The Second Avenue Subway’s East Harlem extension project will keep chugging away despite the Trump administration’s pause on federal funding for the project — but MTA officials warned they will soon need the money restored in order to award the next contract in the undertaking.
MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber, during the agency’s monthly board meeting on Wednesday, insisted that work on Phase 2 of the Second Avenue Subway, which will extend the Q line from 96th to 125th Street, is not in imminent danger of being derailed by Trump’s funding freeze.
“This project is moving forward,” Lieber told the MTA board.
Lieber apparently made the comments to assure board members that the undertaking is on steadier ground than the Gateway Tunnel project, which officials overseeing that effort warned will halt construction by next Friday without the restoration of funding.
“Everybody’s aware of the drama around Gateway,” he continued. “They’re in a different cash flow situation than we are, so they are literally running out of money in the next week with the still unexplained stoppage from Washington.”
Officials, including U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, warned on Tuesday that if the $12 billion the Trump administration is withholding from Gateway is not released by Feb. 6, work on that project will come to a grinding stop — and could be permanently killed.
However, MTA Construction and Development head Jamie Torres-Springer said that while work will continue on the Second Avenue Subway, the project will hit roadblocks in the near future if the federal funding remains frozen.
Specifically, he said the MTA will not be able to award its next contract in the effort, to excavate a new station at 106th Street, if the money is not restored within the next couple of months.
“We need a restoration of certainty from the federal government in order to do that,” Torres-Springer said of awarding the contract. “Predictability of funding is what’s key to keeping a big capital program like this afloat. We’re doing everything we can. We need predictability of funding.”
Torres-Springer’s comments appeared to confirm reporting from the news site Streetsblog that the MTA cannot award the station excavation contract if the federal funding is not reinstated by March.
The Trump administration froze $6 billion in Second Avenue Subway funding at the start of the last government shutdown in October. Trump officials said it would withhold the money pending a review to ensure contractors on the project complied with newly changed rules around minority-and-women-owned businesses.
On Wednesday, Lieber said the MTA has answered the feds’ questions about its Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) program and shown how it will come into alignment with the new rules.
“We have started the process of recertifying all of these minority-and-women-owned companies, so that they can participate in this revised and changed version of the DBE program,” Lieber said. “There’s no reason for the Second Avenue Subway funding to be stopped…Why would you want to create delays and additional costs and schedule problems by slowing it down?”
