MTA: Cuomo's L Train Fix Is Saving Money, Trust Us

One year ago, when Governor Andrew Cuomo said that he and his band of experts had found a new way to repair the L train tunnels without a full 15-month shutdown, he assured the public that the project would cost less too. "Less time, less work, equals less money,” Cuomo told a group of stunned reporters. “But I am a monster to negotiate with.”

Last week during his state of the state address, Cuomo triumphantly announced that the L train rehabilitation would cost $850 million, roughly $75 million less than the initial $926 million budget.

The governor’s number was even lower than the $870 million figure the MTA’s Chief Development Officer, Janno Lieber, relayed to state lawmakers in November.

But the MTA has yet to release any public accounting for these cost savings. You can’t find a breakdown of the L train project on the MTA’s “Mega Projects” website, but you can find one for Penn Station Access, which has a significantly smaller budget than the L train rehab.

"Saving $75 million would be good news if they can save that much, but that would be a big departure from their past history managing major projects,” said Rachael Fauss, a senior policy analyst at the good government group Reinvent Albany. “It would be easier to trust the governor and MTA's numbers if we could see the data for ourselves."

Instead of demolishing and fully rebuilding the bench wall inside the L train tunnel that was severely damaged during Superstorm Sandy, a process that would require a full shutdown of L service between Brooklyn and Manhattan for 15 months, the governor's new plan called for reinforcing the crumbling sections with a fiber polymer, then racking the power and communication cables once enclosed inside the wall along the sides of the tunnel. While that work was ongoing, stations in Brooklyn and Manhattan would be rehabilitated and given accessibility improvements.

This past September, Cuomo announced that the entire project would be finished in April, a year after it began and three months ahead of schedule.

Caitlin Girouard, the governor’s press secretary, referred us to the MTA.

Lieber said that the figure Cuomo announced during the state of the state is “consistent with where the project is trending."

“I won’t know exactly until all the accounting works through. But that’s my projection of where we’re going to finish – right around 850,” Lieber said.

“The most important thing of all, is all this has happened while we manage to maintain regular service for 300,000 people,” he added.

In theory, the MTA Board is supposed to have oversight over the agency’s spending, and when Cuomo announced the change of plans last year, the MTA’s leadership promised the board an independent review of Cuomo’s proposal.

“Nothing will be done in the dark of night, nothing will be done behind closed doors. Everything will be done out in the open,” Freddy Ferrer, then the acting MTA Chairman, told the board in March.

No review happened, and the MTA’s leadership insisted that they wouldn’t even need the board’s approval to make any changes to the agency’s $477 million contract with Judlau Contracting Inc. that was supposed to cover the vital tunnel repairs and was made before Cuomo announced the change in plans. (The Federal Transit Administration said that it is paying for $298 million of L train repairs related to damage from Sandy, though the FTA pegs the total cost of Sandy-related L train work at $592 million. The MTA couldn’t say how they calculated that figure.)

The MTA board didn’t vote on the new plan because it was told the contract wouldn’t cost more than the original one. While the board did receive change orders to contracts on a quarterly basis, those stopped being reported in June. Changes to state law last year allowed the MTA to approve contracts under $1 million without board approval.

"Staff promised to keep the MTA Board apprised of all amendments to the L train contract, yet quarterly change orders reports were quietly removed from Board materials last June,” Fauss said. “The MTA shouldn't be in the business of eliminating transparency, but increasing it."

MTA board member Andrew Albert, who represents riders on the board, and is also on Capital Program Oversight Committee (CPOC), said the MTA hasn’t given the board a budget breakdown of the costs for the L train project.

“I’d like to see greater detail, I’d like to know how much is allocated for power, for ADA, for electrical, how much for signals, how much for fixing actual wall damage from Sandy, new trackage,” Albert said. “It’d be great to have a breakdown of all of these things.”

“What is not clear from any of the documents or anything I’ve been told is what the lifespan of this tunnel will be now that it wasn’t rebuilt the way the other East River tunnels have been rebuilt,” he continued. “I know the original plan would’ve lasted 75 to 100 years. If this only lasts 10 to 15 years, how many times do we want to put commuters through this?”

Robert Linn, one of the newest board members appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, said he’s been concerned that as a board member and also member of CPOC, he doesn’t get enough information from the MTA.

"I've raised the concern in a number of meetings of not being sufficiently caught up to speed in a number of areas, for instance, the cost of the 500 police officers or specifics of fare evasion reductions or specifics of capital projects,” Linn said.

(Lieber, who’s in charge of capital projects, countered that he briefed board members on the L train project multiple times. “I think we've been pretty transparent with the board,” he said.)

Prodded by Cuomo, who accused the MTA of embodying “bureaucracy culture on steroids,” and who recently installed his budget director to the MTA board, the agency hired a Chief Transformation Officer to reorganize the entire organization, and is laying off 2,700 managers in an effort to shave costs. The goal is to prove to the public that the $51.5 billion dollars projected to pour into the MTA from congestion pricing next year is money well spent. The MTA has already begun awarding contracts for the signal upgrades on the A/C/E lines.

“When the legislature took the step to institute congestion pricing, to charge New Yorkers more money and raise revenue, we took that step under the guise that the MTA would become a model mass transit agency,” State Assemblyman Robert Carroll said. “And I think [CEO] Pat Foye and Janno Lieber have done good work to that end, and that's a continuous process, and it must include transparency.”

Danny Pearlstein, the policy and communications director for the Riders Alliance, said that as part of transforming the MTA, the governor should “shed light on opaque processes in an agency that has struggled to finish projects on-time and on-budget."

“On the one hand, it's good not to upend hundreds of thousands of commutes,” Pearlstein said, referring to Cuomo’s L train solution. “But we should know how cost-effective his big decision was, and whether it will cost more or save money, now and in the long-term as our infrastructure ages.”