This whole No. 7 mess is like a bunch of folks at the restaurant fighting over the bill, who ordered what, and who is treating whom.
On Friday, Bloomberg held fast that the city won’t pay for the inevitable cost overruns of the $2.1 billion expansion of the No. 7 train west and south.
“Keep in mind, the MTA should be building the subway line, not the city ” he said on his WABC radio show.
They’re sitting there, yelling at us because … New York City taxpayers (are) stepping up and doing what the MTA should be doing. You know, you can’t write this stuff. You’ve got to tear your hair out and say, ‘What did I miss here?’ But the bottom line is they’ve got a new guy running the MTA. I think he’s very good, Lee Sanders (sic), and he’s very creative and I think working with them, we’ll find a way to make this thing work.”
Last week at the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council's annual meeting, Doctoroff said he worried that the MTA wouldn’t be able to pay for the Second Avenue subway, according to NY Sun.
It will be the third groundbreaking for the same project. It sounds like the Freedom Tower," Mr. Doctoroff told a gathering of about 400 transportation professionals at the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council's annual meeting yesterday, referring to the ground zero memorial that has celebrated multiple groundbreakings but has seen little work thereafter. "We've seen how these things play out before."
The Second Avenue line, known as the city's greatest transportation project never built, is a planned two-track subway line that will run along Manhattan's East Side to the financial district from 125th street. Construction on such a line stopped in 1975, when funds for the project ran dry.
"We can't afford that mistake again," Mr. Doctoroff said. He stressed that even the expected federal funding for the project "does not mean a commitment to completing the job."
Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, a Democrat who heads an MTA oversight committee, said Mr. Doctoroff may have spoken with the city's own financial interests in mind. "The city's reluctance to fully fund the no. 7 line is always lurking in the background of these kinds of conversations," he said.
