So What Is the Deal With The Governor And This New Gateway Project Report?

What the L?

Gov. Cuomo rocked the regional transportation world this week when he cheered a report suggesting that the existing cross-Hudson tunnels between New Jersey and New York don’t need a full shutdown to rebuild them, potentially throwing yet another wrench into the plan to build a new pair of tunnels to boost interstate rail capacity, a $13-billion piece of the Gateway Project.

It’s the latest baffling twist in the decade-plus-long saga.

On Sunday, the governor suggested that a report done for the Port Authority by consultants London Bridge Associates showed that the existing century-old tunnels could be fixed while remaining in service — a strategy he used when he big-footed the experts last year and decided to fix a badly damaged L train tunnel without a full shutdown. The Cuomo (and outside consultant) plan relied on hanging power cables on racks on the tunnel walls and encasing broken concrete walls in Fiberglas rather than the more elaborate (and perhaps longer-lasting) repairs that had originally been planned.

The Cuomo scheme had one advantage: subway service could continue, albeit on a truncated schedule, while repairs were done, so perhaps it’s no surprise that Cuomo is promoting the LBA report, which makes the case that repairs can be done on nights and weekends. And, critically for the future of the Gateway Project, the report suggests the repairs can be done without building another pair of tunnels first — a time-saving, but controversial, notion.

How well did Cuomo’s bombshell go over? Really well … unless you value the opinion of all of New Jersey’s political leadership and Amtrak itself, who all suggested Cuomo had betrayed them.

President-elect Biden is an explicit supporter of the Gateway Project, having said there was “no greater infrastructure priority in the country than the Gateway Project” in 2017, and calling for a “new, safer Hudson River Tunnel” on his transition page, which suggests some small degree of interest in building the two new tunnels.

The governor has been ambivalent to Gateway in the past, such as a comment he made in 2015 objecting to New York paying for any of the tunnel construction by saying, “It’s not my tunnel.” The state is also facing a significant budget crunch right now, and even in 2018 the governor said he didn’t want to pay any more than the state’s $3.25 billion contribution, so the report could be a last-ditch effort to paying for the tunnel.

There’s no question that Gov. Cuomo is fond of himself and his own outside-the-box thinking when it comes to transit repairs. When asked about the London Bridge Associates report, Cuomo bragged to a reporter, “I do take particular pleasure in hearing you endorse the now accepted L train repair methodology.” And Cuomo was pleased that the MTA used methods from the L train repair method to patch up the F train tunnel between Brooklyn and Manhattan, giving more credence to the patch-and-dash idea. The governor also had his own outside experts take a look at the East Side Access project (years into the project going on under his watch). He also once said, “Forget your transit experts” in response to critics of the LaGuardia AirTrain.

But Cuomo’s own Penn South megaproject makes less sense without Gateway’s increased capacity, and the governor called on President Trump to fund Gateway in May. Just last Monday, Cuomo called the approval of the Gateway Project one of the many issues requiring federal intervention that are just as important as congestion pricing, despite potentially undermining the case for that funding with this report.

All of this makes Cuomo’s decision to prop up the report, and potentially take on a Chris Christie-esque role just before the project could get out of purgatory, a heel turn worthy of the WWE, for its suddenness, bad timing and the pure incomprehensibility of it all.

“We’re this close, we’re 60 days from the Biden administration, that has for all intents and purposes has said this project is a go,” said Park-Rogers.