Donald Trump may be seeking to snarl an already-immobile project
President Donald Trump’s move to kill funding for a new rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey sounds in an immediate sense like payback to Sen. Chuck Schumer for snarling the White House’s agenda and nominations.
But it’s just the latest hitch in the long-sought $30 billion Gateway program — which state officials tout as vital to the region’s future and the Trump administration previously showed a reluctance to support.
The Trump plan to rebuild U.S. infrastructure, while hyped as a $1.7 trillion infusion, actually called for only a fraction of that — $200 billion — in direct federal aid.
Somehow this money would be used to leverage state, local and private funding, but plenty of details have still been left to fill in. And even this limited Trump proposal — resources for which would be limited in part by the massive tax cut he recently signed — is showing little life.
Last week Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told reporters that no such plan may will likely win congressional approval this year. “I think it’s gonna be hard, because we have so many other things to do and we don’t have much time,” he said.
Cornyn is the Senate majority whip, which means his position is presumed to be in sync with those of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), who in tandem with the House essentially controls what gets passed.
If the red-state-dependent congressional majority isn’t forking over funds for projects in Colorado, Tennessee, Montana or Idaho, don’t expect to see a windfall for New York and New Jersey.
There have been other big obstacles for Gateway.
Back in 2010 New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie chose to divert funds from the Access to the Region’s Core (ARC) program to rehabilitate the intrastate Pulaski Skyway.
Also, the way tunnels have been dug in the region in the past presages its own obstacles. For the Grand Central Terminal project for Long Island Rail Road access, issues of excessive staffing, fat labor contracts and sparse competition have been a problem, by many accounts. High costs are an assumption.
Nobody disputes that the tunnel system is decrepit and outdated. For now there are those who say the Trump-Schumer feud over one key Hudson River connection on which Amtrak and NJ Transit depend threatens by extension to harm the national economy.
Back in 2016, Schumer said: “We don’t build this, and these tunnels fail, the whole economy will collapse. There will be a deep recession in the metropolitan area and a recession probably in the whole country.”
But well before this clash between the senator and the president, the Trump administration was already rejecting an Obama-era agreement to support the Gateway project.
Late last year, K. Jane Williams, a top official in the Federal Transit Administration, told state officials there was “no such agreement” and it would be “unhelpful to refer to one.”
Williams said New York’s $5 billion-plus request didn’t consider the impact on other projects elsewhere and called Gateway “a local project where 9 out of 10 passengers are local transit riders.”
So it didn’t sound as if the rails had been cleared for Gateway anyway.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
