Yesterday the coalition sent this letter [PDF] to every member of the state legislature. Notably, three of the state's biggest unions -- the AFL-CIO, Service Employees International, and United Federation of Teachers -- have signed on. These labor groups were not part of the coalition that fought for congestion pricing last year, but on this issue, they are firmly on board. On this issue, they're united with the same business leaders whom they're fighting against when it comes to the proposed millionaire's tax. Unlike the State Senate, these leaders grasp the implications of sharply hiking fares while drastically cutting service. They don't want to risk the region's future by letting the transit system fall apart. They do want a plan that provides a long-term answer, and that includes bridge tolls. Here's their full letter:

Dear Legislator:

We represent the citizens of New York who depend upon a safe, clean and reliable public transportation system. We represent the working class New Yorkers -- many of whom do not own automobiles -- who depend upon an affordable public transportation system to get to their jobs, to their schools and to their health care providers. We represent the employers of the region that recognize that a well functioning subway, bus and commuter rail network is the prerequisite for continued economic growth and is what sets New York apart from the rest of the country. We represent the hard-working building trades and construction workers responsible for New York’s skyline that are dependent upon public sector projects to put food on the table during these hard times. And we represent those that care about reducing the asthma rates of children in disproportionately impacted communities throughout the city and about making this city a whole lot greener, more equitable and a little bit more livable.

We represent your constituents, and we are calling on you to act and adopt a comprehensive, long term funding plan for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. It must be a plan that provides for affordable fares, expanded service and long term capital investment. And it must be adopted now -- before the Authority is forced to raise fares and tolls by as much as 30 percent, while at the same time drastically reducing service across the system.

The New York Legislature has had long enough to act. This issue is no surprise to those that have been paying attention. Almost a year ago, Governor Paterson called on Richard Ravitch to head a Commission to review options for comprehensively addressing the MTA’s operating and capital funding needs. This Commission represented business, labor, environmental advocates and everyday straphangers. And the proposal that the Commission put forward has the broad-based support of all of these constituencies -- your constituencies. It is a proposal that is fair, balanced and comprehensive. It relies on transit riders, motorists and the employers that benefit from the system to all participate in the solution for saving the system.

Once again, we are calling for bipartisan action to respond to the needs of New Yorkers and prevent a backsliding into the kind of neglect and disinvestment in our transportation system that marked earlier decades and nearly crippled New York. With funding for the MTA in place, we can move on to confront the other innumerable challenges that our state faces in this time.

We stand united in our commitment to working with you and your colleagues towards a solution to this crisis. We respectfully request a meeting with you in the coming days.

Sincerely,

Denis Hughes
President
New York State AFL-CIO

Gary LaBarbera
President
Building & Construction Trades Council

Mike Fishman
President
32BJ, Service Employees International Union

Randi Weingarten
President
United Federation of Teachers

Kathryn Wylde
President & CEO
Partnership for New York City

Richard T. Anderson
President
New York Building Congress

William C. Rudin
Chairman
Association for a Better New York

Dick Dadey
Executive Director
Citizens Union

Nancy Ploeger
President
Manhattan Chamber of Commerce

Gene Russianoff
Senior Attorney
Straphangers Campaign

Kevin Corbett
Co-Chair
Empire State Transportation Alliance

Kate Slevin
Executive Director
Tri-State Transportation Campaign

David Jones
President & CEO
Community Service Society of New York

Pratt Center for Community
Development

Fifth Avenue Committee

The POINT CDC

Erasmus Neighborhood Federation

Morningside Heights/West Harlem Sanitation Coalition

Today is the first workday of the new year for city public school teachers, some 52,000 of whom have a little over a month to prepare for a commute without free parking privileges.

As reported earlier this week, the city and the United Federation of Teachers have reached an agreement that will rescind all but about 11,000 teacher parking placards, putting the number of placards on par with the number of on-street spaces allotted for school parking across the boroughs (an additional 15,000 off-street spaces are also designated for teacher use). Allocation of placards will be left to the discretion of individual school principals and UFT chapter leaders (who are also teachers), and must be completed by October 1.

Perhaps sensing unrest among the membership, UFT President Randi Weingarten, who is in Denver this week, released a missive yesterday ensuring teachers that teacher parking spaces had not been reduced, and that the deal with the city "presents an opportunity for an increase in the number of spots." This last is apparently a reference to an appeals process briefly outlined in a recent letter to Weingarten from Bloomberg Deputy Mayor Ed Skyler [PDF]. 

