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Not Unlike The L Train, MTA Capital Plan Is Delayed (Again)
By
Emma Whitford
Published Dec 17, 2015
Modified Dec 17, 2015
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Nell Casey/Gothamist
By
Emma Whitford
Published Dec 17, 2015
Modified Dec 17, 2015
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When Governor Cuomo suddenly decided to help fund the MTA's $26.1 billion capital plan in July—after largely ignoring the MTA's budget needs throughout the last legislative session—it was not immediately clear where his grand, Mayor de Blasio-belittling $8.3 billion gesture would come from.
Questioning abated, though, when Cuomo, de Blasio and the MTA triumphantly announced their funding agreement on October 10th. "Today, with agreement on the largest Capital Program ever committed to the future of the MTA, we take a giant step toward making sure that this one-of-a-kind jewel of a system will continue doing what it must," MTA Chairman Thomas Prendergast said with feeling.
That blind (short-sighted?) joy didn't last long. Within weeks the MTA had announced that $1 billion in funding would be cut from the second phase of the ever-elusive Second Avenue Subway line, in large part because the agency feared that the freshly-funded plan wouldn't go far enough. This did not go over well with Mayor de Blasio, who had just agreed to contribute $2.5 billion to make the plan reality.
Tunnel boring for Phase II, which will serve 96th through 125th Streets, is now projected to start no sooner than 2019—a timeline that East Harlem residents are not pleased about.
Upstate legislators, meanwhile, soon balked at the prospect of sending so many billions downstate—unfamiliar with what it means to live and work along an extremely crowded and breakdown-prone public transit network, Republican Senators Thomas O'Mara and Phil Palmesano demanded more funding for roads and bridges in the Finger Lakes Region.
"If Governor Cuomo and legislative leaders are going to find billions of dollars for downstate mass transit in next year’s state budget, we want to make sure that local roads, bridges and culverts across the Southern Tier and Finger Lakes regions, and throughout the state, receive a fair share of state assistance," they said in a joint statement.
Even though the state's transit board has approved the Capital Plan, AM New York reports that the MTA has yet to submit it to the state's Capital Program Review Board, which will make final approvals.
"In the normal process of bringing a Capital Program to the review board, they have a number of questions about its content and issues," MTA Chairman Thomas Prendergast told reporters after yesterday's board meeting. "Probably even more so this time given the size of the program. Second Avenue is a concern, and there's the issue that the legislation is concerned about funding for bridges and tunnels... those are issues we're sorting through."
While the "sorting" continues, ambitious East Side Access and Penn Station Access projects remain a pipe dream, the L train is still threatening our jobs, and this pocket of upstate secessionists is not a joke.
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Emma Whitford
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