Last month, Norman Buenaventura, a longtime yellow cab medallion owner-driver, stood before a packed public hearing and described the medallion debt that nearly drove him to take his own life. He was not there to protest. He was there to support the proposed medallion relief program (MRP+) rules and to ask the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) to go further: to let owners like him transfer their medallion, and the restructured loan guaranty attached to it, into an LLC or S corporation, and beyond family altogether. His wife, a postal worker for 28 years, is never going to drive his taxi. His kids are 18 and 16, headed for college, he hopes, not for a hack license. He appreciated the family transfer rules. They just don’t go far enough.
A second set of proposed rules stemmed from Executive Order 11, issued by Mayor Zohran Mamdani on January 14, 2026, which directed city agencies to review fees and penalties that hit small businesses. The TLC’s answer was to eliminate fees and fines that are duplicative or serve no purpose: the $25 fee to replace a lost driver’s license, the $50 fines tied to lost, stolen, or unreadable licenses, the $200 fine for late annual drug tests, and missed inspection fines of $100 to $500. The logic is straightforward. If a violation already triggers a license suspension, which stops a driver from earning, an additional fine punishes without changing anything. In the TLC’s own recent driver survey, roughly one in four drivers named fines and penalties as their biggest frustration on the job.
The TLC clearly considered these rules uncontroversial, and after the August hearing it expanded them further in drivers’ favor, widening eligible family transfers to siblings, grandparents, nieces, nephews, and first cousins, and allowing sole proprietors to move their medallion, with its MRP+ guaranty, into a corporate entity they fully own, a change with real tax benefits.
Medallion owners who were MRP+ participants and the New York Taxi Workers Alliance also requested amendments permitting the form of medallion ownership to be changed from individual to corporate ownership to reduce the owner’s tax burden. Upon careful review, TLC is in agreement with these changes, and will expand the definition of eligible family members and allow changes in the form of medallion ownership for participating owners, since these changes protect the population of small medallion owners for which the MRP+ program was created.
— Notice of Promulgation, NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission
Yet at last Thursday’s commission meeting, September 17th, even that failed, despite commissioners voting 4 to 1 in favor. Adopting TLC rules requires a majority of the Commission’s nine authorized seats, five votes, not merely a majority of commissioners in the room. Four yes votes fell one short. Here is the strangest part.
The lone dissenter, Board Commissioner Paul Bader, opened by asking whether the rules were being voted on together or separately, then, told it was a single vote, voted no while saying he expected the package would probably pass. It could not: with five present and five required, his no was fatal. A commissioner should know what he is voting on and what his vote does. But Bader said his expectation out loud, and no one corrected it. And Bader himself supported the medallion relief. Read that again. The medallion transfer rules failed with zero commissioners opposed to them, felled by a no from a man who expected them to pass.
How that happens is an insight into why drivers lose faith in government. When a man testifies about nearly ending his life, the agency agrees with half of what he asks, expands the rules in his favor, and even that half dies on arithmetic, no explanation of Charter vote thresholds will restore what that does to trust. And the arithmetic is about to matter far more. The TLC Board is likely heading into genuinely contentious rulemaking, autonomous vehicles (AVs) above all, where powerful interests will want rules blocked or changed in their favor.
On a Commission this thin, changing a rule still takes a majority. Blocking one requires reaching exactly one commissioner. Thursday showed everyone watching that the mechanism works.
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We Warned About This In April, And The Hard Votes Haven’t Even Arrived
This was not bad luck. When we wrote in April that the Mayor should fill the TLC Board, the concern was never the vacancies for their own sake. It was that a Board running this lean has no margin for error precisely when the most consequential rulemaking in over a decade is heading toward it:
With five commissioners and Chair Valdivia currently confirmed, the Board holds six of its nine authorized members. Under the NYC Charter, quorum requires a majority of members then in office — currently four. The Board can act. But it is running lean at precisely the moment when decisions on plate issuance, driver pay, autonomous vehicle (AV) regulation, and enforcement policy will define the character of the Mamdani TLC…Every vacancy left unfilled is a constraint on the Mayor’s agenda.
— AutoMarketplace (April 8, 2026)
On Thursday the constraint stopped being theoretical. With Board Commissioner Thomas Sorrentino, Brooklyn’s representative, absent from the meeting, the TLC Board had exactly five voting members in the room and needed all five. It got four.
Consider what that arithmetic means going forward. Adopting rules takes five of nine authorized seats no matter how many commissioners show up. With only six seated, the Board can absorb exactly one no vote, and only if attendance is perfect. Two absences defeat a rule that every commissioner present supports. One absence plus one dissent is what you just watched. Now run that math against the likely docket ahead, autonomous vehicle (AV) rules among the most consequential the agency has ever faced, alongside plate issuance, licensing, driver pay, and others.
Thursday’s package contained rules not a single commissioner opposed, and even those died. Genuinely controversial rules will have opponents, well-resourced ones. A short-handed Board is not just slow. It is an open invitation to anyone with an interest in the TLC not acting, and the interests circling the robotaxi question alone should make City Hall uncomfortable with that invitation staying open.
The companies with the most at stake in AV rulemaking run some of the most sophisticated lobbying and government-affairs operations in the country. They can count votes as well as anyone, and the current math tells them that stopping a rule they dislike requires persuading exactly one commissioner, not winning a public argument. Whether anyone ever acts on that invitation, the city’s job is to close it.
Influential driver advocates at the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA) were understandably upset with Commissioner Bader, whose no vote sank the package.
