The MTA expects to spend around $500 million on “COVID-related expenses” in 2020, the agency’s chairman Pat Foye wrote Tuesday in an angry letter seeking more help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The letter comes less than a week after the Trump administration quietly nixed a policy that reimburses state and local governments expenses they’ve incurred responding to the pandemic.
FEMA cash wasn’t expected to fund the full $500 million COVID-19 tab — but the MTA hoped the feds would provide substantial help.
The end to the policy has stuck the MTA with bills for sanitizing trains and buses, and providing workers with protective equipment. Foye wrote to FEMA administrator Peter Gaynor that the change was “absurd.”
Slashing the reimbursements “during an ongoing, federally-declared public health emergency and worldwide pandemic, is completely irresponsible and will only increase the heavy burden on states and the MTA at a time when local resources are already historically strained to the bone,” Foye’s letter says.
MTA officials are still waiting on $125 million from FEMA in order to some pandemic-related expenses from the beginning of March to the end of June, said agency spokesman Ken Lovett.
The agency will need much more for COVID-19 expenses by the end of the year — as well as another $12 billion in federal relief by the end of 2021 to cover losses from plummeting fare payments and tax subsidies.
The $500 million the MTA expects to spend on the pandemic response this year includes $500,000 in death benefits it is paying each of the 131 agency employees who died of COVID-19.
Officials said the MTA will not ask FEMA to cover those payouts, which also come with three years of health care for the victims’ families and will cost at least $65 million.
The rest of the $500 million includes costs to hire contractors to rapidly disinfect subway cars, millions of face masks and protective equipment for transit workers and riders, and overtime for MTA employees who have been asked to work extra hours during the pandemic, Lovett said.
FEMA spokeswoman Lizze Litzow said the agency will continue to reimburse costs for protective equipment so long as the supplies are “necessary to carry out eligible emergency work.”
“FEMA is not authorized to support the day-to-day operations and operational expenses of facilities,” Litzow said.
