Money for something

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Money for something
Residents stuck in decaying, crime-ridden projects that the New York City Housing Authority says it can’t afford to fix up or keep safe, take note:

Gov. Cuomo, Mayor de Blasio and Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. have just come into one hell of a pile of money.

Straphangers who require functioning buses, trains, tracks and signals to get them to and from work on a daily basis, the windfall could benefit you, too.

A whopping $4.4 billion is heading New York’s way thanks to aggressive efforts by Vance and his predecessor as DA, Robert Morgenthau, in bringing the French bank BNP Paribas to justice for doing business with Iran, Syria and other rogue regimes in flagrant violation of U.S. sanctions.

In a record-setting plea deal Monday with the DA’s office and state and federal authorities, the bank agreed to pay $8.8 billion in penalties — $4.4 billion of which is New York’s share.

Of that amount, $3.5 billion will go to state coffers, $447 million to city accounts and $448.7 million to the Manhattan DA’s office.

Cuomo, de Blasio and Vance must devote this massive, one-time cash infusion to making long-term investments in infrastructure rather than pouring it into pet programs for which there will be no funding when the money runs out.

In that vein, fiscal watchdog E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center for Public Policy floats a suggestion for the state’s share: He would allocate $1.15 billion each to the capital plans of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the state Transportation Department. Both are desperately short of money.

“Funding improvements to the roads, bridges and transit systems that all of us depend on . . . will clearly yield the greatest lasting benefits for all New Yorkers,” says McMahon.

In the city, Vance is appropriately focused on using his office’s share to fight crime and boost safety, including in city housing projects. Great idea. This could be the time to finally install the security cameras that NYCHA’s management has been promising but failing to deliver. De Blasio could reverse the deterioration of some NYCHA apartment buildings.

There are any number of good and creative ways that Cuomo, de Blasio and Vance could put the BNP proceeds to productive use — so long as they have concrete improvements to show for the money when it’s gone.