His position deserves to be stated accurately. Bader explicitly supported the taxi medallion (MRP+) transfer rules, calling the expansion a good idea. His objections were to the fine eliminations bundled with them. On the lost and stolen TLC driver license fees, he argued that maintaining a government-issued license is a personal responsibility, and paying to replace one is as it should be. On the drug test fine, his logic was that a driver who knows the test date and still misses it may have something to hide, so the fine should stay unless the TLC moves to random testing, in which case no fine would be needed at all. He also dismissed the package’s stakes as minimal next to what he called the real issues: bathroom access, app deactivations, rising insurance premiums, and how app fares are split with drivers.
Reasonable people can agree or disagree with Bader’s logic. But Bader’s vote only had the power to kill medallion relief because of two choices the TLC itself made.
First, it bundled uncontroversial medallion transfer rules with fine eliminations a known skeptic had publicly questioned, into a single up-or-down vote.
Second, leadership called that vote without counting it. Vote counting is politics 101, and this one was countable: with one commissioner absent, the Chair needed every hand in the room, and Bader had just spent several minutes on the record explaining his objections. Those objections should not have been news. Boards like the TLC's do not discover commissioners' positions live on the dais; items are briefed and votes are sounded out before public meetings, which is what makes the choice to proceed hard to explain. Either leadership knew Bader was a no and called the vote anyway, or it walked into a five-person room without knowing where its five votes stood. Neither reflects well, and both were fixable before the gavel.
Tabling the rules or simply holding them for the next meeting was available; nothing required the vote to be called that day. Whether the package could have been split and voted in parts on the spot is a question for the TLC’s lawyers, but a vote deferred is a vote that can be counted first. Immediately after the vote failed, Bader said that if a way could be found to deliver the medallion relief that same day, he would have no problem with it. No one had an answer for him. In fairness to Chair Midori Valdivia, the miss came at the end of a fast start. She noted the package came together in her first 113 working days on the job, real urgency by agency standards, and she closed by saying she was saddened that relief meant for over 2,000 families would not happen that day. The error was procedural, not one of substance or effort. It was also avoidable.
The deeper failure belongs to the Mayor and the City Council. Three of nine Board seats sit empty, and, as we reported in April, terms have also lapsed among the occupied ones. The Mamdani administration’s excuse that it inherited dysfunction can only last so long. It has had the ability to appoint commissioners since taking office, and a full Board would have made Thursday’s arithmetic irrelevant. It would also close the veto window before the votes that actually matter.
What Has To Happen Now
The fix is easy and the city should be judged on how fast it executes. The Board should reconvene quickly and pass an amended package, or at minimum split the driver fine and medallion relief rules so that one commissioner’s objection to a $25 fee cannot hold medallion transfers hostage.
Bader has already signaled he would vote yes on the medallion relief. And the Mayor and Council should fill the empty seats, because the next 4-to-1 failure is already loaded into the structure, and the rules it kills next time will not be ones everyone agrees on. Until then, the delay has a daily cost: owner-drivers who testified in August keep waiting, and the TLC continues assessing the very fines its own rule filing concluded serve no purpose, on some of the 180,000 actively licensed drivers Chair Valdivia herself cited as powering nearly one million trips a day. The Medallion Relief Program has restructured loans for more than 2,000 medallion owners, forgiving $472 million in debt to date. The people it was built for should not be waiting on vote math.
The meeting itself opened in mourning. Chair Valdivia called a moment of silence and spoke into the record the names of three yellow cab drivers found dead in their cabs over the past three months: Richard Coulibaly, Khalifa Siwa, and Jagjit Singh. We wrote about their deaths, and what they say about the state of driving a New York City yellow cab in 2026, in Three Cabs, No Driver.
It was not all bad news. Commissioners voted unanimously to extend the ATLAS pilot for a second year, through September 28, 2027. The program pairs Disability Opportunity Fund financing with a $30,000 Taxi Improvement Fund grant, bringing a roughly $81,000 wheelchair accessible Toyota Sienna down to $51,000 financed, with estimated payments of $686 a month. In its first year, per the TLC’s presentation, 353 medallion owners submitted interest forms, 42 loans were approved, 36 ATLAS accessible taxis reached the road and completed 55,984 trips, six owners paid off their loans entirely, and medallion ownership retention stands at 100%. The Board also approved four base license renewals, 5 to 0, including Dial 7 Car & Limousine Service.
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Food for thought…
Also available on YouTube ⬇️
TABLE OF CONTENTS
0:00 Cold open: "Relief for over 2,000 families will not happen today"
0:56 Call to order and commissioners present
1:40 Moment of silence for Richard Coulibaly, Khalifa Siwa, and Jagjit Singh
3:25 Chair's report: driver survey, Executive Order 11, and the relief package
6:12 Adoption of July 15, 2026 meeting minutes
6:27 ATLAS pilot program one-year report and presentation
13:26 TLC recommendation to extend ATLAS
19:31 Commissioner questions on ATLAS
23:06 Vote: ATLAS extended one year, unanimous
23:34 Proposed rules: Driver Relief Penalty Reduction and MRP
24:08 Commissioner Bader questions the single bundled vote
28:12 Bader's objections to the fine eliminations
35:02 The vote: 4 to 1 in favor, rules fail
35:21 Chair Valdivia and commissioners react
36:31 Base license applications approved 5 to 0
37:12 Meeting concludes
AutoMarketplace is New York City’s leading marketplace and intelligence platform for the taxi and for-hire vehicle (FHV) economy. Through our newsletter and podcast, we cover TLC insurance, taxi medallions, TLC plates, and trip activity across a market we estimate exceeds $16 billion, supported by our proprietary AIX, APX, and AYX indexes. We also track New York’s transition to autonomous vehicle (AV) networks.
Disclosure: We are also an operator and investor in this market.
