Penn Station Subway Fixes To Get MTA Vote After Dispute

NEW YORK, NY — The second time could be the charm. The MTA Board will decide Thursday whether to pay nearly $213 million to renovate eight subway stations — including two adjacent to Manhattan's bustling Penn Station — after a dispute last month over how the stations were picked for fixes.

The stations are among more than 30 slated for upgrades under the Gov. Andrew Cuomo's Enhanced Station Initiative, or ESI. The program, reportedly worth $1 billion, includes structural repairs and cosmetic fixes, such as new stairs, floors, countdown clocks and lighting.

One contract up for the board's approval would pay Judlau Contracting $124.9 million to upgrade the 34th Street-Penn Station stops on the A/C/E and 1/2/3 lines, along with three others on the F and 6 lines in Manhattan. The other nearly $88 million pact with the Citnalta-Forte Joint Venture would cover two B/D stations in the Bronx and a 2/3 stop in Harlem.

A vote on the contracts was postponed last month after Mayor Bill de Blasio's appointees questioned why city officials didn't get a say in which stations the initiative included, and why the projects lacked elevators to make the stations accessible for disabled riders. Andy Byford, the new president of New York City Transit, also wanted more time to review the plans in his first weeks on the job.

Byford had answers Tuesday — and kind words for the station initiative.

He told the board's New York City Transit Committee that MTA officials picked stations based on a 2012 survey of each stop's construction needs. The selected stations have a high number of parts that aren't in a "state of good repair" compared to the systemwide average, Byford said.

The projects lack elevators because installing them would have doubled the program's cost, Byford said. Three selected stations already have elevators and the others are near other stops with them, he said.

"You do need to look at the whole program, because initially I was perplexed as to why elevators wouldn’t be included but I now understand that they are, via different means, via different programs," Byford said Tuesday. "And in any case, these ESI packages contained a lot of state-of-good-repair work that could not be ignored any longer."

Some 118 subway stations are accessible and another 25 have accessibility upgrades in progress, Byford told the committee. The MTA's capital plan includes $950 million for accessibility upgrades and $300 million for fixes at five stations picked by the city that will likely make those stations accessible, he said. Byford plans to commission a study of how much it would cost to make every station accessible.

Two of de Blasio's board appointees praised Byford for explaining how the Enhanced Station Initiative was planned. But one of them, city Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg, said there should be a study of how much it would cost to get the entire system in a "state of good repair" so board members could see how badly each station needs fixes. The board should also have access to the MTA's 2012 station survey, she said.

"It’s not that we don’t think everything should be fixed. It’s just that there isn’t money to fix everything at once," Trottenberg said.

Danny Pearlstein, a spokesman for the transit advocacy group Riders Alliance, said the station initiative reflects misplaced priorities. The money would be better spent on modernizing the subways' "ancient" signals and aging trains, he said.

"We need to focus our resources and our energy on maintaining and improving core service so that we can reliably get to work on time," Pearlstein said.

The MTA Board will meet at 10 a.m. Thursday. You can watch the meeting here.

(Lead image: The 34th Street-Penn Station stop on the 1/2/3 line is pictured in Manhattan. Photo by Maria Cormack Pitts/Patch)