Subway Station Fixes On Hold Amid Mayor's Rift With Cuomo

NEW YORK, NY — The Metropolitan Transportation Authority Board on Wednesday postponed spending nearly $213 million to renovate eight subway stations — including two bustling stops at Penn Station — after Mayor Bill de Blasio's board members objected to the projects.

The board voted to table two contracts for the work to give Andy Byford, the new president of New York City Transit, more time to review them. They'll go back on the agenda for the February board meeting.

The contracts would have funded makeovers at seven stations in Manhattan and the Bronx as part of the MTA's Enhanced Station Initiative, a plan to revamp 32 stations with structural repairs and cosmetic fixes, such as new stairs, floors and countdown clocks. This round of stations includes two of the city's busiest stops at 34th Street-Penn Station on the A/C/E and 1/2/3 lines.

De Blasio's appointees to the MTA Board wanted to block the contracts, which require approval from two thirds of the board members. The MTA — controlled by de Blasio's nemesis, Gov. Andrew Cuomo — picked stations that aren't in dire need of repairs and failed to include elevators in the plans, which would improve accessibility for disabled straphangers, they argued.

"Especially given the back-and-forth between the city and the MTA management over the last few days, I think what should be clear from the city’s perspective is how important it is ... that the city be consulted on these initiatives," said board member Carl Weisbrod, a de Blasio appointee.

City Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg, another mayoral appointee to the board, offered a list of 25 stations that struggle most with overcrowding or need repairs most desperately. The Enhanced Station Initiative includes only two of them. New York Daily News reporter Dan Rivoli posted Trottenberg's list to Twitter.

Trottenberg has also criticized the MTA for not consulting city officials on what stations the initiative should target.

"The city covers nearly 70 percent of the MTA’s costs — city residents, city drivers, city subway riders," she told reporters on a conference call Tuesday afternoon. "We had no input into that plan."

Board members Andrew Saul and Andrew Ward questioned the wisdom of giving one of the contracts, worth nearly $125 million, to Judlau Contracting. The MTA reportedly pulled a separate contract with the company because it was running far behind on repairs at the Cortlandt Street 1 station.

The Enhanced Station Initiative is among $2.5 billion worth of station repairs in the MTA's 2015-2019 Capital Program, MTA Chairman Joe Lhota said.

The initiative aims to test new "design guidelines" that could be implemented across the subway system to make stations easier for customers to navigate, Lhota said. That wouldn't make sense for the most crowded and run-down stations, he said.

"We have to shut down a station to do what we need to do here for six months," Lhota, a Cuomo appointee, told reporters after Wednesday's board meeting. "We also want to make sure that the new guidelines, as we developed them, work."

But the pair of 34th Street stops targeted for renovations were the subway system's fifth- and sixth-busiest stations in 2016. They saw more than 53 million riders combined that year, according to MTA statistics.

In his own conference call with reporters Tuesday, Lhota said it's "both disingenuous and just completely false" for the city to assert it had no input on the Enhanced Station Initiative. The city's representative on the four-member Capital Program Review Board could have voted down the projects because they were part of the MTA capital plan, he said.

Saul, of Westchester County, bemoaned the delay in starting the renovations.

"All one has to do is go down and look at some of the stations. They’re really an embarrassment to the riding public," he said.

(Lead image: An E train pulls into the 34th Street-Penn Station stop on the Eighth Avenue line. Photo by Mark Osborne/Patch)