Fair Fares: City Council to hear from Mamdani admin on bill to automatically enroll lowest-income New Yorkers in transit discount program

The City Council is going all-in on expanding a municipal program providing subsidized subway, bus, and paratransit trips to the lowest-income New Yorkers — known as Fair Fares.

On the heels of pitching a major expansion of the program in their budget proposal last month, Democratic Council leaders are holding a May 6 hearing on legislation that would require the city to develop an automatic enrollment system for Fair Fares and other city-created benefits programs — a key ask of advocates pushing for the program’s expansion.

The proceeding will be jointly hosted by the Council’s Committees on General Welfare and Transportation. Council members will hear testimony from officials with Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration and the MTA as well as advocates and fiscal watchdog groups.

It marks the first time the council will ever hold a hearing on the program, which launched in 2019 and has been growing incrementally since.

Council Transportation Committee Chair Shaun Abreu (D-Manhattan) said the central goal of the hearing will be learning more about whether and how the city can implement automatic enrollment.

“There’s some aspects of the automatic enrollment legislation that we want to uncover and figure out,” Abreu said in an interview with amNewYork. “[Like] whether the administration could make this work. We believe they should be able to.”

As it currently stands, those eligible for the program — anyone between ages 18 and 64 earning at or below 150% of the federal poverty level annually — must proactively enroll in it. That process requires applicants to submit documentation of their identity, age, residency, and taxable household income.

Proponents of the change say those bureaucratic hurdles have led to only 30% to 40% of those who qualify actually being enrolled in the program — about 370,000 of the 1.4 million New Yorkers eligible.

The bill, sponsored by Council Member Crystal Hudson (D-Brooklyn), would require the city Department of Social Services (DSS) and Human Resources Administration (HRA) to create an automatic enrollment mechanism by using information that qualified individuals already submitted for other city-administered public benefits programs, such as Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid.

“The fastest way to get more New Yorkers enrolled in Fair Fares is to enroll them automatically,” Hudson said in a statement to amNewYork. “The same people we help connect to housing or food stamps are those who are eligible for Fair Fares. We should be using the same documents New Yorkers submit to verify identity, income, and residency when applying for other programs to enroll them in Fair Fares automatically and only require them to agree to join the program.”

Hudson, along with 27 of the council’s 51 members, sent a letter to DSS Commissioner Erin Dalton last week urging the administration to implement automatic enrollment.

The council has also proposed expanding Fair Fares through the city budget process by making it free for everyone who is currently eligible. That means the council will seek to implement two of three central goals that advocates have for expansion, with the other being a move to begin offering half-fares to those earning between 150% and 300% of the federal poverty level.

Abreu said he expects Wednesday’s hearing to focus mostly on the enrollment legislation, with the council saving discussion of its budget ask for its next round of hearings on Mamdani’s yet-to-be-released Executive Budget proposal.

Mamdani did not include a Fair Fares expansion in his Preliminary Budget proposal released in February. He has avoided addressing the push to expand the program, instead redirecting attention to his proposal to make all city buses free, which looks unlikely to happen this year.

Riders Alliance Director of Policy and Communications Danny Pearlstein, however, said he thinks the council’s budget demands related to Fair Fares will also be part of the discussion. Regardless, he characterized the hearing as a major step in the right direction.

“HRA will be testifying about the program in-depth for the first time, and that in itself is a milestone,” he said. “We obviously want transparency from them about administering the program and how it succeeds for New Yorkers.”