While in her letter to teachers, the full text of which appears after the jump, Weingarten characterizes the agreement as a win, school personnel aren't happy. Speaking to the Times, one Bronx middle school principal riffed on a previous Weingarten complaint, intimating that the best of New York's Brightest will gravitate to schools with available auto storage.

"What I think will end up happening is we’ve already got competition for teachers, and schools with parking lots will become even more desirable than they were before," he said.

Here's the Weingarten letter:

There are a lot of rumors floating around regarding parking placards. Do not believe everything you hear and read. The Education Department was the only city agency not to lose parking spots, and that is because the UFT fought hard for its members from the moment the mayor first announced his intention to cut spaces. We filed a grievance and took the case to the Public Employees Relations Board (PERB), and we were the only ones to negotiate a parking agreement. The deal that the union and the city reached yesterday ensures that all on-street and off-street parking spots for schools have been preserved and presents an opportunity for an increase in the number of spots.

Teacher parking has always been a problem in New York City. There has never been enough. In the past, the Department of Education has sought to address this problem by increasing the number of permits without increasing the number of actual spots. This has created problems for neighborhoods and educators. Although I would rather the city not change the process right now, the agreement the UFT reached with the city continues the number of available spots and more closely aligns the number of placards with the number of spots. This brings the decision on who gets the placards to the school level where it belongs.

Under the agreement, the number of permits available to a school will be limited to the number of available spaces currently designated for parking by DOE personnel. The principal and chapter leader in each school will decide the distribution of these on-street and off-street placards, whether through assignment to individual people, pooling of placards for use each day (which could be on a first-come, first-serve basis), or some combination of those two methods. There is now an appeals process when the principal and chapter leader can’t agree as well as a way for the principal or chapter leader to appeal if they believe their school needs more parking spots. The city will also issue at least 1,000 additional parking placards for educators whose work requires them to travel between different schools.

Enforcement of the new system will begin Oct. 1. New placards will start to be issued at the beginning of the school year.

We recommend that chapter leaders advocate for a transparent and reasonable system of allocation that is fair to staff. If you have any questions or concerns about the agreement or your role in the allocation process, please contact your district rep.

It took a little longer than expected, but the City is significantly shrinking the pool of parking placards available to public employees. The total number of placards allocated to certain departments -- most notably NYPD -- has been reduced from roughly 80,000 to about 55,000, as reported by the Times, News, and Post this morning. The police will have 21,474 fewer placards to distribute, a 33 percent reduction.

Placards have also been redesigned to prevent fraud and abuse, said Deputy Mayor Ed Skyler. The News reports:

New standardized placards are designed to eliminate the dizzying patchwork of permits previously created by each agency that often stumped ticket writers.

"They were being respected by the people who were doing traffic enforcement because they looked legit," Skyler said. "If you have an old police one, you might as well have a Time magazine on the dashboard. It's not going to be effective."

Mayor Bloomberg announced the placard reduction plan back in January, initially targeting a March 1st implementation date. But when an inventory revealed 142,000 placards in use -- thousands more than anticipated -- delays ensued. The percentage reduction announced yesterday exceeds the 20 percent goal the Mayor set in January.

A separate pool of 63,000 placards issued by the Department of Education is in line for a similar reduction by September. Expect obstruction from Randi Weingarten, or her successor, should the current boss of New York's teacher's union succeed in her campaign to head the American Federation of Teachers.

Graphic: New York Times

Last Friday, as she announced her intention to seek the top spot at the American Federation of Teachers, Weingarten took another swipe at the mayor, and in the process further betrayed her ignorance when it comes to the relationship between private automobiles and public space.

City Room reports:

During a brief speech, Ms. Weingarten took a shot at Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, sarcastically announcing that now that congestion pricing had been defeated, the mayor was planning to require pedestrians to "put quarters in the the traffic lights to be able to cross the street."

Huh? Aside from being unfunny, this doesn't make any sense. Even the most casual observer understood that congestion pricing was intended as a deterrent to driving -- not walking, or riding a bike, or using any other means of transportation.

It would be pointless to try to figure out what Weingarten was going for here, other than a cheap laugh at the mayor's expense, but it was a revealing statement. While school kids across the city have their outdoor spaces intruded upon and poisoned by cars, and take classes on how not to get run down in the street, Weingarten sees fit to crack jokes about the failure of a plan that would have made things better.

Here's hoping Weingarten gets that AFT job, and that the next UFT head spends less energy fighting for free parking and more on getting teachers to work without their cars.

