Liz Krueger says unpausing congestion pricing is the only way forward

State Sen. Liz Krueger has had a hell of a year, in the sense that politics in New York, especially issues near and dear to her, have gotten equal parts bizarre and intense since state lawmakers trekked back to Albany in January for the legislative session. More recently, she has seen her Equal Rights Amendment getting caught up in the national culture war, congestion pricing being paused indefinitely by Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Eric Adams finding his administration awash in corruption allegations.

Krueger, as state Senate Finance Committee chair, is one of the most high-profile lawmakers in the state. She spoke with City & State on Sept. 18 about her thoughts on this election cycle, the future of congestion pricing and how life might be for New York as a Canadian province. This interview was edited for length and clarity.

How do you feel about Democratic candidates’ chances this cycle?

I’m cautiously optimistic, compared to where I was before we had a change in presidential candidate, where I was, frankly, not sleeping and looking up on the internet every night what countries might let me live there since I’m convinced if Trump becomes the president, I’m going to a prison camp, and I’m too old to go to prison camp. Right now, I’m feeling, again, cautiously optimistic Harris-Walz are going to win, and not just us, but I think the whole world could take a big sigh of relief. But you’ll have to ask me again after Election Day, so that’s where I am coming into the elections, and obviously that translates down the rows from the president to Congress, to the Senate, to ultimately, Assembly and state Senate races here in New York. But I’ve been saying now for quite a while, while my life involves the New York state Senate and what happens in Albany, everyone should focus on the national elections because they determine whether or not our country continues to exist, and frankly, if our country doesn’t continue to exist, it doesn’t really matter what I hope to do in Albany.

That was pretty dark, but fair enough. So with this big push around the Equal Rights Amendment, how do you see that factoring into how people are going to campaign this year, and overall messaging to voters?

Well, I do think that messaging around equal rights and rights to abortion and reproductive health and LGBT issues, even though the ERA covers many other topics, but I think those issues specifically are resonating with voters at the national level and at the state level, and it’s an underlying message of people running on the Democratic ticket versus the Trump party folks everywhere. So yes, I do think people who are running for office, from my side of the topics, are highlighting why it’s important to vote Democratic and it’s important to vote yes on Proposal 1. Interestingly, the other side has accused me of playing politics at this time around abortion, and my response is, well, “Yes, abortions end up being political decisions, as we have seen in 24 states who have actually outlawed them, and women are dying.” So it’s personal, it’s a health care issue, and yep, it’s political, because the Supreme Court walked away from its responsibility and made horrendous decisions, multiple now, relating to reproductive health and privacy rights, and so states have to deal with this. So yeah, it’s personal and political.

Does it give you a chuckle at all to hear that you specifically are being accused of playing politics with abortion when the issue has been polarizing for decades?

No, I spent 10 years attempting to get the Reproductive Health Act passed through the New York state Senate with Republican control, where they would not entertain any modernization in a very bad abortion law that dated to 1970 because they were Republicans and said, “We’re not doing anything to ensure access to abortion in New York state.’ So the law was written in 1970 all it did was say in the criminal code, sometimes abortions aren’t illegal. Frankly, our law sucked. We just didn’t worry that much because we had Roe v. Wade at the Supreme Court level, but I spent 10 years fighting to get the law modernized and get it established that abortion was a health care service and needed to be in the health law, not the criminal code, and for those 10 years, many people said to me, “Well, we have all these rights anyway, don’t worry.” And so I traveled around talking to legislators with people who hadn’t been able to get abortions late in pregnancy, when their life and health was at risk, or their doctors had already told them this is not a viable pregnancy. It would be cruel to have a fetus go through nine months only to die in the birth canal. Why would we do this? And unfortunately, our laws were not good enough in New York state to allow these women to get the services they need. So we already had problems. People were in denial about it. The Republicans continued to refuse to do anything about it, until the Democrats came back into session as a supermajority in 2019, and my Reproductive Health Act was passed on the second day we were in the majority. So this (has a) huge policy impact on real people’s lives, and yeah, it’s always turned out to be political.

Are you concerned with the effectiveness of Republicans turning the Equal Rights Amendment into a child safety issue, as opposed to one about access to abortion?

