Well into the 21st century, smoke-belching diesel trains still run across all three rail lines in Suffolk County. This, after years of lectures about greenhouse gases and climate change from the politicians controlling the MTA, the bloated, mismanaged monstrosity that runs the Long Island Rail Road.
The suburbs are treated as the MTA’s cash cow: good enough to milk, never important enough to fix. We pump billions into this bureaucratic behemoth through our taxes, tolls, fares, surcharges, congestion pricing, and the so-called “payroll mobility tax,” all to prop up an agency that won’t electrify the lines in our lifetime.
What do Suffolk commuters get for their money? Diesel fumes, poor service, crumbling stations, and a drumbeat for more, more, more. Suffolk taxpayers send upwards of $25 million a year to the MTA just for station “maintenance,” yet many stops look like they’ve been abandoned for years. The new Mastic–Shirley station was a bare-bones insult that left everyone in shock over its $7.5 million price tag padded with hundreds of thousands of dollars in “management fees.”
The MTA set a record with about $1.4 billion in overtime this year, including a foreman who took home more than the LIRR president. It spent millions on fingerprint scanners to stop time-card fraud, then let them sit idle for years while a cheating scandal festered under their noses.
State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli’s audits routinely uncover waste, fraud, and abuse — and his recommendations are ignored. His latest round of reviews underscores the continuing dysfunction, concluding that a capital-construction reorganization failed to produce any meaningful gains in service, efficiency, or cost savings for customers.
A 2024 DiNapoli report on the MTA’s “20-Year Needs Assessment” revealed that the agency’s newest plan offered no cost estimates, leaving riders and taxpayers with no way to know how much critical repairs will cost, how they’ll be funded, or what will actually be prioritized.
This amounts to blatant mismanagement, all happening under a board dominated by city-centric appointees of Gov. Hochul who are more than happy to send the bill to the suburbs. Long Island lawmakers have called for a forensic audit and a fiscal control board to take the checkbook out of the MTA’s hands. They’re right. Only a well-aimed stake to the heart of the MTA vampire will finally end this nightmare for Long Island.