Should the MTA and the federal government decide that its approval is indeed required, that could pose a risk to Cuomo’s proposal. | AP Photo Cuomo's L train plan might hinge on Trump administration approval

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s surprise proposal to scrap the 15-month closure of the L train tunnel won’t just require the approval of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board, which he effectively controls. It may also require the approval of the Trump administration.

“We’re not sure,” said MTA Managing Director Veronique “Ronnie” Hakim in an interview at MTA headquarters Monday.


“In fairness to our partners at the Federal Transit Administration,” she continued, “I don’t think they’re sure either.”

Thanks to the government shutdown, spokespeople for the federal agency were on furlough Monday and did not respond to a request for comment.

The Trump administration is implicated in Cuomo’s L train plans because the Cuomo administration is relying on federal funding to get the job done.

The MTA's original, nearly three-year-old L train closure plan was slated to cost close to $1 billion and was reliant on nearly $500 million in federal funding, Hakim said. Some of that funding has already been spent. Much of it is still “pending,” she said. The new cost of the plan remains unclear, though officials suggest it may prove less expensive.

Should the MTA and the federal government decide that its approval is indeed required, that could pose a risk to Cuomo’s proposal.

“With Trump you never know anything until the final signature is signed, but this should be completely uncontroversial from a funding standpoint,” said Tri-State Transportation Campaign Executive Director Nick Sifuentes. “There’s no reason other than petty politics to hold this up.”

Critics contend the Trump administration has been guilty of infrastructure-related "petty politics" before. It has proven resistant to New York and New Jersey efforts to accelerate construction of a new rail tunnel under the Hudson River to Penn Station to replace the existing one that's falling apart — a stance observers attribute to Trump's pique with tunnel champion Sen. Chuck Schumer.

“I haven’t heard of Gateway, and we’re focused on the L train,” said MTA President Pat Foye, in jest. (As the former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Foye was intimately involved in the Gateway program.)

The MTA’s leadership participated in a series of interviews with reporters on Monday in an effort to project transparency following the rocky rollout of the governor’s L tunnel plan — one that caught the MTA’s board by surprise and seemed to cast doubt on the credibility of the MTA itself.

The MTA had spent years working on its own repair plan for the L train tunnel connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn. The tunnel was inundated during Hurricane Sandy and carries some 225,000 people a day between the two boroughs. The salt water deposited by Sandy continues to eat away at the concrete bench walls that line the tunnel and encompass its electrical equipment. Like the tunnel, they are about a century old. The original plan called for replacing the bench walls entirely, a process that the MTA said would require a 15-month closure of the passage.

Cuomo’s proposal calls for abandoning the power conduit inside the concrete bench walls and running it along elevated racks instead. It also calls for shoring up the the deteriorating bench walls with fiber reinforced polymer, which New York City Transit President Andy Byford recently said could last some 40 years — or about half as long as the existing bench walls.

Officials say the alternative plan can be done on nights and weekends, obviating the need for a prolonged closure.

Byford supports the new plan and hopes it will launch on April 27, like the original plan was supposed to, he said. He will present the new proposal to the board of the MTA at its next, regular meeting later this month. The emergency MTA board meeting Cuomo called for last week will not happen.

“By the time we get around to sorting out the emergency meeting, we’ll be on the cusp of the regular one anyway,” Byford said.