By Henry J. Stern
November 29, 2006


The massive expenditure of public funds in the construction of the Fulton Street Subway Palace is slowly coming to light.  The problem was reported in the daily press yesterday (William Neuman in the New York Times, Pete Donohue in the Daily News, under the headline, Steamed at Fulton,  and Jeremy Olshan in the The Post) after a contentious meeting Monday of the MTA board’s capital construction committee.

At that meeting several board members protested the deletion of an underground connection to the E train that had been proposed as part of the original Fulton plan.   The E line now terminates under the former World Trade Center and runs north under Church Street.  It connects with the A and C lines between the Chambers and Canal Street stations.

The larger issue, which is the wisdom of the entire Fulton Street project, was effectively raised by Steve Cuozzo in a column in today's Post.  You should read this informative and persuasive column to get a sense of the issues.  Link to it here.

When the decision was made years ago to rebuild the Fulton Street stations of various lines into a Grand Central Station of the South, the stated rationale was that two billion dollars was available from the Federal government, following 9/11, that could only be spent on transit improvements south of Canal Street in lower Manhattan.  That was a reprise of Robert Moses' old strategy to secure consent for his projects – telling the Board of Estimate, the press and the public that money was only available for what he wanted to build, and otherwise the money would be lost to the city and the state.

Two projects, suggested by MTA engineers during their idle months between designing subways, were presented as pre-planned and almost ready to build. One was the South Ferry station reconstruction, and the other the Fulton Street transit center.  South Ferry was supposed to cost $400 million and Fulton $750 million, give or take a few million Federal dollars.  The projects were opposed at the time by the usual suspects, some civic groups and Community Board No. 1. The buildings were supported by construction unions, engineering companies, contractors and their hirelings and sundry doofuses who will support anything under the mantra of transit.

This is what we wrote at the time these projects were being cobbled together:

 
June 22, 2004

The $750 million Fulton Street underground mall and station connector, now in the pipeline, might benefit from value engineering, although its purpose is beneficial to riders.

But South Ferry and Fulton Mall, costly as they are, pale beside the most egregious example of extravagance cloaked by the word transportation. That is the $2 billion of federal money that the Port Authority intends to spend for its new Santiago Calatrava-designed station at the former World Trade Center. It will be a magnificent monument, lacking only passengers to bring it to life. Since I maintain the simple notion that people take the subway for rapid transit, rather than for glorious stations, I wonder whether the resources spent on architects, engineers, contractors, and their employees would be better spent elsewhere on the underfunded transit system. Yes, Grand Central Terminal is palatial and now, historic, but it would not make sense to put a station where there are hardly any people to use it.




March 30, 2005

The second boondoggle is the Fulton Street station reconstruction.  This will take at least a billion dollars, and it is minor rerouting of existing lines, with an arcade to the former World Trade Center.  Yes, some work should be done here, but the whole nine yards is unnecessary.  It is a scheme that idle engineers design when there is no imminent construction work facing them.  If the MTA hires a management consulting firm, as they seek to do, this project is the first thing they should examine — if they are allowed to look at capital projects, which is where you will find most of the waste.


November 19, 2004

Nonetheless, the MTA will spend billions on unnecessary extravagances, such as a new South Ferry subway station to replace an existing station which is a bit less conveniently constructed, and an over-engineered billion-dollar Fulton Street subway station which will provide no increased service, just somewhat better connections, which are certainly not worth a fortune to build. Not to be outdone, the Port Authority is building a lavish new subway station at what remains of the World Trade Center, demolishing a station which has just been rebuilt at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. Nor have they done anything about their administrative fat, as pointed out by the mayor and comptroller.


To his credit, Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff originally opposed the South Ferry project.  The decision to build was made by Governor Pataki at the urging of MTA chair Peter Kalikow who is devoted to his job and urgently desires to keep it (he received reappointment to a term stretching to 2012 by Governor Pataki). In transit policy Mr. Kalikow is a complete creature of happenstance, owing his high position as Chairman of the MTA entirely to his close friendship with former Senator Al D'Amato, now a highly competent and effective lobbyist before state agencies, particularly the MTA.

The South Ferry project requiring the uprooting of hundreds of trees in Battery Park, the destruction of a landmark 1912 subway station, and the provision of a relative pittance to Parks to repair the damage, plant saplings and improve Battery Park. (The MTA will give the Park about 3% of the project cost, compared with 10% given to the Bronx for the construction of a filtration plant under a corner of Van Cortlandt Park)  The touted improvement was you could now exit and enter at South Ferry from all ten cars rather than the first five.  For 92 years generations of New Yorkers and tourists were able to locate the first five cars on a subway. . The cost is now estimated at about $450 million. It epitomizes wasteful spending on a low-priority project.

Fulton Street will be at least twice as expensive as South Ferry. There is now an underground arcade, stretching from Broadway two blocks east to William Street, which connects nine subway lines 2,3,4,5, A, C, J, M, and Z .To get from one to the other you follow a relatively straight easts-west corridor, but better signage would make navigation easier.  The project under construction, which required eminent domain to seize what will now be $157 million worth of private land, will make it simpler for simple people to get from one subway line to another.

But is it worth a billion dollars to do that, not counting the loss of tax revenue from the valuable commercial property which is being purchased by the MTA.  City-wide, transit construction is under funded, and the Second Avenue subway is a prime example of where money is badly needed.  One advantage of these smaller projects is that, optimistically, they will be opened by the people who decide to build them. It is, however, too late for Governor Pataki, although if he becomes President of the United States, a cause to which he is devoting his efforts, he will be welcomed back to participate in the dedication, and he would richly deserve that honor.

What interests us, over and over, is how intelligent people can make foolish decisions, motivated primarily by honest ignorance, with perhaps a smidgen of desire to please (i.e. enrich) one's supporters. The difficulties and disruptions in construction, the cost rising far beyond the low-ball estimates, the delays, all are regrettable but were entirely predictable. The matter is basically not the fault of Mysore Nagaraja, president of the MTA Construction Company, who builds what he is told. He does not, however, decide what should be built, and he should not be scapegoated for the ambitions of his masters.  He was, however, rather deeply into this one.

We cannot finish this article without alluding to the third and largest boondoggle of downtown transit, the $2.2 BILLION Path station being constructed as part of the future World Center. The station is said to be beautifully designed by the world-renowned Spanish architect, Santiago Calatrava.  If a billionaire wanted to build it to flaunt his good taste, or a prince wanted a magnificent tomb for his late wife, that would be a private decision.  Why use public funds, our tax dollars, to build an extravagant edifice to serve a purpose that could be accomplished at one-tenth of the cost by a handsome, well-designed practical structure?  Why demolish a station that has just been built at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars?  Is there a rational economist who would consider this a prudent expenditure of the scarce public resources allocated to mass transit?.

The three projects, South Ferry, Fulton Street and the Path Terminal, have varying degrees of utility.  To be fair, it is better to build them than to throw the money into the sea, as was requested in an early English case on cy pres.. That does not, however, justify their enormous and ever-growing cost. It is our observation that the cost of ignorance exceeds the cost of corruption.  Chicane enriches one person or a few, but the ignorance of decision makers can impoverish a community, and in war, famine or plague, can lead to the cost of human lives. We can take small comfort from the fact that the only loss here is financial, and even that will, for the most part, be borne by our descendants.


#333 11.29.06  1639wds