For Janno Lieber, congestion pricing isn’t dead

In the months leading up to its planned start date, New York’s congestion pricing program had a sharp-elbowed guardian trying to shepherd it through the valley of political death.

Janno Lieber, who as chair and CEO of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority was tasked with implementing the road tolling program, was known to launch spirited defenses when the program came under attack. For example, he went after the Democratic governor of New Jersey who sued to block the federal government’s approval of congestion pricing. “To me, it’s amazing that Phil Murphy is suing Joe Biden in a presidential election year,” Lieber told City & State in May – a variation on a dig he’d made about Murphy before. “I never would have thought that Phil Murphy would be on the same side as Donald Trump in an issue where the federal government is trying to advance a climate change-oriented, progressive issue. But here we are.”

Transit advocates have seen Lieber as an able defender of the policy, helping to usher it through a series of complicated federal approvals – and political and legal attacks.

But in the face of the latest threat to congestion pricing, Lieber can’t be so sharp-elbowed anymore. That’s because the threat comes directly from his boss. Less than a month before the state was set to turn on the new tolling program, New York’s own Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul directed the MTA to “indefinitely pause” congestion pricing, citing concerns about the toll’s affordability and a fragile economic recovery. “To those cynics who question my motivation, I approach every decision through one lens: What is best for New Yorkers?” Hochul said in a June 5 video announcing the decision. “We need to make sure our solutions work for everyone – especially those who are struggling to make ends meet.”

The stunning eleventh hour call took Lieber and MTA leadership by surprise, according to several people who spoke with him in the aftermath. Until that point, Hochul had been a vocal supporter of congestion pricing, and the MTA had already sunk half a billion dollars into tolling equipment for the program.

A shrewd navigator of choppy political waters and the self-described “patron saint of challenging projects,” Lieber has proceeded with Hochul’s pause while laying out in clear terms its cost for much-needed accessibility, modernization and even state-of-good-repair work. “I think he’s successfully walked a very fine line,” said Rachael Fauss, senior policy adviser at Reinvent Albany.

Standing by the governor while acknowledging disappointment on behalf of those who worked for years on the program, Lieber has been diplomatic, even as her about-face threatens to rip a $15 billion hole in the MTA’s current capital plan. “What we’re doing is being businesslike and just making sure, No. 1, that we’re protecting ridership and service, and, No. 2, that we remain ready to implement congestion pricing when the temporary pause, as it’s been described, is lifted,” Lieber said in a press conference last month.

Some observers, such as Norman Brown, legislative director of the New York State Council of Machinists and a nonvoting member of the MTA board, have been more blunt: “They gave him 10 pounds of shit in a five-pound bag here.”

The gaping hole in the 2020-2024 capital plan isn’t the only pressing financing challenge that the MTA faces. This fall, the MTA will present its next capital plan for 2025-2029, carrying its own hefty needs for new funding sources. How permanent the congestion pricing pause is and whether the Legislature and governor will agree on an alternative funding stream remain open questions.

Lieber says he’s focused on keeping the MTA moving forward, noting that questions of funding sources aren’t his to answer. When asked whether he’s heard of any viable alternatives to finance the current capital plan, Lieber said he’s open to all ideas, as long as they don’t take away from something that would have been invested in the next capital program. Lieber hasn’t adopted the governor’s words, parroting her concerns about whether congestion pricing is coming at the right time or the right price. And he has repeatedly said that he takes Hochul at her word that the pause isn’t permanent. 

“Listen, congestion pricing is right there,” Lieber told City & State. “It is the right-in-front-of-you option for how to fund the $15 billion.”

Taking the reins

On what seems to be a fairly average workday, Lieber moves swiftly through the second leg of his commute from Atlantic Avenue to Bowling Green, as if an MTA dashboard is recording his personal on-time performance. “I annoy the conductors and all the MTA personnel by saying hello and thanking them for their service,” he says. “I’m saying hello to the conductors. I say hello to the cleaners. I say hello to the station agents and cops. Sometimes the National Guard dudes who have no idea who I am or where New York is or anything.”

“I have been with him when somebody jumped over a turnstile, and Janno takes it personally,” said Tom Wright, president of the Regional Plan Association. “I’ve seen him confront people and say, ‘Hey, you shouldn’t be doing that. We all have to pay for this system, otherwise it will fall apart.’”

