'Blow Up The MTA,' Cuomo Says After Ripping Up L Train Plans

NEW YORK — Gov. Andrew Cuomo reportedly wants to "blow up" the MTA after tearing the agency's L train shutdown to shreds. In an interview with the New York Daily News Editorial Board, the governor argued the agency is broken because no one is repsonsible enough for it.

"Blow up the MTA. Blow it up," Cuomo, a Democrat, said in the interview, portions of which were reported Tuesday morning.

Cuomo picks the MTA's CEO and a plurality of the agency's board, and transit advocates have pinned the current subway crisis to him.

But Cuomo argued to the Daily News that the agency's structure doesn't give any one person true accountability.

"The only time I have authority is when no one else wants it," he told the paper.

The governor's comments came less than a week after he announced a new plan to fix the L line's tunnel under the East River that would avert the 15-month shutdown for which New Yorkers had long been preparing.

The L train episode is "a window into a much bigger problem," Cuomo told the Daily News. He reportedly argued that the MTA's bureaucracy plays a role in an uncompetitive system in which the same contractors get to handle the agency's big construction projects.

"The MTA is so tedious to deal with that it developed a boutique industry of people who just are willing to deal with this thing called the MTA," Cuomo told the Daily News.

Read the full New York Daily News story here.

(Lead image: Gov. Andrew Cuomo makes a speech at Barnard College on Jan. 7, 2018. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)