Thaw Gateway Funding Now

by Jim Mathews / President & CEO

As of this writing, we are days away from making one of the biggest infrastructure blunders in the history of the United States, and that’s no exaggeration.

On Tuesday, the Gateway Development Corp. announced that construction on the Hudson Tunnel Project will “pause” on Feb. 6th if the disbursement of previously committed Federal funding isn't restored.

That money has been frozen since October. This is despite the fact that the Federal government has already signed contracts for the work -- you know, legally binding documents saying you promise to do something and that you could find yourself before a court if you break your promise. And that Congress has already authorized and appropriated that money. And also that the Northeast Corridor powers 20 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. And that construction will generate 95,000 jobs and $19.6 billion in economic activity. And the reality that when the North River Tunnel repair inevitably occurs, if we haven't built the new tubes taking that tunnel out of service it will lop off $16 billion in annual U.S. GDP and cut Amtrak service between New York and Washington, D.C., in half.

And, and, and...

Back in October, DOT said it was suspending funding to the project as part of a broader review of the GDC’s Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) Program. Congress first enacted the DBE in 1983. It has been largely uncontroversial during the life of the program, with successive Congresses reauthorizing it in each and every subsequent surface and aviation authorization spanning the entire 42 years since it was first put into law. DOT says its review is based on an interim final rule that bars race- and sex-based contracting requirements from Federal grants...even though the rule wasn’t even published until two days after DOT said it was suspending the New York projects.

Blaming “Chuck Schumer and Democrats” for “standing in the way of a deal for the Gateway Tunnel Project by refusing to negotiate with the Trump administration,” the White House on Tuesday declared through spokesperson Kush Desai that “there is nothing stopping Democrats from prioritizing the interests of Americans over illegal aliens and getting this project back on track.”

Standing in the way of a deal that was already negotiated and closed? With contracts signed? With work already underway, on time and on budget? And what do “illegal aliens” have to do with ensuring that this 116-year-old tunnel -- the pulsing carotid artery of the U.S. -- is finally repaired and modernized?

This infrastructure project is just too important to allow any side to play partisan politics.

So, if the suspension happened in October, why is the crisis happening now? Thanks to a bank line of credit, which Thomas Prendergast -- the former MTA chief brought on last year to lead Gateway -- has described as a “short-term solution,” work at the five active construction sites was able to continue. But the expectation all along was that the $12 billion in funding that was already authorized, appropriated, contracted, and obligated, would eventually become available to take care of that credit line. By next Friday, that money’s gone.

“I want to be very direct about what we’re facing here: this transportation crisis is a five-alarm fire, nothing short of that,” says New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer. “In 10 days, on February 6, the money runs out and shovels go down on the Gateway Project, the most consequential infrastructure project right now in the United States of America.”

Gottheimer appears in a brief video capturing a whole stream of elected officials, business leaders, and union members explaining why this is such a big problem. You can watch that video here, and I’d urge you to do so.

The rancid nut of our problem is that other countries treat infrastructure maintenance as a core function of government and public safety, where in the U.S. we wait until something breaks or becomes politically untenable, then scramble for funding and accept massive service disruptions as the cost of inaction. I said that last Spring as I observed the controversy over the East River Tunnel project, and I stand by that assessment for what’s happening here.

We’re hardly the only country with old infrastructure. We are, however, nearly unique in our disregard for maintaining what we build. Contrast our neglect with how other countries deal with century-old railway tunnels. The U.K., France, Italy, Austria, and many others all have old tunnels and bridges and power systems. But they recognize the essential nature of these systems and don’t hold them hostage to irrelevant political debating points.

The Rail Passengers Association’s bottom line is this: this is one of the most important rail transportation projects in the nation, and it is vital that this work continues. The existing tunnels, more than a century old, carry over 200,000 daily passenger trips every weekday onboard 425 trains. Any failure would be catastrophic for not only the region, but the entire U.S. economy. We’ve known for decades that these new tunnels need to be built, the funding agreements have been vetted and ratified — now the bureaucrats need to get out of the way and let workers build them!