J.Lho exits
MTA boss: Gig was part-time
Joe Lhota resigned as MTA chairman Friday — some 18 months after taking the gig despite a fulltime job elsewhere and a handful of board positions.
Fernando Ferrer, the transit agency’s vice chairman, was named acting chair effective immediately.
Gov. Cuomo coaxed Lhota, who had run the MTA from 2012 to 2013, back into the role in the summer of 2017 amid a crisis of repeated subway breakdowns. But he agreed to do the job only on a parttime basis while remaining chief of staff at NYU Langone Medical Center.
Lhota said in a statement Friday that he accepted the job for the “sole purpose of halting the decline of service and stabilizing the system for my fellow New Yorkers.
“When I agreed to return to the MTA, it was with the understanding that I would maintain my private-sector positions and delegate day-to-day responsibility to a new team,” he added.
Lhota hit the ground running in 2017, imple- menting a wide-reaching $836 million action plan to stem delays that included ripping out seats to fit more riders, buying massive vacuum trains to suck trash from the tracks and adding more EMTs to more quickly deal with sick passengers.
The plan has had marginal success. On Friday, the MTA immediately followed up notice of Lhota’s resignation with the latest subway data, showing that weekday on-time performance increased to 70 percent for the first time since August 2015.
Lhota’s departure came as a surprise to many. He played coy just last month when asked if he planned to leave his post.
“My term ends on June 10, 2021,” he told reporters.