The Governor is a brain-damaged moron. Governor Andrew Cuomo liked to fool around with cars as a kid in the days of leaded gasoline, and he seems to have ended up with pretty severe brain damage.
He has no chance of winning higher office. None whatsoever. He's made a *lot* of enemies by being so unbelievably stupid. (If you want one of the gorier stories, ask any local elected official in upstate NY about "Medicaid transportation funding".) Because he's an idiot, he's probably going to try to run for higher office anyway.
Is it safe to say that you aren't a fan of the Governor? ^_^
Yeah. Not since the Medicaid transportation funding business.
Brief summary:
-- In NY, due to stupid political deals made 50 years ago, the counties pay for a large portion of Medicaid out of the county budget (property tax / sales tax funded). They also have to administer Medicaid. (No other state does this.)
-- This is something like 25%-50% of the average county budget, and very little of it is under the control of the county legislators, who resent this situation to start with.
-- Medicaid has a transportation budget, which is to make sure that Medicaid patients can get to their medical appointments.
-- For decades, the upstate counties have used a portion of the Medicaid transportation budget to fund their local bus services. Medicaid patients ride free to appointments, everyone else can buy a ticket and come along. This has covered the majority of Medicaid transportation needs, with only a few patients so remote or disabled as to need special door-to-door service.
-- Cuomo, as a unilateral executive action, decreed that all counties must now use the Medicaid transportation budget strictly for taxis, and strictly through a dispatcher which he chose at the state level.
-- Many of these counties do not even HAVE taxi services, and for those that do, the taxi services often do not participate with Cuomo's dispatcher.
-- The Medicaid patients are now waiting for hours for unreliable taxi services driving in from two counties away, and are
missing their appointments.
-- The taxi drivers don't want to do it and are not showing up on time (or at all).
-- The cost of the taxis is far, far more than the cost of the bus services, blowing a huge hole in the county budgets and forcing them to
raise property taxes (and remember, these are poor rural counties)
-- The Medicaid transportation funding was providing the majority of funding for the bus systems in most of these counties, and with it removed,
the bus services have to be cancelled entirely. (There's only so much property tax raising the counties can do.) So people without cars can't get to work.
Lose-lose-lose. This sort of gross stupidity benefits nobody. It's alienated every member of every county legislature upstate, Republican, Democratic, or Independent, while raising property taxes and eliminating bus service and making transportation for Medicaid patients much worse. For the benefit of nobody, except possibly Cuomo's dispatching company.
Cuomo has been petitioned by the county governments repeatedly but he's refused to rescind his diktat.
I can therefore objectively say that it is a
fact that Cuomo is an idiot. It's not just an opinion, it's a fact. Only an idiot would do
this.
The complete destruction of the upstate rural bus systems seems to be complete now. The result is that the only surviving bus systems are in the more urban areas where they were not reliant on the Medicaid transportation funding. This is creating a desparate population of people trying to move out of the bus-free counties into the borders of the counties which still have buses. (For example, Ithaca still has buses, but they all terminate at the Tompkins County border. Tioga County now runs, IIRC, *one bus service total*, and that one bus takes people from Tioga County to Ithaca, since that's the most important flow of commuters. Cortland County still has more than one bus line, with one bus line connecting to Tompkins County.)
Of course there is the question "What does this mean for Amtrak?". In general I tend to think the destruction of public transportation services hurts Amtrak. But it is possible that the resulting depopulation of the rural counties, with people moving into the borders served by the Syracuse/Rochester/Buffalo bus systems, will actually mean more Amtrak riders.
