MTA defies feds fourth deadline to kill congestion pricing, calls Duffy threats a sham

Fourth time’s a “sham.”The Metropolitan Transportation Authority defied the feds’ fourth deadline to kill congestion pricing — while ripping Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s repeated threats as a “sham.”In a pair of letters sent to Duffy on Wednesday, the MTA and the state Department of Transportation said that his deadlines and letters threatening to yank federal funding were irrelevant — since the battle over the tolling program is playing out in court.The May 21 time limit for the MTA to stop collecting the $9 tolls on drivers entering Manhattan below 60th Street was ordered in a letter Duffy sent to Gov.Kathy Hochul last month — when his third deadline came and went.The April 21 letter gave Hochul another 30 days to prove to him why the US Department of Transportation shouldn’t “remedy New York’s non-compliance” by yanking untold amounts of federal transit funding.But state agencies argued in the recent filings that the whiplash back-and-forth was “procedurally improper.”The MTA attorneys argued there wasn’t even a point in responding to Duffy’s threat, since according to the transportation secretary’s original Feb.

19 letter announcing he was pulling federal approval for the first-in-the-nation program, he has already made up his mind.That letter “already purported to ‘terminate’” congestion pricing, wrote attorney Roberta Kaplan, “without any prior notice or opportunity to be heard as required by the relevant regulations.”“It is thus obvious that USDOT’s decision has already been made, and that this is an ‘opportunity to be heard’ in name only,” Kaplan argued.“Secretary Duffy did not afford the Project Sponsors any notice or due process before that alleged termination, and he cannot cure that failure now through a sham exchange of letters,” Kaplan wrote.The state DOT letter goes further, and hints that Duffy’s lawyers may be trying to form a new legal argument to kill the toll — citing D...