N.Y. pressing for transport money
Rail tunnel, subway top list
ALBANY, N.Y. — If President Donald Trump needs help in picking projects for his $1.5 trillion infrastructure program, he needs only to look to his home state of New York, where the list of mega-projects needing billions of dollars has been piling up for years.
It’s unclear however just how much — if any — new money New York can expect for its two most pressing transportation needs. The beleaguered New York City subway system needs extensive upgrades and repairs following decades of underinvestment. And a longawaited Hudson River rail tunnel to New Jersey, critical for service throughout the Northeast Corridor, will require at least $13 billion.
Of the $1.5 trillion, Trump’s plan has relatively few new federal dollars — some $200 billion over 10 years. Cities and states that apply for grants could use the money for no more than 20 percent of cost of a project, using local taxes, fees, tolls or private investment to make up the rest.
“Every federal dollar should be leveraged by partnering with state and local governments and, where appropriate, tapping into private-sector investment,” Trump said during Wednesday’s State of the Union address.
While that might make sense for smaller projects, transportation experts and state officials say New York doesn’t have the resources to foot most of the bill for projects like the rail tunnel, known as Gateway, a decades-old proposal to relieve congestion and eliminate a chokepoint that is hurting the country’s entire eastern rail corridor.
The plan offers little help for the city’s subways either.
“I am, if anything, less optimistic,” said Nick Sifuentes, executive director of Tri-State Transportation Campaign, an organization that advocates for investments in transit in the New York region. “We should be very concerned that the federal government has said ‘we’re not interested in doing real infrastructure development.’ You would think a president from New York would understand the importance.”
The federal government typically provides 80 percent of the funding for capital expenditures on highways, with state and local governments coming up with the rest. On transit projects, the federal share typically ranges from 50 to 80 percent, according to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.
Under Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, New York has used public-private partnerships to spur big renovations at Kennedy and LaGuardia airports and at Penn Station. In some cases, private investors get the rights to develop commercial space in exchange for their investment.