Well, it frankly pisses me off that they keep lying about it, but it’s hardly surprising to me that they’re lying about this issue, because I think their entire campaign agenda, on the national level and on the state level, is to lie to people. Find me truth in anything the Trump crowd is telling anyone on any issue, and that’s pretty much the exact marching orders of the congressional candidates and the Republican Party candidates here in New York this year. And so I’m not at all surprised they’re lying about it, but everything they’re saying is untrue, so we have to make sure people know that, and it’s hard because they’ve got money behind them, although you might have noticed the Republicans aren’t saying it’s them. They’re keeping their hands away from it directly, because they know that this is a pro-choice, pro-LGBT state, and so they don’t think they can say that stuff. So instead, they’re having fringe, fake organizations do it for them. You know, most of the money going into this lying campaign is from anti-choice donors. The Conservative Party is fronting for them, which is what their purpose in life, apparently, has been for many years in New York state, just to be a front mouthpiece when the Republicans don’t want direct hits that they’re lying to everyone.

On congestion pricing, do you see a path to either undo the damage that’s going to be caused by this pause or any way to fix this before things get really bad for the MTA?

There’s a very easy way to fix this: the governor unpauses her pause. The longer she waits to do so, the more money we’re losing. But it’s not unfixable at this point, because it’s only been a couple of months, and the feds haven’t pulled their matching money yet, but I’m told they’re getting close, and so we need to unpause her pause and move forward, because, no, I don’t see a plan being offered by her or anyone else that would come up with the $15 billion needed to repay bonds we need to take out to complete a five-year capital plan that is ending now. I have also not seen any alternatives that would actually resolve getting the revenue to pay off $15 billion in bonds and reduce congestion and reduce the environmental damage, because the congestion pricing plan was a three-parter, so anybody’s ideas of how we resolve congestion pricing problem has to include all three parts.

Because it sounds like lawmakers have some expectation that barring Hochul reversing the pause immediately after the election, that they’ll have to come back and vote on some sort of new measure. Is that something you’re prepared for?

I don’t believe there any lawmakers who think that. I know the governor said that in some press statement somewhere, but none of us can actually figure out what she thinks she’s going to ask us to vote for, because it’s not within our purview. We have a law, and there’s a subcommittee of the MTA board that could choose to change the formula within the parameters they have, but I don’t actually see any legislative role here.

But if there was going to be a funding alternative, wouldn’t you guys need to sign off?

In negotiations for the budget, which also is not going to happen early in January. So no, the Legislature is not going to come up with some approval of new revenue external to either the budget process or, quite frankly, the much bigger challenge ahead of us, a new MTA capital plan that I believe was leaked today. I saw it somewhere saying $69 billion that’s separate from the $15 billion we’re now short on the remaining capital plan projects from the finishing five-year capital plan.

The Legislature and the governor need to confront very soon after starting in Albany, how do we get the money for the $69 billion for the next five years, and perhaps in addition to that, how do we resolve the $15 billion hole Gov. Hochul has created for us, above and beyond that $69 billion and, of course, if you read the comptroller’s report from earlier in the week or the weekend, he expected the number to be $90 billion, and if you read the Citizens Budget Commission report, they were projecting even more. So no, nobody’s going to show up on Jan. 3 or Jan. 4 or Jan. 5 and say, “Oh, here we have a magic answer and solution through the legislative process to come up with that $15 billion because that’s not even really the assignment for us.” It’s much, much bigger, and it can’t all just be separated out like, “Oh, we’ll come up with that solution now in January, separate from the budget and separate from the next MTA capital plan.” So the concept that people say there is some choice for the Legislature to act upon immediately upon starting session again, I don’t think so. I can’t name anybody who actually tells me this is what might happen and what we could do.

Could you take me back to that last week of the session where she sprung on everybody that there was going to be this pause and there was some implied assumption that lawmakers would band together in 48 hours and figure out something to fix it? What was morale like in the chamber as you all tried to figure it out?

