Mayor Bill de Blasio went straight to Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie's office after he arrived in Albany on Tuesday afternoon.

Heastie has been the mayor's most consistent ally in the state capitol. And now, the speaker has corralled the votes in his chamber to pass the congestion pricing plan that the mayor supports.

"Number one thing is to get a vote off for April 1. This is the decisive moment," de Blasio said at a news conference. "We get a package done April 1, we ensure the long-term future of our subways and buses. If we fail to meet that April 1 deadline, I'm very worried about what happens thereafter."

But there are still many details to be worked out on congestion pricing, which would charge motorists a fee to drive into Manhattan below 61st Street.

(The proposed congestion pricing zone that the governor and mayor unveiled last month).

Lawmakers want to see carve outs and exemptions and they have different ideas about who should qualify for those discounts.

"'Carve out this bridge, carve out this bridge, carve out my bridge' is what it comes down to. 'Carve out the bridge my constituents use,' say the Assembly and the senators. Yeah, but you carve this out, carve that out, it's a smaller pie," Gov. Andrew Cuomo said on WNYC's The Brian Lehrer Show.

Congestion pricing failed in the legislature 10 years ago, but things are different this time around. The poor state of the city's subways has prompted lawmakers to take action, including those who represent districts that are likely to be hardest hit if the fee passes.

"We've never had the stars align like this," the mayor said. "The urgency being felt by everyday New Yorker is intense. The way this is at the center of the public debate, I don't remember anything quite like this before."

 

Even with congestion pricing, the governor acknowledges it will not be enough to fully fund the MTA Capital Plan. They need other sources of revenue, so the state is considering a pied-a-terre tax. But that is proving much more complicated than lawmakers realized.

In a separate development later in the day, the mayor reached a deal with members of the Black and Latino Caucus in the Assembly to get a three-year extension of mayoral control of New York City public schools in exchange for specific commitments for more parental involvement.

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