Earlier today I blogged about New York’s Workers’ Compensation Board and its link to the dysfunctional legislature that is Albany. Now I get an email from the Working Families Party about the MTA fare hikes which said the following.

I’m sure you’ve heard that the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) voted last week to raise fares by at least 25% on New York City subways, buses, Metro North and the Long Island Railroad.

They took this step because our state legislators in Albany failed to pass an alternative that would solve the MTA’s budget crisis without these painful fare increases.

So due to inaction in Albany, New Yorker’s are going to feel the pain? The WFP have started an online action (shout out to DIA!) to get people to contact their legislators to get them to propose a better solution than the one the MTA is about to impose. What’s also cool is a parallel action where they’ve created a clever poster that they want people to download and post all over the place. They then want you to take pictures and email them to clenchner@votewfp.org. Lastly, there’s the Facebook component where they’ve created a graphic that they are asking people to post on their wall or make it their profile picture. Now I may not be living in New York anymore (I’m in DC metro) but I still care about what goes on there! This fare hike is going to hurt millions!

Back in 2004 I remember all the hullabaloo about the Brennan Center report calling Albany the most dysfunctional legislature in the nation. This dysfunction is like a disease which has infected almost every aspect of government down to New York’s Workers’ Compensation Board.

From Consumer Reports:

The New York Times starts a new series today examining the challenges faced by injured workers in New York State, as they deal with the vast bureaucracy that is the state’s Workers’ Compensation Board. According to the paper, which spent 18 months investigating the issue, the $5.5 billion agency is a “subbasement of the legal world,” that “struggles to treat workers with due speed, protect employers from fraud or mute tensions in the workplace.”

When you click over to the NY Times article there is a paragraph that clearly links the dysfunction of the legislature to the other parts of New York’s government.

Though its commissioners largely function as a legal tribunal, most are not lawyers but relatives or allies of politicians, appointed usually without regard to experience in the field.

Is this “heckuva job Brownie” at the state level we’re witnessing? Now I know for a fact that there are some good Republicans and Democrats in Albany but clearly there aren’t enough good government types there to change things yet.