City Council Speaker Julie Menin has announced a proposal for an expansion of the city’s “Fair Fares” program that would provide free train and bus rides for NYC’s poorest residents.
Under the proposal, which is part of a broader (and pretty contentious) budget plan unveiled by Menin on Wednesday, the city program would cover the full cost of fares for households making less than 150% of the federal poverty line, or roughly $22,600 per year, according to Gothamist. Currently, Fair Fares, a $121 million city program launched by the De Blasio administration, covers half the cost of a ride for over 370,000 enrolled New Yorkers who qualify. But the city estimates that about one million are eligible, and hopes ramping up enrollment would mitigate fare evasion. “The Council is making a significant Fair Fares expansion among our top priorities in a budget that is fiscally responsible and invests directly in New Yorkers,” Menin said in a statement.
As good as this particular component may sound, the budget proposal as a whole has its skeptics. Chief among them is Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a longtime free bus advocate and perennial Menin adversary, who’s been hyper-focused on closing the city’s $5 billion budget gap over the last few weeks. The first-termer pushed back on Menin’s plan in a statement released on Wednesday afternoon. “Speaker Julie Menin’s preliminary budget proposal would result in slashing billions of dollars from agency budgets, which would force the City to cut services,” Mamdani claimed in a tweet. “It refuses to address the deeper structural imbalance between the City and the State, or to increase taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers and most profitable corporations. It effectively ensures this structural deficit will continue indefinitely.”
The Fair Fares expansion isn’t the only thing caught up in the growing tensions between Menin and Mamdani. The wildly popular proposal to raise the city’s minimum wage to a highest-in-the-nation $30 per hour by 2030, a cornerstone policy point of Mamdani’s campaign for mayor, is also squarely in the crossfire. The “Safer Homes” Act, a recent proposal with wide support that would empower the city to strip the worst landlords in New York of their property, is also awaiting the green light from Menin.
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