Comrie’s Penn plan death sentence

State Sen. Leroy Comrie chairs the committee on Corporations, Authorities and Commissions, but Friday he was coroner, declaring “dead” the Cuomo/Hochul plan to fund New York’s share of the MTA’s $7 billion Penn Station rehab and Amtrak’s wholly unneeded $11 billion Penn annex by relying on money from the construction of 10 large towers — towers that developer Steve Roth’s Vornado will not be erecting.

Actually, Comrie was doing the medical examiner’s job without a physician license because New York City doesn’t have a coroner, but his lifelessness verdict was the same during his oversight hearing in calling to start over without wasting more time: “I hope that we can convince the governor and her team to do this tomorrow and throw this plan out because everyone knows that it’s not going anywhere.” We hope so too. Hochul should dump the terrible plan she inherited from Cuomo.

What has no hope is the Cuomo/Hochul scheme and the state Empire State Development Corp. was a no-show for the hearing, despite having been invited to appear. The agency submitted two pages of mushy written testimony. But even the skilled Comrie would have found it difficult to elicit answers from two sheets of paper. In fact, there are no answers because they have no plan without Roth and Vornado, which have mothballed their blueprints.

ESD is busy trying to finalize a very bad Buffalo stadium deal (which still hasn’t closed). The difference is that while local yokels up there want that boondoggle, everyone here is opposed to the Penn nonsense and the guy who was supposed to fund it has packed it in.

While the MTA has done their best to upgrade their half of Penn, the half used by NJTransit and Amtrak remains a pit with too-short tracks and low ceilings. Comrie said that Penn must be fixed, such as making all 21 tracks long enough to accommodate 12-car trains and stated during the hearing he had seen other plans. What are those other plans? They have to be better than the corpse Hochul now has.