With Gov. Andrew Cuomo cracking the whip, New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority envisions opening the Second Avenue subway line by Dec. 31.
"We believe we'll be ringing in the New Year with the new line," MTA Chairman Thomas Prendergast said during Wednesday's monthly board meeting, at which the state-run agency approved its $15.8 billion operating budget and four-year financial plan through 2020. "The governor has challenged us daily and even in person."
Two days earlier, MTA capital construction officials and the authority's independent engineer, Kent Haggas of McKissack Group Inc., raised the specter of a late December opening for a line nearly 100 years in the making. They cited an all-hands-on-deck push to complete systems including escalators, elevators, and fire-alarm and public address systems for the first-phase four opening stations.
Haggas in the past had called out the MTA for running behind schedule.
While MTA personnel are working around the clock to open the new line on time, Cuomo's hurry-up offense has triggered a host of questions.
Perceived upsides include a holiday-season ribbon cutting and political points for Cuomo, good publicity for an MTA that traditionally can't finish projects on time, and commuter relief throughout Manhattan's East Side.
The line is intended to alleviate crowding along the north-south Lexington Avenue corridor. The first phase will add four stations: Lexington Avenue and 63rd Street, 72nd Street, 86th street and 96th Street. If fully completed, the line would stretch 8.5 miles along the East Side, from 125th Street in Harlem to Hanover Square in lower Manhattan.
Cuomo last weekend toured the 72nd and 86th street stations.
"The governor has pretty much made this a personal crusade to get this done by the end of the year," said Howard Cure, director of municipal bond research for Evercore Wealth Management.
The MTA is one of the largest municipal issuers with roughly $37 billion in debt. Finishing a large project on-time and within budget resonates with bond rating agencies, according to Cure.
As Cuomo wields a heavy stick akin to that of Robert Moses, the city's infrastructure czar of yesteryear, some worry about the downside of a rushed opening.
"It will be interesting to see the final bill," said Cure. "I live in the area and I see they're pretty much working nonstop. From the outside it looks very complicated. It will be interesting to see how much they spent on overtime to get this done."
The last new subway project, the $2.4 billion 34th Street-Hudson Yards station, had problems. Leaks, puddles and mold emerged at the new station just west of Times Square a few months after its September 2015 opening.
"Safety's first and I'm sure the safeguards will be in place," said Cure. "It just goes back to my original concern. It's a new project and it will benefit a number of people, but I wish they'd spend just as much energy on the basic maintenance of the system.
"I'd be interested in getting a candid view from the head of the MTA about how important this project really is. It raises the question of political elements in trying to put together a capital plan."
Such events as the Great Depression, World War II and New York City's mid-1970s financial crisis interrupted the project. The MTA revived it in its current form in 1995.
News that the MTA might finish the project by New Year's generated a buzz at headquarters on Monday. Media speculated about a partial opening to loop in the Q line at 63rd Street, the most southern of the four Phase I stops, and even joked about Cuomo testing the public-address systems himself on Dec. 24, then trumpeting the new line as a Christmas present.
Hartsdale, N.Y., transit advocate Murray Bodin, a frequent critic of the MTA and other regional agencies, said MTA would lay down an effective marker with a December opening.
"That sets the standard for everybody else," Bodin told members of the MTA board's capital projects oversight committee.
According to Bodin, this has implications for regional transit projects, including the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey's new flagship bus terminal and the ambitious vision of extending the No. 7 subway line to Secaucus, N.J.
"The subway to Secaucus and the bus terminal are impacted by this as well," he said.
Other MTA megaprojects in the works are East Side access for Long Island Rail Road trains, and Penn Station access for the Metro-North Railroad, which would four new stations in the East Bronx. The MTA heard presentations on the latter on Monday.
Behind it all is Cuomo, first elected governor in 2010.
"The governor insists that we change the public perception of this organization by doing things we haven't been able to do in the past," said Prendergast.
He has staked political capital on such big-ticket infrastructure projects as Second Avenue subway and the reconstructions of Penn Station and the upstate Tappan Zee Bridge. He announced Tuesday that the $4 billion Tappan Zee replacement, the New NY Bridge, is on budget and on track to open in 2018.
Like his father, Mario, who governed the state from 1983 through 1994, Andrew Cuomo unapologetic about his bent for micromanaging.
"Sort of in the past year and a half, I'd say, I've taken a personal hands-on approach," said Cuomo, a former state attorney general who cited his private-sector experience. "You have to show up every day. When I was building something, I'd be there seven days a week, and that's what we're doing with the Second Avenue subway."
Former MTA Chairman Richard Ravitch, who crafted the authority's initial five-year capital plan in 1982 and later became New York's lieutenant governor, locked horns with the elder Cuomo late in his four-year tenure.
"Cuomo didn't like him being independent," former MTA executive Peter Derrick said in a Bond Buyer interview in 2014. "With Cuomo, it was the same style of management as his son today, that of an egomaniac."
In his book, "So Much to Do: A Full Life of Business, Politics, and Confronting Fiscal Crises," Ravitch wrote that while under Mario Cuomo, "the fun quotient of the job had been diminished by the governor's inexplicable hostility."
