MTA boss Elliot Sander announced yesterday that a half-billion dollars from President Obama’s stimulus packages could soon be available for the Fulton Street subway reconstruction project.
Oh, joy.
That should make all the difference.
Starting in 2005, the MTA knocked down an entire city block of Downtown. The plan: a grand Lower Manhattan transit hub, with well-laid-out connections to 12 different subway lines and a spectacular above-ground pavilion – all for a cool $900 million.
As always with such things, costs began soaring – and the pavilion was the first casualty.
Today, the site is a wind-swept, trash-littered vacant lot whose only difference from Ground Zero is that al Qaeda had nothing to do with creating it.
Shockingly, the MTA managed to burn through some $573 million getting to that point – with virtually nothing for straphangers in return.
On top of that, Sander yesterday disclosed yet another $200 million in new costs – bringing the tab to a mind-numbing $1.4 billion.
Not to worry, says Sander. If all goes well, some $497 million in stimulus funding will be available to pay for a nifty glass top for the project.
“People have been worried that we were going to leave a hole in the ground or construct a simple subway entrance instead of the iconic structure that the community was expecting,” he said.
Gee, why would anyone think that?
No reason to suspect that the stimulus dough will be wasted, either – right?
We have a better idea.
Sander should take the cash, pour it into the hole in the ground, pave the whole thing over and be done with it.
Downtown doesn’t need four or five more years of disruption while the MTA bumbles its way to the stripped-down, scaled-back, ruinously expensive “transit hub” that everybody knows is inevitable anyway.
Enough, Mr. Sander.