Gov. Paterson has appointed former MTA Chairman Richard Ravitch to head a blue ribbon panel to examine the MTA's finances. At the same time, MTA Executive Director Elliot Sander states that if the funding for the $29.5 Billion 2008-2013 MTA Capital Plan, which currently has at least a $13.5 billion funding gap, is not found, "the Board would have to consider things like fares and tolls."

While Richard Ravitch created the first MTA Capital Plan in 1982 to save the system from ruin, Elliot Sander has taken the legacy of a "state of good repair" and thoughtful expansion via realistic capital investment planning and turned the process into an all-inclusive wish list of unfunded expansion projects that threaten the "state of good repair" of the entire existing system.

To simultaneously build the Second Avenue Subway, East Side Access, the Fulton Street Transit Center, the South Ferry Terminal, the Moynihan Station and the LIRR Mainline Third Track project, by itself now estimated to cost $1.5 billion and not to be completed until 2020, is an exercise in fiscal folly. Even after 25 years and six capital programs, significant parts of the entire MTA system are not in a "state of good repair."

Hopefully, former MTA Chairman Richard Ravitch will bring some reality to the MTA operating budget and capital plan financial picture. The current financial picture is a portrait of willy-nilly, pie-in-the-sky, have-it-all analysis and assumptions not worthy of an agency that is the fifth largest public debtor in the entire country.

Edward W. Powers