MTA wants Post to foot hefty bill for email review around edited fare beater video
The MTA wants to pay a consultant $180 per hour to review agency emails surrounding its decision to release a selectively edited video that sought to turn a middle-aged woman into the face of its anti-fare-beating campaign — and is demanding The Post pick up the bill.
That means the paper would have to fork over more than $1,500 for the emails, which are typically provided by city and state agencies at little or no cost through the Freedom of Information Law.
The Post sought the emails from the account of the agency’s top spokesman, Tim Minton, after the flack posted the edited eight-second clip on his official Twitter account.
The clip makes it look like a “latte-sipping” middle-aged woman was scamming a ride by sneaking under a subway turnstile. But the full video, obtained by The Post, shows the customer made at least one attempt to swipe her MetroCard before being forced to crawl under the turnstile when it apparently failed to register.
A cost estimate provided for the FOIL request shows the MTA would bill The Post at the nose-bleeding rates for seven hours of “project management/technical consulting” on behalf of an unidentified contractor.
At $180 an hour, this consultant would be paid at a higher rate than the MTA’s most recent chairman and CEO, Pat Foye, who made roughly $157 an hour — or $325,600 annually.
When pressed about the fees, Minton on Thursday refused to comment on the eye-watering price tag for public records and instead issued a statement that again maligned the straphanger as a thief.
“Who would have thought any NY institution would condone stealing from an agency that gets essential workers to their jobs,” he said, attacking The Post for revealing the footage.
The MTA disclosed its extraordinary pay-for-public-records demand in an invoice that claimed the search would involve “thousands” of records and required The Post put up the “estimated cost” — $1,560 — in “advance.”
Its contractor, the MTA added, could blow past that amount without any recourse for the paper.
“Please note — we will be incurring these costs through an [external vendor], on behalf of the NY Post and it is the NY Post’s responsibility to pay all costs, even if they exceed the estimated cost,” the response said.
“The NY Post must pay these fees promptly upon receipt of invoices,” it added. “The MTA will not send out a response to this FOIL request until full payment for all invoices related to this FOIL is rendered.”
Good-government advocates who reviewed The Post’s records request said the MTA’s bill was outrageous.
“The MTA shouldn’t be in the business of putting up obstacles to the public getting the records they paid for,” said Rachael Fauss, a good-government advocate at Reinvent Albany, who focuses on the transit agency. “These are public documents that the public pays for and has a right to see.”
The agency had only coughed up extended version of the video after repeated inquiries and the threat of a FOIL appeal from The Post.
Minton had posted the truncated clip — which depicted a woman holding a latte as she circumvented a turnstile — as purported proof of claims made by MTA chairman and CEO Janno Lieber that fare-beating has become common even among well-heeled New Yorkers.
While the longer version shows her attempting to swipe in first, the video does not capture why her MetroCard was declined.
New Yorkers have griped for years that the agency’s turnstile card readers are notoriously unreliable. Independent audits have found that between a quarter and a third of all card swipes result in an error or rejection of some kind.
The authority’s spending habits have come under sharp scrutiny in recent years as the organization has repeatedly blown budgets and deadlines for projects large and small.
It recently spent $30 million on a project that added a staircase with 28 steps and new fare gates to the Times Square station — and refused to say how much was spent installing the egress.
MTA officials now estimate that it will cost more than $6 billion to extend the Second Avenue Subway into East Harlem, making it the most expensive tunneling project on the planet.
It’ll cost substantially more than the previous record holder, which was building the first leg of the Second Avenue Subway through the Upper East Side.
Meanwhile, its most infamous boondoggle, the much-delayed project to bring the Long Island Rail Road into Grand Central Station, is finally approaching completion.
But its price tag has ballooned to more than $11 billion, nearly triple the original estimates of roughly $4 billion.
