The Metropolitan Transportation Authority on Wednesday threatened to sue the federal government if it did not release tens of millions of dollars in overdue funding for New York City’s Second Avenue subway expansion by next week.
Construction on the second phase of the expansion, a version of which was first proposed in the 1920s, had finally begun. But in October, President Trump declared that federal funds that had already been awarded for the project, as well as for a major Hudson River tunneling plan, would be withheld.
The funds were initially frozen in an apparent attempt to pressure New York Democrats to agree to end a government shutdown. The U.S. Transportation Department told the M.T.A. in September that the funds had actually been suspended because of a review of the authority’s race- and sex-based contracting requirements.
More recently, Mr. Trump suggested that he would release the funds for the Hudson River project in exchange for adding his name to two major transportation hubs, Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia and Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan.
The federal government now owes more than $58 million for the subway expansion, according to a letter the M.T.A. sent Wednesday to the Transportation Department. And the holdup could delay the entire project, the authority said.
“D.O.T.’s refusal to comply with its payment obligations has jeopardized the project and placed the M.T.A. in an impossible position, requiring it to plug the gap by diverting critical transportation infrastructure funding from other priorities,” the authority said in the letter, adding that it would pursue legal action if its federal reimbursements were not released by March 6.
Janno Lieber, the chief executive of the authority, which is running the project, said at a news conference on Wednesday that there were no legal grounds for the Transportation Department to withhold the money. The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“It’s time for us to get this back on track, so we’re letting them know: Time’s up,” Mr. Lieber said.
The project to expand the Second Avenue line, the first phase of which opened in 2017, is expected to extend Q train service in Manhattan farther north, into East Harlem, which has long had a dearth of mass transit options.
The line would be extended from 96th Street and Second Avenue to 125th Street and Lexington Avenue, at a cost of around $6.9 billion. About $3.4 billion of that is expected to come from the federal government, according to the M.T.A.
The project would help create more than 70,000 jobs and reduce overcrowding along the 4, 5 and 6 train lines, the authority has said — and Sean Duffy, the secretary of the federal Transportation Department, has acknowledged this.
“Indeed, Secretary Duffy has previously recognized that the project is ‘important’ and stressed the need for it to ‘move forward and move forward fast,’” the letter said.
The Trump administration has already had to comply with another request to release funding for the Hudson River tunnel project, an even larger infrastructure development in the region.
Earlier this month, a federal judge blocked the White House from suspending billions of dollars of funding for the tunneling project, known as Gateway, which is expected to replace deteriorating infrastructure under the Hudson River connecting New York and New Jersey.
That decision helped the states retrieve $205 million in overdue funding, but not before the delays forced a halt to work on the project, and the layoff of about 1,000 union workers.
Mr. Lieber said that any further delays in funding could disrupt the entire timeline for the subway project, which is broken into four major parts.
The contracts for the first two parts — which involve relocating utilities and assembling a giant tunnel-boring machine overseas, among other work — have already been awarded. The authority was planning next month to award the contract for the third part, which includes excavation work at the planned 106th Street station, but the funding dispute may delay those plans.
Stefanos Chen is a Times reporter covering New York City’s transit system.
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