Lieber, who grew up in a civically engaged Jewish family on the Upper West Side in the 1970s, said that riding the subway system at that time makes him appreciative of what the city has now. “We never changed trains, because if you had a train that was going generally in the direction you want to go, you’re not taking a chance on another train showing up,” he recalls. Lieber has been around politics his whole life. His late mother Mimi Levin Lieber, who comes from a Democratic political dynasty in Michigan, served on the state Board of Regents. Lieber, for the record, does not have any interest in running for office himself, he said.

After graduating from Harvard, Lieber worked on transportation issues in Mayor Ed Koch’s administration before going to law school, later working on transportation policy under President Bill Clinton’s administration. He eventually built his reputation working on large-scale public-private infrastructure projects – most notably, taking the helm of the redevelopment of the World Trade Center after 9/11 during his 14-year stint at Silverstein Properties. Lieber worked on the series of projects beset by delays, and the planning, financing, legal and political issues that came along with them.

Lieber was brought in to the MTA in 2017 to lead work on capital projects as president of Construction & Development. Under a plan from then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2021, Lieber and then-New York City Transit President Sarah Feinberg were set to split the MTA’s top job, Lieber taking CEO and Feinberg taking chair. That power-sharing plan fell apart without support from the state Legislature, and Lieber served as acting CEO and chair, a role made official after Gov. Kathy Hochul took office later that year.

Three years into the job, Lieber has celebrated victories, including clawing back ridership following the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the completion of the Grand Central Madison terminal, opening service for the Long Island Rail Road to the East Side of Manhattan. “Maybe he’s not the Train Daddy, but he’s pretty close,” state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal said with a laugh, referring to the affectionate nickname for one of the more beloved – and martyred – MTA leaders in recent history, Andy Byford. “I don’t know, the Train Stepdaddy.”

But the price of the job – and the $400,000 salary that comes with it – is answering for every train car with broken air conditioning on a 90-degree day, every line with 25-minute headways, and every one of the system’s more ingrained problems. Both he and Hochul have focused on subway crime, which is declining overall but remains a present fear for some riders.

Described by multiple people as formidable in an argument, Lieber has also differed with advocates and MTA board members on other issues, such as his focus on fare evasion as an existential threat.

And while the relationship between management and labor will always have some tension, Lieber has a particularly vocal detractor in Transport Workers Union International President John Samuelsen, who holds a nonvoting seat on the MTA board, and who was locked in fraught negotiations for Metro-North workers last year that nearly came to a strike. “He’s not a public transport professional, he’s a real estate developer,” Samuelsen said.

Lieber isn’t dismissive of the challenges facing the MTA, including ones that most riders don’t have the awareness to angrily tweet about. Antiquated power substations risk more power outages, and outdated signaling stands in the way of running trains with more frequency and reliability. Extreme weather events threaten already aging infrastructure that serves the entire system, including Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road. And then there’s the question of how to pay for the projects that will, as the MTA’s 20-year needs assessment put it, allow the system to last for another 100 years.

Starting their tenures in leadership at roughly the same time, Lieber and Hochul have often moved in lockstep, with Hochul frequently appearing at MTA announcements, backing an urgent push for more funding for the MTA’s operating budget in last year’s state budget negotiations, and supporting favorite projects of Lieber’s, like the Interborough Express. 

Some observers suggest that Lieber has been given freer rein than some of his predecessors to run the system without the micromanagement that was characteristic of the Cuomo administration.

That room to run seemed to extend to the MTA’s task of implementing congestion pricing too. “I think he’s just become more of a public figure, A, because congestion pricing is a big deal, but also, he’s willing to be out there talking about it, and sort of standing up for it,” said Jon Orcutt, director of advocacy at Bike New York. “He’s not working for Cuomo, where that was much more difficult and you’d get your head chopped off if you stood out too much.”

“There were some tears”

To the extent that Lieber has acknowledged frustration and disappointment at Hochul’s pause on congestion pricing – a deviation from what’s seemed to be a hands-off approach at the MTA – he has largely done so on behalf of MTA staff who have worked for years to get the program underway. “You can imagine there was disappointment. There was emotion, there were some tears,” Lieber said of meetings he had with MTA staff and people leading the congestion pricing implementation the morning after news of the pause broke in Politico and The New York Times.

He has declined to dive deep into his own personal reaction. When asked by two reporters at a press conference last month about his emotions and reading between the lines of his public statements, he wryly suggested that they open a psychotherapy practice together. “You know, I was a little emotional as well,” he later told City & State.

