Governor-elect Spitzer’s pick to run the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will push to complete construction of a Second Avenue subway in Manhattan and the East Side Access project that will connect the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Station.

Elliot “Lee” Sander said he wouldn’t rule out a fare hike in 2008, saying, “It would be irresponsible to take that option off of the table, but it is the option of last resort.”

He said he will place a priority on technological advances that would allow such things as cell phone use in subway stations and signs in the stations telling riders when the next train is coming.

And he called privatizing the subway lines “unrealistic for the MTA to consider right now.”

In an interview with The New York Sun, Mr. Spitzer’s pick to take over as CEO and executive director of the MTA said he would also emphasize rebuilding relationships with leaders of the transit union, which went on strike last year. One of his first challenges will be to avert a strike of Metro-North employees.

Mr. Sander, an experienced public administrator who has served both Republican and Democratic elected officials, turned around the city’s office of rent administration in the mid-1990s, as well as the Department of Transportation’s Manhattan parking division in the 1980s.

“The clear issues I’ve had to deal with in the past were poor morale and general organizational structures that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. There’s some of that here,” he said.

Mr. Sander, one of a series of high-level appointments made in recent days by Mr. Spitzer, has served on every city and state transportation agency, with the exception of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. He served as a transportation consultant to Mayor Giuliani, and worked in the MTA’s surface transit division between 1983 and 1988. He currently heads the Rudin Center for Transportation & Policy Management at New York University.

“Lee Sander has a few decades of transportation planning and management experience,” the chairman of the transportation committee of the City Council, John Liu, said. Mr. Liu called the MTA’s current chairman, Peter Kalikow, a big political contributor who came to the post lacking experience on transportation issues.

“Lee brings groups together to find common ground, which is not easy,” the staff attorney for the Straphangers Campaign, Gene Russianoff, said.

Mr. Sander said he would step down a vice president of DMJM Harris, a transportation and infrastructure company that is a partner in the Second Avenue subway construction project. He said he saw no conflict between his job at the company and his new role in setting public transportation policy.

“I’m leaving one job to take another job,” Mr. Sander said. “I will be severing all financial ties with DMJM Harris, and I’m likely to recuse myself with any dealings with DMJM Harris.”

Mr. Sander says he plans on logging between 12- and 14-hour days at MTA headquarters, unlike Mr. Kalikow, who comes to the offices infrequently. He will continue to commute to work on the Long Island Rail Road from his home in Douglaston, L.I., but says that he has no strong opinion on the potential ban on drinking alcohol on the commuter railroads. He calls himself an avid aviator and a sometimes cyclist, who possesses a “fairly robust schedule as it is,” he said yesterday. “But I will inevitably be taking it up a notch when I take over.” While Mr. Kalikow does not accept a salary for his position, Mr. Sander will. “I will be a full-time employee, and I’m not independently wealthy,” he said.

Mr. Spitzer, who vowed to conduct a nationwide talent search to recruit the best and the brightest to his administration, has turned to loyalists to fill other key jobs, tapping several attorneys who worked him in the attorney general’s office. Mr. Spitzer is nominating Eric Dinallo as insurance superintendent, the regulator of all of insurance business in the state.

Before joining the private sector as managing director of regulatory affairs at Morgan Stanley, Mr. Dinallo was chief of the attorney general office’s investment protection bureau, where he creatively used the 1920s-era Martin Act as an investigative weapon against companies like Merrill Lynch. Joining Mr. Dinallo in state government will be his wife, Priscilla Almodovar, a former campaign aide to Mr. Spitzer who is being recommended for appointments as president and CEO of the New York State Housing Finance Agency, which issues billions of dollars in tax-exempt bonds to build low-income housing. The agency, which also in charge of approving Liberty Bond projects for rebuilding Lower Manhattan, has come under scrutiny for steering grants to developers who are major Republican contributors.

Mr. Spitzer also picked two people to run the Empire State Development Corporation: Patrick Foye, president and CEO of United Way of Long Island, and Avi Schick, who was a deputy attorney general under Mr. Spitzer and the lead the lawyer in the Richard Grasso compensation package case. Unofficially, Mr. Schick, who attended rabbinical school and graduated from Columbia Law School, has been Mr. Spitzer’s liaison to the Orthodox Jewish community and has championed education tax credits as a legally viable alternative to private school vouchers.

Mr. Spitzer’s policy director will be Peter Pope, a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School who ran the attorney general’s criminal division and defended the office’s record on recovering stolen Medicaid funds when the issue was threatening to become a campaign liability for Mr. Spitzer. Mr. Spitzer is making Martin Mack his deputy secretary for intergovernmental affairs. Mr. Mack, a former mayor of the upstate city of Cortland and cochairman of the state Democratic Party, oversaw the attorney general’s 11 regional offices.

The governor-elect is recommending for appointment Anthony Shorris, a $3,000-a-month policy adviser to the Spitzer campaign, as executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Mr. Shorris, who was New York City’s deputy schools chancellor from 2001 to 2003, resigned from the job after the Daily News reported that he was also a paid consultant to the Local 1199 health care union.