(The following story by Erik Holm and Joshua Robin appeared on Newsday?s website on December 10.)
NEW YORK — Eight years before its planned completion, the price tag for bringing Long Island Rail Road riders to Grand Central Terminal has increased by $1 billion to $6.3 billion, a top Metropolitan Transportation Authority official said Wednesday.
But the timetable for the project remains the same, for now: riders coming from Long Island can expect to sail straight to Grand Central in 2011, said Mysore Nagaraja, president of MTA Capital Construction.
“Estimating is an art, not a science,” he said after an MTA meeting in Manhattan Wednesday. He said an earlier estimate of $5.3 billion, from June of last year, was a “conceptual estimate” based on “optimistic assumptions.” Underestimated costs for steel and excavation are possible factors, along with unexpected insurance costs, MTA officials said.
But the earlier $5.3-billion cost, as projected by a private firm hired by the MTA, was an increase over the initial $4.3-billion estimate done by the federal Army Corps of Engineers in 1998. Still, Nagaraja said the $6.3-billion price was “not ballooning, and I can stay with that number” until the project is complete in 2011.
But Mitchell Pally, vice president for government affairs for the Long Island Association, a business group that wholeheartedly backs the project, said there is more potential for delay. “If any additional funding is necessary, it makes it more difficult to complete it at the date originally envisioned,” he said.
The proposed Grand Central stop, called the East Side Access project, is designed to be more convenient for Long Islanders commuting to the East Side of Manhattan. Currently, such passengers take the train to Penn Station and then backtrack via the subway. Roughly 100,000 take the train to Penn Station each weekday.
Gene Russianoff, staff attorney for the Straphangers Campaign, a transit riders group, said he was concerned that increasing costs for the East Side Access project could siphon funds from a planned subway line running up Manhattan’s Second Avenue.
That line is expected to serve 345,000 people daily, at a cost of $3.6 billion, and would relieve overcrowding on the Lexington Avenue line that serves Grand Central — the very line users of the new terminus would flock to each day. “In my view of the world, these two projects are inextricably linked,” Russianoff said. “We support both … but both face an uphill battle.”
He said powerful Democrats in Albany would need to work to make sure the subway gets funding for the Second Avenue line, because Gov. George Pataki, a Republican, was more inclined to favor the needs of his natural constituency of suburban voters.
Nagaraja said Wednesday that earlier estimates for construction costs on the East Side Access project did not include $100 million in insurance to help shield the MTA against unexpected costs of cleanup for hazardous materials at an Amtrak yard in Sunnyside. The yard is where the 3-1/2-mile tunnel to Grand Central would begin.
Tom Kelly, an MTA spokesman, offered that some of the additional cost also might include the increasing price of steel and a more accurate estimate of the cost of excavating the tunnel.
The MTA has said it expects the federal government to supply funds to cover half the cost of the project. Representatives have scheduled a trip today to Washington to discuss the project. Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford) said Wednesday the federal government will “have to work a little harder to come up with the money,” but said the project “is as worthwhile now, if not more so, than when it started.”
King secured $75 million in federal funds last month for the project in the omnibus appropriations bill that is still awaiting Senate and presidential approval. Earlier, Congress allocated $82 million for the project. That leaves about $6 billion left to be funded.