Construction delays at the 72nd Street station could jeopardize the planned December opening of the long-awaited Second Avenue subway line, New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials said Monday.
The contractor hired to finish the station is falling behind on work such as elevators, tunnel vent fans and heating, ventilating and air-conditioning installation, the president of the authority's capital construction unit, Michael Horodniceanu, told members of the MTA board's transit and bus committee.
"We are working to mitigate that," Horodniceanu said. "This is something we are monitoring closely."
The first $4.5 billion phase of the line will run from Lexington Avenue/63rd Street to 96th Street along Manhattan's East Side. The MTA is one of the largest municipal issuers with roughly $36.7 billion in debt.
According to Horodniceanu, a strike by Verizon Communications Inc. employees has slowed the power installation at 63rd Street, but the authority has a "workaround" in place to counter its effects.
Completion of the elevator work, he said, is necessary for the MTA to comply with mandates under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act.
Kent Haggas, senior project manager for McKissack Group Inc. and the authority's independent engineering consultant, cited "several concerns" about target dates. Contractors, he said, kept to schedule targets for only 70% of the interim tracking milestones identified at last month's MTA capital program oversight committee meeting.
In addition, he said, there is no improvement in elevator and escalator completion forecasts for 72nd Street. "which remain close to impacting the [revenue service date]," and the testing schedule for major station equipment systems remains "highly compressed," thus maximizing the demand on New York City Transit staff.
The work effort at 72nd Street has not reached the level necessary to support an accelerated schedule for completing the work, said the engineering report, and late design changes have continued through March and the backlog may risk the scheduled completion of the testing program.
The initial four stops in Phase I are Lexington/63rd, 72nd, 86th and 92nd streets. Gov. Andrew Cuomo's $156 billion fiscal 2017 budget included an additional $1.5 billion for Phase II of the project, from 96th Street to 125th Street in East Harlem.
