Corrupt Transit Official Gets Promotion, Pay Raise

More than half a dozen officials running the nation’s largest public transportation agency remain on the job years after falsifying thousands of safety reports and one derelict supervisor actually got a big promotion and hefty pay raise.

The public employees all work for New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), one of the world’s largest with an annual ridership of about 1.6 billion. The system’s fleet of 6,380 subway cars travel 345 million miles annually along 660 miles of tracks that lead to 468 subway stations throughout the city. The bus fleet has 4,600 vehicles and an annual ridership of 726 million.

Over the weekend a local newspaper reported that for years New York transit supervisors falsified vital signal inspections across the sprawling subway system, leaving straphangers at risk for deadly collisions. Managers forced signal maintainers in every line to lie about inspections by threatening to punish them with loss of lucrative overtime pay.

As a result, signal maintainers routinely entered false inspections into their logbooks, which were used by managers to write reports. In cases where lower-level workers refused to issue a phony report, managers would simply do it themselves. The information was obtained from the MTA’s inspector general, which conducted a six-month investigation.

Incredibly, one of the managers heavily involved in the scandal got a promotion and pay raise while six other supervisors remain on the job, according to a separate story published this week by the same newspaper. The manager got bumped to general superintendant with an annual salary of $125,000. He even got an $11,360 raise last year and is responsible for overseeing several Manhattan lines.