The U.S. Division of Transportation has outlined the steps the MTA and the Gateway Improvement Fee should take as a way to restore funding for 2 key transit tasks — the following part of the Second Avenue Subway and the Hudson River Tunnel.
Each the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the GDC acknowledged Tuesday that they’ve acquired letters from the feds explaining the steps D.O.T. expects them to take as a way to restart federal reimbursements on the tasks.
“We got feedback from the federal government last night, literally,” Janno Lieber mentioned at a public occasion in Manhattan on Monday. “We got feedback from them and we will be acting on it promptly.”
MTA Chairman Janno Lieber is pictured on the Workplace of Emergency Administration in Brooklyn on Friday, April 5, 2024. (Theodore Parisienne for New York Every day Information)
The funding for the 2 key transit tasks — the long-awaited extension of the Second Avenue Subway into East Harlem and the development of a brand new tunnel below the Hudson River to double practice visitors between New York and New Jersey — was positioned on maintain by the Trump administration in October, in the course of the early hours of the federal shutdown.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Workplace of Administration and Funds Director Russell Vought each mentioned on the time that the choice was remodeled considerations that the businesses answerable for these tasks — the MTA and the Gateway Improvement Fee — each had been in violation of a rule that the federal authorities had solely simply revealed.
That rule forbids the usage of race- or sex-based elements to find out whether or not a contractor on a federally funded program could be thought of a “Disadvantaged Business Enterprise,” as outlined in a Reagan-era program meant to help large-project contracts going to such entities.
It was not instantly clear Tuesday what the feds had been asking MTA or GDC to do as a way to restore funding, and a request for particulars from the D.O.T. went unanswered by press time.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy enters the Dekalb Ave.-Flatbush Ave. subway station in Brooklyn, New York, on Friday, April 4, 2025. (Theodore Parisienne / New York Every day Information)
“They’ve sent us some specific directions,” Lieber instructed reporters Tuesday. “It looks like they’re things we can comply with — we just have to go through a process of recertifying companies to participate in this DBE program.”
“We were in dialogue with the federal government on that as recently as yesterday, and it looks like we’re going to be able to move forward,” he mentioned.
Gateway Improvement Fee spokesman Stephen Sigmund confirmed that his company had acquired an analogous letter.
Work on each tasks has continued amid the funding maintain.
