Higher Cost, More Delays for LIRR Station

Higher Cost, More Delays for LIRR Station
East Side Access Project, Now Years Behind Schedule, Could Stretch to 2021

 

By

Ted Mann

Updated Jan. 24, 2014 8:40 a.m. ET

 

The price tag for a vast new train station being built for the Long Island Rail Road beneath Midtown Manhattan could top $10 billion and its completion date could stretch into the next decade, officials said.

 

Officials from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will present a new timeline for the project, known as East Side Access, to members of the MTA board on Monday, and now believe trains might not run into the station until 2021 or beyond. Others within the authority said the project cost might not reach $10 billion, and noted that the higher estimates build in the risks of future delays. The timeline for completion also could be shortened, one official said.

 

The MTA's most recent cost estimate was $8.2 billion.

 

Amid the disappointment with the latest delays, the project executive overseeing East Side Access is departing, according to a person familiar with the matter. Alan Paskoff, a senior vice president at the MTA's Capital Construction division, will leave the agency in April, according to this person. Mr. Paskoff couldn't be reached for comment.

 

The project, which was approved with the backing of state and federal officials including former Sen. Alfonse D'Amato and then-Gov. George Pataki and launched in 2001, is the largest and most technically complex of the MTA's so-called megaprojects, which include the first phase of the Second Avenue subway and the extension of the No. 7 line to the far West Side. The project would eventually allow the LIRR to send trains from its main line tracks in Queens through the unused lower level of a subway tunnel into Manhattan at East 63rd Street. From there, trains would proceed through newly bored tunnels to a new subterranean station in a pair of caverns carved out of the bedrock more than 100 feet beneath Park Avenue, north of the Grand Central Terminal building.

 

MTA officials and the project's backers say the project could shave as many as 40 minutes off the daily round-trip commute for 80,000 LIRR riders who now take the train from Long Island to Penn Station, then commute back to the East Side of Manhattan.

 

The project has been plagued by delays and cost overruns. In 2006, when a federal grant agreement was completed, the MTA said it could run LIRR trains into the station by December 2013. The date slipped to 2016 by 2010, when Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff wrote to a U.S. senator that progress had been "grim."

 

The new completion estimate has its roots in November 2012, when officials at the MTA's Capital Construction division rejected the bids for a major contract to build the "Manhattan Structures"—construction in the station caverns and related facilities and systems. The bids had come in some $365 million over the MTA's budget for that phase of work. Rather than accept the bids, MTA officials said, the authority rejected them and broke the Manhattan Structures contract into smaller segments, some of which are still being advertised for bids. An MTA spokesman declined to comment, saying the authority would first present its construction timeline and new cost range to board members.

 

East Side Access has long divided some engineers and external critics from the MTA and its supporters in government, who have said it will ease commuting times and could free up space at Penn Station that could then be used by the MTA's other railroad, Metro-North.

But critics have warned that the project's complexity, and the depth of the station when it is completed, make it impractical and wasteful given the other funding needs at the MTA.