'Shut up!' from one lawmaker to another disrupts budget hearing

And Hochul has chosen a running mate, she said Tuesday.

Good afternoon — It’s Tuesday and Missing Persons Day.

In today’s CapCon:

• The transportation budget hearing is usually a snoozefest, but a lawmaker shouting at another to “shut up” woke everyone up Tuesday.

• MTA Chair Janno Lieber told lawmakers the agency is having complications with its plan to transition its fleet of buses to electric.

• Public transit agencies are seeking more money this year than what Hochul has proposed and are asking lawmakers for a new revenue stream.

• Some of Hochul’s top budget proposals got good scores from voters in a new poll from the Siena Research Institute Tuesday.

• Here’s what’s happening at the state Capitol Wednesday, Feb. 4.

• A new bill seeks to prohibit utility companies from excluding legal fees, fines and penalties from rate hike requests.

Names in today’s CapCon: Janno Lieber, Kathy Hochul, Mario Mattera, J. Gary Pretlow, Marie Therese Dominguez, Miguel Velázquez, Brian Cunningham, Glenn Liebman, MaryJane Shimsky, Chuck Lavine

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MTA Chair Janno Lieber in Albany on Tuesday (Will Waldton/Times Union)

🛣️ Pretlow tells Mattera to “shut up” in heated budget hearing exchange

The state budget hearing on transportation typically isn’t very exciting. It’s largely centered around infrastructure funding.

This year’s hearing was no exception. Janno Lieber, chair of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, was the first to testify before the state Legislature and made little news.

Lieber had two requests for lawmakers. The first was for them to support Gov. Kathy Hochul’s tort reform proposals to change how damages are calculated after automobile crashes.

Hochul wants to limit damages for people who are found to have engaged in unlawful behavior at the time of the crash. She also wants to limit damages for the party that’s found to be “mostly” at fault for causing the collision.

The MTA has a stake in those claims because of its fleet of thousands of buses that, despite their best efforts, are regularly involved in accidents.

Lieber said he also wants help from lawmakers to pressure New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to improve stormwater management.

“On every big storm, and they are getting more frequent, torrential rainfall overwhelms the city’s sewer system capacity and backs up into severe flooding and stoppages in our subway system,” Lieber said.

The only other nugget of news that caught my ears related to the MTA’s procurement of electric buses. The agency is supposed to have an all-electric fleet of buses by 2040.

That’s many years away but, given the number of buses in the agency’s fleet, replacing all that run on gas will take time because of their cost. It would be an enormous expense to purchase thousands of electric buses in a single year.

But Lieber said that effort is now moving slower than anticipated because of the agency’s initial experience with electric buses.

“The electric buses, about 60 altogether that we’ve received so far, have been underperforming in terms of breakdown frequency and we are slowing down the acquisition of the electric buses until that is resolved,” Lieber said.

“The electric buses are not moving quickly enough in terms of how well they’re functioning, especially in an urban environment,” he said.

Sens. George Borrello, Liz Krueger and Mario Mattera Tuesday (Will Waldron/Times Union)

But there was one moment of Lieber’s testimony that stood out. He got into an all-out shouting match with state Sen. Mario Mattera, a Republican from Long Island, over a $35 million contract the agency holds with a Pennsylvania-based company.