Ex-MTA Chair Hid Real Reason For His Departure, Letter Shows

NEW YORK — The Metropolitan Transportation Authority's former boss concealed the real reason he left the agency late last year, a newly disclosed letter shows.

In his Nov. 8 resignation letter to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, ex-MTA Chairman Joe Lhota said he was stepping down because of potential conflicts of interest posed by his lucrative outside jobs. That contradicts his and the Democratic governor's claims that the two-time transit chief was leaving his short-term gig after rescuing the subway system.

In the letter, published Tuesday by Politico New York, Lhota revealed that the state's Joint Commission on Public Ethics told him his outside work was "legally incompatible with (his) obligations under the state's Public Officers Law," and that merely recusing himself "could not adequately cure or mitigate any potential conflicts in a way that would satisfy the standard set forth in the law."

"Accordingly, I am stepping down as chairman effective immediately," Lhota wrote, before congratulating Cuomo on his re-election to a third term.

The explanations Lhota and Cuomo gave for the boss's departure belied the reasons in the letter.

In a Nov. 9 statement, Lhota said he had returned to the MTA in June 2017 solely to stabilize the beleaguered subway system. He suggested he had achieved that goal through the success of his $836 million Subway Action Plan, which he said had "successfully arrested the subway's decline."

Cuomo made a similar claim in a radio interview two days later, indicating that Lhota's second stint at the helm of the MTA would be brief.

"The original understanding was he would just help out for a period and then do his substantial work that he's doing in the private sector," Cuomo said, according to a transcript of the interview.

Lhota's resignation followed mounting scrutiny of his work on the board of directors for the Madison Square Garden Company — which owns the arena atop Penn Station, a major MTA hub — and his high-ranking job at NYU Langone Health, for which he was reportedly paid more than $2 million in 2017.

Lhota had conviced the Joint Commission on Public Ethics, the state's ethics watchdog, that he was not a formal "employee" of the MTA and was thus exempt from approval of his NYU Langone work and restrictions on lobbying. He also pledged to recuse himself from MTA matters involving NYU Langone and vice versa.

It's unclear when the commission changed its position and indicated to Lhota that he would have to step down because of his potential conflicts of interest. Neither Lhota nor a spokesperson for Cuomo immediately responded to requests for comment on Wednesday.

But a source familiar with the commission's deliberations told Politico that the body could not determine "how (Lhota) could operate and set up an effective set of recusals while leading the MTA and serving in that capacity at MSG."

Lhota recused himself from all issues related to Madison Square Garden, said Maxwell Young, the MTA's chief external affairs officer. The transit authority will continue to consult the ethics commission about "recusals, conflicts and related issues," he said.

"Chairman Lhota stepped in to take the helm of the MTA in a time of crisis, architected the Subway Action Plan which stabilized the entire system and helped bring it back from the brink – and he worked at no cost to taxpayers," Young said in a statement.

Good-government advocates stood by their longstanding concerns about Lhota's outside work.

"New Yorkers are simply tired of politicians who are playing games with the MTA, and not recognizing the need to put the interests of all New Yorkers first and foremost," Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, said in a statement.