The firestorm over congestion price is once again a demonstration of how warped politics and policy has become.

Let’s break out the issue in pieces. Most pro-toll advocates are tying this to MTA funding. Right off the bat, that’s disingenuous, and it follows a familiar template in our politics of using a bad reason to leverage a preferred outcome.

Funding and the environmental benefits, if any, should stand on their own merits. If they have any.

Why? Because using the toll income to fund a mismanaged and corrupted dung heap like the MTA is an ethical and fiscal non-starter. As it is, the MTA’s debt stack is larger than that of the State of New Jersey’s, and they didn’t get there overnight. As with Long Island, stochastic inertia lets problems fester to the point where curing them requires massive upheavals in policy. And that, of course, brings public blowback, so nothing gets better. Had there been more prudence and oversight over the past few decades, the MTA wouldn’t be where it is now. Hats off to that fireball of a state “comptroller” who duly noted this every five years or so.

Furthermore, after assessing this plan, does anyone doubt that congestion pricing wouldn’t be this draconian if the MTA hadn’t been left to obliterate itself? Like letting the cost of building one mile of subway track exceed $1 billion?

The irony is the MTA will be forced to resort to more bonding now that toll income is off the table, at least for the time being. I don’t give out investing advice, but keep in mind the MTA is forbidden from declaring Chapter 9, so do with that piece of information what you will. Who cares if the rating agencies downgrade them?

Now congestion pricing might be a solution, if an imperfect one, for Midtown’s traffic and pollution problems. However, I believe that commercial vehicles should not be taxed one penny. The other problem here, recently created, is that there’s a lot of office space going begging in the very area the city wants to toll. It would seem we’re working at cross purposes here, and that’s something that shouldn’t be dismissed.

With the typical lack of self-awareness that defines Long Island, the town supervisors of Islip and Babylon wrote a guest editorial in Newsday to say that their residents can’t afford the extra tolls. First, it takes 90 minutes to get to Midtown from Islip on a GOOD day during rush hour. Imagine wasting this much of your life in a soul-crushing existence riding your brakes for 90 minutes every morning five days a week, and then doing the same thing on the way home.

Maybe rethink your choices? Like taking an Uber to a train station? Furthermore, I find it odd how these town residents can afford an 8.625% sales tax, their school taxes, county taxes, and the existing tunnel tolls, but this new one is a burden? Doesn’t make sense to me.

The irony of these complaints from these two supervisors, aside from the phony “concern” over their constituents’ pocketbooks, is how this plays into the housing issue. These folks blocked every opportunity to build near a transit point, or simply add supply, and Nassau County obliged them further by bricking the addition of any new dwellings that are in closer proximity to Midtown, which could help people who now live way out in Suffolk.

Whoops.

And, of course, with the typical smug entitlement of the Long Island office holder, exporting your own “nuys and twaffic” to other municipalities, while restricting it in your home turf is a sacred right.

For that reason alone, I would double the toll.

Lastly, the yanking of this thing at the last second by Gov. Hochul has probably torched her political career. You need to stay the course in this business, or people are going to look at you differently.

I don’t have a dog in the hunt on this matter, but I did take the LIRR for 20 years into Midtown, and I think if you drive in, especially from Suffolk, you’re crazy.

But if you’re going to make a policy judgment, it pays to take the pieces apart, forget the shrill advocacy, and look at what you’re trying to accomplish. The current rationales aren’t so clear cut.

Donald Davret

Morristown