Others confirmed that morale at the MTA has taken a hit. “You can expect that this is something that has been very difficult for people to digest,” said Quemuel Arroyo, the MTA’s chief accessibility officer. “Including me. Congestion pricing was supposed to deliver $2 billion for accessibility.” Lieber, Arroyo said, has been “doing his best to keep people reminded of the amazing work that happens here every day.”

“It’s devastating and disappointing and extremely frustrating, and, you know, infuriating,” said Feinberg, the former president of New York City Transit, who said she has been in close touch with MTA leaders.

Lieber has declined to get into the details of the conversation in which Hochul notified him of the pause, but said in his first press conference that he “found out about her final decision like the night before,” and hasn’t commented on whether he had any earlier indications that this was being considered. Some who spoke to Lieber in the days after described him as seeming “blindsided.”

Before Lieber’s first press availability after the announcement, Lisa Daglian, president of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA, texted him. “I said, ‘Please tell me that this doesn’t mean you’re resigning?’”

Some have been happy to see Lieber brush off questions about whether he would step down. “A lot of other people, less committed people, would have pulled the trigger on their own job at that point,” said Brown, the MTA board member.

“It’s not in my nature to walk or to quit,” Lieber said at that first press conference. “The perspective I have is of someone who saw what it took to get the system where it is now, from the depths of the 1970s and early 1980s. People did a lot of hard work in hard times. I couldn’t possibly justify walking away because of a single setback. Even one of this magnitude.”

Lieber has also brushed off questions about whether this setback will damage his working relationship with Hochul, calling her a “pro-transit” governor. Asked whether he believes Hochul’s decision had anything to do with the upcoming elections, he said, “No idea.”

“She’s dealing with the issue in a way that she believes is the right thing to do,” he said, adding that they each play on different fields – she on the state and national field, and he on the New York transit field. “So it’s not a shock that from time to time, we won’t look at things exactly the same way. But I’m determined to continue to work with her going forward.”

Two days before congestion pricing was set to go into effect, Lieber and Hochul appeared together at a Pride event for a subway station renaming, posing for a friendly photo op. “We’re celebrating this incredible system that keeps going and, with your support, we’ll keep going for a long time,” Lieber told Hochul. “We sure will, under your leadership,” she said.

Moving on

For a while, twin covers of the Daily News and New York Post lamenting a particularly bad day for subway service in the summer of 2017 hung on the wall of Lieber’s office bathroom. (“Probably a place that I’ll look at the wall more than I would otherwise,” he says.) They’ve since moved into another room at MTA headquarters, but they served as an important reminder for Lieber: “This is where you don’t want to be.”

Lieber arrived at the MTA in 2017 at a crisis point for the authority that saw overcrowding, subways dipping to on-time performance lows not seen since the ’70s and the cracks of an aging, underfunded system busting open. “I saw people who are professionals who were involved in managing the system have their careers destroyed, because they were responsible at the moment when the MTA couldn’t make service,” Lieber recalls. “And that was a result of disinvestment.” Reorganizing the capital plan and prioritizing “fundamental state of good repair work” and some rolling stock upgrades is the MTA’s attempt to avoid going backward.

But looking at the slate of projects that will be deferred while the MTA waits for the congestion pricing pause to end or another revenue source to be identified, such as long-awaited signaling upgrades, some advocates fear going back to a crisis point.

Some state lawmakers have suggested “mending, not ending” congestion pricing by introducing it with an adjusted toll price. Hochul said earlier this month that she’s been in conversations with state legislative leaders and key committee members about how to move forward on filling the funding gap. “Every project that is important, and they all are important, will be funded,” she said. “We will find the financing, and yes, conversations are very much underway.”

State Senate Deputy Majority Leader Michael Gianaris, a supporter of congestion pricing, suggested that those conversations aren’t very far along, however. “I don’t think there have been very serious conversations between the parties at all,” he said.

When asked if he still has faith in New York’s and the MTA’s ability to take big swings, Lieber didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely,” he says. “You’ve got to be willing to do major policy initiatives. And we’ve already shown, you know maybe at a smaller scale, that New York can adjust to change,” he said, pointing to those who vehemently opposed but came to accept the city’s indoor smoking bans and the introduction of Citi Bike. “There’s payoff, if you can have the endurance, the stamina, to see it through and make the case.”