So it took us all totally by surprise, and it was the last several days of session. So the last two weeks of session are the craziest of each 12-month period. It is when you were dealing with hundreds of bills. It is when, unfortunately for the Senate and for me personally, the governor decides to hand us large numbers of people she wants us to move through the confirmation process before we go home, even though I begged every governor I’ve served under to move it all much earlier in the year, everybody always waits to do huge numbers of confirmations at the very end. So we are dealing with endless interviews and committee meetings to review the confirmations. We are dealing with hundreds of bills, and the concept that then suddenly, the governor out of nowhere after saying even, I think a week earlier how much she supported congestion pricing, suddenly, she says we’re putting a pause on. So you mostly could have knocked us all over with a feather. What is she talking about? Why she’s saying that? How can that be? We’re too busy even to take the pause to figure out what the hell she’s talking about with her pause. So then it was like, well, that can’t be, there’s a law and it’s supposed to happen, and there’s federal agreements and lawsuits and of course it’s going forward, except it wasn’t. So I think it was just like shock combined with we have absolutely no oxygen left to even deal with this issue. So then she proposed two different hypothetical solutions, which I don’t think it took very much time for all houses to reject. One was a tax increase that would be very unfairly placed only on the workers in New York City, even though MTA region is 12 counties and MTA impact is statewide, raising the same tax we had just raised a year earlier for the operating side of the MTA. So rejecting that didn’t take very long at all, and then she came up with some bizarre IOU proposal, which she never even put in writing anywhere. I think somebody just said, “Well, maybe we can just sign some kind of IOU promising to pay the bonds back with future revenue yet to be resolved.” Also, I think that was really easy to go, “Oh, somebody asked Wall Street, will they take an IOU?” Because I don’t think so and the answer is no, Wall Street doesn’t take IOUs, even from lovely people like the state of New York, because they want a revenue stream guaranteed to provide the return that they are fiduciary responsible for collecting from us, if they carry and sell our bonds. So that idea also basically torpedoed, sort of in a reality check, extremely quickly, and then we were gone from Albany.

While it’s not specifically within your role as a state senator, what’s your take on this entire Eric Adams administration fracas?

Well, let’s see. For the record, I worked very, very hard to make Kathryn Garcia the mayor when there was the last mayoral election. I had great faith in her ability to run the city of New York and to offer competence and responsible government. I knew Eric Adams as a state senator, and therefore I knew that he shouldn’t be the mayor of New York City. Since that time, he’s done very little in that role to convince me I was wrong in my initial analysis, and it looks like he may not actually have an opportunity to get to be the mayor a second time. But again, I’m not in law enforcement, and I have publicly said before this all blew up in his face, I certainly hope some good people will be running for mayor next time. I’ll stick with that.

As both a fellow politician and resident of New York City, how does it feel to see the leader of your city regularly involved in scandals along with his inner circle?

So I hate it whenever anyone in political office is accused of or found guilty of corruption, because I fundamentally believe we should be held to a higher standard than anyone else. When it comes to the laws, we ask people to give us their vote so that we can make the laws they have to live under. Hence, I believe we have a legal, moral and ethical duty to have the highest standards applied to ourselves. So when we are caught doing bad things, illegal things, unethical things, I am madder than when it’s a private citizen in the same situation. Second, because I am in politics, I know every time one of these stories explodes, X percentage of people will now conclude I also must be corrupt, I just haven’t been caught yet, because everybody who runs for office is corrupt, and I find that also personally unbearable, because I think you could probably hit me with a lot of things as a human being and as a politician, but I’m quite sure I am not corrupt, and it’s personally painful that people out there believe I must be because I run for office.

Lastly, I know you talked about seeing if, let me see if I have this right, Canada would take New York as another province?

If Trump won yes, because, again, you told me I was sort of dark before, when I was talking about this, you know, on a more upbeat note, I was trying to come up with solutions, and I know that Canada has basically said, “Yeah, we’re not letting you all in if he wins.” As individuals, they basically made it clear. But that’s why I thought, “Oh, why do I have to leave this country? I love this country, and if Trump wins a second term, it’s not actually my fault or people in New York.” So I thought I would suggest to Canada that instead of us all trying to illegally cross the border at night without them noticing, which is pretty hard because there’s a lot of us, that they should instead agree to let us be the southeast province, a new province of Canada, and I offered, even though I hadn’t gotten agreement from other states yet, that I thought New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, would combine and be a great new province as the southeast province of Canada. We have land bridges. We have the Peace Bridge from Buffalo. Basically everybody in these states are progressive Democrats. We would fit in pretty well with the political philosophy of at least most of the Canadian elected officials. I propose that this could be an option, and I got back some unofficial responses and heard this is probably sellable in Ottawa, and look, if we were Europe, in the length of time we’ve been a nation, for Canada, if we were European countries, our borders would have moved around 20 times by now, right?