Sources: Gov. Hochul expected to announce new congestion pricing plan Thursday

The plan would bring the toll price down from $15 to $9, a $1,500 yearly savings for commuters driving into New York City five days a week.

News 12 Staff and Greg Thompson

Nov 13, 2024, 9:43 PM

Updated 23 days ago

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Sources tell News 12 the Gov. Kathy Hochul will announce a new plan for congestion pricing on Thursday.
The original plan would have charged cars going below 60th Street in Manhattan a $15 toll before being paused in June - just weeks before it was slated to go into effect.
Sources say the new plan will only charge cars $9, but Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman says any charge is still "bad for nurses, any kind of first responder who has to go to lower Manhattan."
Farmingdale-based On Time Trucking, which sends around 20 trucks into Manhattan each day, also says this could be bad news, since someone will have to pay for those tolls.
The company's assistant terminal manager Tracey Kubik says that likely what will happen is "we pass it along to our customer, they can pass it along to their customer, and the end result, the woman who's buying diapers at the diaper store is going to pay for those charges."
Still the MTA and its advocates say they need the money to raise $15 billion to fix and upgrade infrastructure.
In fact, some say the $9 charge may not be enough.
Lisa Daglian, the executive director of the Permanant Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA, told News 12 "nine is better than none, I think it's a start, we'll probably hear about ways that money will increase over time."
Republicans have vowed to fight congestion pricing.
Back in May, now President-elect Donald Trump wrote on social media that he would "terminate" it his first week in office, and Wednesday, Long Island's congressional Republicans wrote him a letter asking him to follow through.
Members of the state GOP are also speaking out, with Sen. Steve Rhoads saying even at a decreased rate, "any amount is too much, and the reality is that they don't have to do that if they were willing to make the difficult choices that they need to make."