Photo: United Federation of Teachers

Streetsblog reader Richard Conroy sends along these photos and writes:

Yesterday there was an article about Randi Weingarten saying teachers don't abuse parking permits. I found that amusing since my daily commute takes me past P.S. 161 in Harlem where there are numerous vehicles parked on the sidewalk every school day. This school is on Convent Ave.

In her letter to the Mayor, United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten claimed that "teachers are not abusers of parking permits, and to publicly suggest that they are is deeply troubling." The letter was a response to the Mayor's plan to reduce the number of city government parking permits and prevent unions from printing their own placards. 

At least they're not parking on the playground, I suppose.

United Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten sent a letter to Mayor Bloomberg Friday expressing objections to his plan to reduce the number of city government parking permits and prevent unions and city agencies from printing their own. Weingarten's letter echoed Teamsters president Gary LaBarbera's recent assertion that "parking permits are a form of compensation for teachers"and other city employees (Is anyone paying taxes on that "compensation?" Is it accounted for in any city budget?)

In her letter, reprinted below in full, Weingarten makes three particularly remarkable claims:

1. "Teachers are not abusers of parking permits."
   A quick visit to UncivilServants.org (or your own neighborhood streets) shows Weingarten's blanket claim is, obviously, incorrect.
   
   
2. "Teachers do not clog areas such as lower Manhattan" with their personal vehicles.
   Not only are teachers' cars part of the Lower Manhattan traffic jam, in a city where 43 percent of elementary school kids are unhealthily obese, teachers and education officials have been known to clog school playgrounds with their personal vehicles. In one notorious case, Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum intervened to stop city employees from using the Tompkins Square Middle School's playground as a parking lot in 2004.
   
   
3. Parking permits are necessary to "attract the best and the brightest to teaching" in New York City.
   Really? I'm no education policy expert and I'm sure that some teachers really do need to use cars for work, but do the world's best and brightest come to live and work in New York City for the convenient parking?
   

I think Weingarten and the unions may find that they are fighting a costly and losing battle here. The public has little sympathy for the maintenance of a city employee parking system that is so blatantly abused. Few issues draw the ire of such a broad range of New York City civic groups as city government parking placard abuse.

A recent Independent Budget Office report found that cops, firefighters and teachers drive to work at double the rate of any other group of New York City workers. Why?

As DOT Deputy Commissioner Bruce Schaller told Streetsblog in the very first post we ever published, "Free parking has a tremendous impact on the decision whether to drive or take transit." Moreover, among teachers working in Manhattan, "nearly all of these auto commuters have transit alternatives," Schaller said. His 2006 study found that ninety-five percent of the government employees driving into Manhattan from Brooklyn and Staten Island live in neighborhoods where the majority of their neighbors use transit.

No one is proposing eliminating teachers' permits. Rather, there just needs to be a more centralized and rational system for distributing parking permits based on real need. And there needs to be real enforcement. Hopefully Weingarten and the unions will realize that they are better off pushing for a parking "cash-out" law like California's than fighting to maintain their oft-abused parking privilege.

To:
Mayor Michael Bloomberg
Deputy Mayor Edward Skyler

Cc:
Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott
Labor Commissioner James Hanley
Chancellor Joel Klein

Gentlemen:

It was deeply troubling to learn -- through media coverage -- of your plan to reduce by 20 percent the number of parking permits issued to all city employees.

On the numerous occasions we have raised the need for more parking for teachers, we have been repeatedly told that this is a collective bargaining issue. If increasing parking availability is a bargaining issue, then clearly, reduction is as well. Now you have apparently chosen, by fiat, to move forward a plan that would penalize the hardworking men and women who teach our city's kids.

Teachers in New York City public schools receive permits that enable them to park on a portion of their school block, during school hours only. Taking away these permits at a time when we're making strides to attract the best and the brightest to teaching (the NYC education workforce is the highest-qualified it's been since the fiscal crisis of the 1970s) makes absolutely no sense. Many city schools are difficult to reach by public transportation, many teachers travel between schools and available parking is clearly one incentive to attract teachers to high-needs schools.

Teachers do not clog areas such as lower Manhattan. Teachers are not abusers of parking permits, and to publicly suggest that they are is deeply troubling. Holding abusers of parking privileges accountable for their actions should not be done at the expense of teachers whose jobs are hard enough already.

I urge you to reconsider your position and would like to meet with you on this as soon as possible.

Randi Weingarten