuter rail operations have come under scrutiny.
A recent report by the Citizens Budget Commission found that the MTA could say $86 million a year if it could run the LIRR as efficiently as MetroNorth, which serves New York’s northern suburbs.