Frontrunner Yang keeps focus on fixing city’s infrastructure

Andrew Yang presented himself as a Mr. Fix-It mayoral candidate on Monday, promising to fast-track the completion of a vital water tunnel and to safeguard the city’s decaying water infrastructure.

“We have to invest: This is, to me, the highest function of government,” Yang said in an industrial stretch of Maspeth, Queens, where a graffitied-over water shaft holds the promise of the city’s third water tunnel. Developing that tunnel is an unfinished project first authorized more than a half-century ago.

Work on the tunnel is almost complete, but its final phase slowed to a drip during Mayor de Blasio’s administration. Yang (photo) promised he would ensure its swift realization, saying that it’s “unacceptable” the tunnel isn’t already complete.

“You cannot have a city that has a crumbling infrastructure and say, ‘We’re being responsible stewards and passing it to our kids,’ ” Yang said in the shadow of the Long Island Rail Road.

“So I pledge to be responsible about our infrastructure.”

He said he would introduce a dashboard allowing citizens to track the city’s infrastructure projects.

Yang acknowledged that the campaign stop, which was interrupted at one point by the blast of a power tool, centered around a “decidedly unsexy” topic.

But even as his competitors seize on eye-catching issues like fighting gun violence and flooding classrooms with teachers, Yang’s campaign has fixed its focus on infrastructure in recent weeks.

The onetime presidential candidate leads polls in the Democratic primary that’s expected to determine the city’s next mayor.

And he appears to be betting that voters are hungry for the city to work.

As part of his hard-hat appeal, he visited a battery storage facility in Williamsburg to tout his clean-energy vision, dropped into Forest Park to pitch a plan for a High-Line-style walking path and schlepped out to the Rockaways to speak about solar energy.