DEALMAKER: Contractor Santo Petrocelli has pleaded guilty to making payoffs for city work. (Paul Martinka)
This train still hasn’t left the station.
More than a decade after the MTA pledged to transform the subway data network, the equipment is still busted and the multimillion-dollar price tag is growing.
The $530 million boondoggle has skyrocketed from the original estimate of $324 million, according to a Post analysis of transit budget documents, and it will take another pile of cash for it to go fully live — if it ever does.
In 2000, the MTA announced it would revolutionize the subway’s information grid, with a new fiber-optic network, security cameras, more PA systems, digital train-arrival boards, and a centralized way to monitor trains.
And while riders were hit with four fare increases in the decade since, and two troubled firms made millions on the project’s contracts, the Synchronized Optical Network (SONET) has continued to stall.
“No one looked at the bigger picture,” said one transit source. “There should have been a comprehensive planning effort.”
The first $112 million contract was awarded to a consortium between the German engineering giant Siemens and a partnership of E.A. Technologies of Long Island and Petrocelli Electric of Queens.
Problems quickly mounted, including:
* Servers fried in underground storage rooms, where temperatures can climb to 120 degrees.
* Ten-year-old fiber-optic cables couldn’t hold up under the strain of the new network.
* The server cabinets in many stations would suddenly start rolling, and server batteries died or exploded.
Meanwhile, the subcontractors were dealing with heavy legal baggage.
In 2006, the engineering brain behind E.A. Technologies, Charles Boyce, became increasingly concerned that the company’s co-owner, Edward Willner, could not “adequately perform” work he solicited from the MTA, according to a suit he filed in Manhattan Supreme Court in 2009.
Willner used an undisclosed amount of company money to pay for his $134,100 home in Wading River, NY, another pad in the Ritz Carlton Residences in Florida, and international travel and car trips for him and his wife, the suit alleges. He is also accused of making undisclosed loans to himself and propping up the company with his own checkbook.
Meanwhile, the head of Petrocelli Electric, Santo Petrocelli Sr., 75, pleaded guilty to paying off a corrupt union official for city lighting contracts in 2009.
The MTA said the first phase of SONET was accepted last year and it is running “as intended.” Transit officials have said they are closely watching money spent on SONET and addressing problems with the contractors as they come up.