Bay Ridge’s freshman Rep. Mike McMahon backed the nearly $800-billion federal stimulus package on Friday — he’s a Democrat, after all — and promptly called The Brooklyn Paper buzzing about his first truly historic vote.
“It felt good,” the former City Councilman said via phone from Washington. “It’s a very good package considering it had to be negotiated in two houses of Congress and across party lines.”
No Republicans voted for the bill, officially HR 1, and McMahon had an explanation.
“The tax cuts in this bill are not for the rich, but for the middle class,” he said. “The stimulus invests in schools, highway and road construction and, most important, mass transit. The vision here, for the first time, is to have the federal government invest in mass transit, as it should.”
McMahon, who succeeded scandal-tarred Rep. Vito Fossella to become the first Democrat to hold the Staten Island-Brooklyn seat in decades, said the transit funding bore some of his fingerprints.
“It was my amendment that added $3 billion for transit to the original House package, which brought it up to $10 billion,” he said. “The Senate scaled it back to $8 billion, but there’s still $1.2 billion that will be coming to New York.”
McMahon said his priority for that money would be renovating B and M line stations in Bensonhurst, a plan nixed by the MTA last year — and not funnel the money to Bruce Ratner to jumpstart the stalled Atlantic Yards project.
“The priority is fixing train stations and getting ferry service from Bay Ridge to Manhattan,” he said. “I do not see Atlantic Yards as a priority for the money from this package.”
