New York’s Metropolitan Transport Authority (MTA) has amended its four-year financial plan after losing millions of dollars of revenue following Super Storm Sandy.
MTA has approved its new budget which includes plans to bring forward predicted cash balances for 2013 and 2014 to address a looming $330 million deficit.
Super Storm Sandy resulted in $268 million in lost revenue and additional operating costs.
By 2016, debt payments will have increased the loss by as much as $62 million annually because of infrastructural losses not recovered through insurance payouts or federal disaster relief funding.
MTA, who described the 2013 outlook as “fragile”, insists that despite the devastating impact of Sandy the budget remains balanced because of the organisation’s aggressive cost-cutting targets, which by 2016 will see the organisation making savings of $1.2 billion annually.
The storm caused $5 billion of damage to MTA’s transport network, with $600 million alone needed to repair the recently-opened South Ferry subway station in Manhattan.
In a written statement to the U.S. Senate, Federal Transport Administration (FTA) administrator Peter Rogoff said: “It is extremely important that going forward, we rebuild our public transit and other transportation systems with greater resiliency, so they are able to better withstand powerful natural and man-made disasters. This also entails building greater redundancy into public transit and other transportation systems, to ensure that viable alternatives are available when primary systems – like the New York subway – are crippled.
“The havoc wreaked by Hurricane Sandy was a tragedy and also a wake-up call. It brought into sharp focus the need for us as a nation to do a better job of building public transportation systems – and all of the infrastructure our economy depends on – to withstand strong physical forces.”
