Bill De Blasio To Meet With Trump In Washington

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Mayor Bill de Blasio will meet with President Donald Trump Wednesday evening for the first time since Trump took office. De Blasio, a Democrat, is among more than 100 mayors scheduled to discuss infrastructure funding with Trump in Washington, D.C., during the U.S. Conference of Mayors winter gathering, according to City Hall and the White House.

UPDATE: Mayor Bill de Blasio abruptly pulled out of the meeting Wednesday afternoon, citing the U.S. Department of Justice's new actions against sanctuary cities. Read more here.

Original story continues below.

The mayor will urge Trump and federal officials to “provide adequate resources (to) help rebuild New York’s aging infrastructure,” mayoral spokeswoman Freddi Goldstein said in an email.

He’ll specifically advocate for two local projects, Goldstein said: the Gateway train tunnel underneath the Hudson River, and renovations to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

The Trump administration in December scrapped plans to fund half of the Gateway Tunnel, a multibillion-dollar project to replace a critical artery connecting New Jersey to Penn Station, Crain's New York Business reported. New Jersey and New York had agreed to fund the other half.

The tunnel supports $50 billion worth of economic activity throughout the Northeast, Goldstein said.

De Blasio expressed surprise earlier this month that Trump would back out of the project, given his election-year pledge for a $1 trillion infrastructure package. Reports from Washington suggest the latest plan is around $200 billion, Goldstein said.

"Here’s a chance to make a smart long-term investment that will keep this whole metropolitan area strong," de Blasio told the radio host John Catsimatidis on Jan. 7. "I’m shocked that a guy who says he’s interested in infrastructure investment like Trump would get cold feet."

De Blasio's last meeting with the Republican president was on Nov. 16, 2016, just eight days after Trump was elected. Since then de Blasio has called himself a "leading anti-Trump voice" and cast the president — himself a New Yorker — as an enemy to the city's diversity, culture and economic livelihood.

De Blasio's only other reported communication with Trump came on Nov. 1 of last year, when the president praised the city's response to a terrorist attack on the Hudson River Greenway the day before.

Infrastructure is one area of Trump's stated agenda that Democrats have said they'd support. But at a U.S. Conference of Mayors gathering last summer, de Blasio "floated the idea of cities refusing any infrastructure money as an act of resistance" to the president, Politico Magazine reported in a Dec. 26 profile of the mayor.

(Lead image: Mayor Bill de Blasio speaks outside Trump Tower on Nov. 16, 2016 after his first meeting with then-President-Elect Donald Trump. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)