NYC-WTC_000230575

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

Mayor: This would not be good and this is a terrible time of the year for this. The kids need the help before vacation so that they can continue their studies. Lot’s of companies depend on this for the bulk of their profits. They call the Friday after Thanksgiving “Black Friday” not because it’s Friday but because the companies go into the black from the red. And if they don’t make the money they don’t keep people working. This would devastate particularly a lot of people who are at the lower struggling levels starting up the economic ladder. They’re the ones who really get hurt.

Gambling: Years ago, a couple of years ago, you and I talked about the buses in Queen, speaking of the MT A. That deal is supposedly done but it seems to be very different from the way you and I first talked about it.

Mayor: No, no, no.

Gambling: The costs?

Mayor: I don’t know. I’d have to go back and see. The issues are we had to negotiate with each of the companies.

Gambling: It took a long time.

Mayor: There were- some of the owners did not want to sell and so whether they really didn’t or they just wanted to negotiate...

Gambling: Hold the City up?

Mayor: I would phrase politely ‘Negotiate the best deal for themselves.’ John that’s a private company. They have a right to do that and Mark Page who did the negotiations for the city did a masterful job. He’s got the patience of Job. There are a number of different unions involved and there are politics as well as making sure they continue with their benefits and when you have different unions and different schedules and promotion policies, blending that all together is never easy. There are some employees that are not unionized and these companies who went to court and there’s one judge who kept issuing injunction after injunction stopping this. Fortunately every time in the appeals court the appeals said- threw it all out instantly, but that slowed it down. There are some things that weren’t quite so simple. For example, we have to take over or buy the terminals as well as the lines because you have to have a place to store the buses and to dispatch them and for the workers to show up- the drivers and the mechanics- and that sort of thing. And we can take those over but some of these yards were being used by other companies. For example a company that has buses to serve the school system. And so where were they going to go until they found a place? So there’s lots of dominos. What was fascinating to me was at the very beginning when I called in a bunch of elected officials to tell them that we were finally going to do this and this would provide much better service for the riding public- and the MT A remember was created to provide public transportation, they didn’t do it in this case, now we’re going to do it. There will be modern buses and buses that were interchangeable with other places so we can have reliability and all that- a lot of

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