BEFORE the federal govern ment even thinks about spotting the MTA another dime for its calamitous Fulton Street Transit Center project, it should consider how the MTA bungled the vastly simpler South Ferry subway station.
“Dr.” Michael Horodniceanu, the MTA capital-projects president, just revealed that the $530 million South Ferry job, already behind schedule, will be delayed for at least another month. (MTA flacks grant him that Einstein-evoking “Dr.,” but the degree is a transportation-planning PhD from Polytechnic University.)
The MTA’s hundreds of engineers and lawyers apparently failed to read a federal disability-law requirement that the gap between the platform edge and trains not exceed three inches, so now the agency must scramble to stretch the platform.
The project is also late because it’s taken longer than expected to test the new station’s mechanical systems. “It took us a little by surprise,” The New York Times reports Horodniceanu telling MTA board members.
The screwups are especially damaging to the MTA because 80 percent of the money from the project came from the feds. You’d think that, after sucking all that dough out of the US government, the agency would take care to read its benefactor’s rulebook.
But while the MTA can be embarrassed, it can’t be shamed. The state-controlled agency – apparently beyond the ability of Gov. Paterson or his two most recent predecessors to control – will stop at nothing to milk every cent it can out of taxpayers.
It burned through about half of $850 million in federal bucks for the Fulton Street Transit Center before halting work last winter. Horodniceanu’s hapless predecessor, Mysore Nagajara, hit a brick wall when he discovered that the remaining funds weren’t remotely enough to build the “Grand Central of Downtown,” with its planned glass-and-steel, domed roof.
The agency suddenly announced that the Fulton job, which was also supposed to include elaborate underground improvements, would cost more than $1.2 billion.
By then, the MTA had already evicted scores of stores and businesses, reduced most of a Broadway blockfront and a nearby corner to pits like Ground Zero and made conditions for the sprawling station’s hundreds of thousands of daily riders immeasurably worse.
After that, the MTA promised time and again that it would soon come up with an alternative plan for the site. Eventually it stopped doing even that – and last month, The Post’s Tom Topousis revealed why.
Writing on Dec. 25, he reported that the MTA hopes to scam even more money for the Fulton fiasco from the Obama administration, which has pledged up to $700 billion in federal aid for public- works projects nationwide.
The Fulton scheme is one of several for which the MTA hopes to suck up to $1.5 billion more out of Congress. An MTA flack told The Post its various boondoggles were “longterm investments” and “shovel-ready.”
Sen. Chuck Schumer enabled the pipedream, echoing, “These projects are shovel-ready and can be up and running once this money comes through.”
But before giving the MTA more public money to waste, the new president and Congress should drop by the Fulton Street site and see what a travesty it is.
Not only does it look like the aftermath of another terrorist attack – the MTA hasn’t got a clue how to proceed, with or without more money.
The $400 million it has spent so far has bought nothing except a giant hole and a useless underground pedestrian tunnel to the new PATH terminal at Ground Zero – a link that can’t possibly open for at least five years.
And despite MTA lies about “progress” being made, it hasn’t even bid out a contract to rebuild and simplify the Fulton station’s “labyrinth” of platforms and passageways – which the agency originally touted as the main justification for the project.
Why should Washington trust the MTA with more money for so grandiose a project – when a few blocks south, it neglected so basic a rule as to measure the inches between the platform and the track?