It started with a chance meeting in Brooklyn late last year, when an irate man told Gov. Andrew Cuomo that closing the subway tunnel for 15 months would hurt his community. It ended Thursday with a news conference so quickly thrown together that the board that oversees the subway was told 11 minutes before it began.
Cuomo — after taking a midnight tour of the tunnel in December and consulting his own panel of experts — dropped a bombshell: The L train would not fully shut down in April as planned.
It was a remarkable moment in the fraught relations between a bulldog governor, a besieged transit agency and the city’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, who has long been frustrated by his lack of influence over the subways. Cuomo essentially overruled transit executives and the mayor by deciding to pursue his own solution.
Cuomo’s announcement circumvented the authority’s board, even though the governor has insisted over and over that he does not actually run the subway, in a move that could further damage the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s already dim credibility. And Cuomo left de Blasio, a persistent adversary, scrambling to respond.
“I want to know for sure that this will work but also why on Earth wasn’t it considered previously?” de Blasio said in a radio interview Friday.
Cuomo introduced fresh uncertainty over the L train’s future Friday morning when he said his plan to repair the tunnel, damaged by Superstorm Sandy in 2012, still needed to be approved by the MTA board. He called for the board to hold an emergency meeting to consider the plan.
“If they decide to pursue this alternative plan, great,” Cuomo told reporters in a conference call. “If they decide not to pursue the alternative plan, make a decision, right?”
The abrupt turn of events, while mostly welcomed by subway riders, was met with confusion and frustration among some elected officials and transportation advocates. The plans were made in secret. The city had already started to pay for contingency plans to replace a critical tunnel between Manhattan and Brooklyn that carries 250,000 people each day. People had rearranged their lives, moving and finding new jobs to avoid the pain to come.
The new repair plan relies on an unproven technology that has never been used in the United States, raising questions about whether it can work without causing major disruptions. And the plan, for all of the governor’s promotion, was criticized as a simple patch job instead of a permanent solution.
Cuomo’s 11th-hour dramatics are well known. He has fashioned his political brand around a series of concrete accomplishments and an aggressive response to disasters and other headline-grabbing events, like his campaign to make sure the Second Avenue subway opened on time. He has not been shy about wading into city affairs, including the management of the New York City Housing Authority and placing state troopers on city streets.
His L train announcement Thursday came together hastily. An email arrived at 12:34 p.m., alerting board members that the authority’s chairman, Fernando Ferrer, had accepted the Cuomo panel’s recommendations. Cuomo’s news conference began at 12:45 p.m.
His panel of experts had been working for weeks behind the scenes, even on Christmas and New Year’s Day. Ferrer said leaders at the transit agency welcomed the new approach.
“We’ve actually, over the last three weeks, literally spent hundreds of hours collectively working on this project,” Mary Boyce, dean of engineering at Columbia University, said.
When Cuomo was asked Thursday whether the board had to approve the repair plan, Cuomo said, “I don’t believe so.” Ferrer clarified that the board would, in fact, have to approve a new contract for the work.
Veronica Vanterpool, a board member appointed by de Blasio, said Ferrer’s stamp of approval was premature. She said she did not have the answers she needed to vote in support of the new plan.
“The original proposal would have fixed and repaired the tunnel for 50 or 60 years,” Vanterpool said. “It’s not clear to me the longevity of this solution.”
Vanterpool said the announcement had undermined the board.
“This continues to show that the board is essentially an afterthought,” Vanterpool said. “We’re not consulted, we’re not briefed, but yet we’re expected to move important projects along.”
The authority’s board makes decisions for the regional transit system — which includes subways, buses, Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad — and votes on issues like fare increases. The governor names six representatives to the authority’s board, including the chairman. The mayor appoints four members. The executives of Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester counties each recommend one member, while the members that represent Dutchess, Orange, Putnam and Rockland counties share one vote.
Cuomo’s repair plan relies on a new technology that Cuomo said had not been used in the United States but had been used in London and Hong Kong. The approach uses a “racking system” to house cables on the tunnel’s wall, instead of encasing them in a separate structure known as a “bench wall.” During Superstorm Sandy, the bench walls were damaged by salt water from the storm’s floodwaters.
De Blasio said he wanted to proceed with preparations for the shutdown because there was still uncertainty over what would happen.
“We should not, in my opinion, turn off all of the efforts that had been underway to prepare for the shutdown until we are 100 percent certain what’s going on,” the mayor said.
Andrew Smyth, a professor of civil engineering at Columbia, said his dean reached out to him, and within days he found himself underground with Cuomo.
“It happened very, very quickly,” Smyth said of the December tour.
Smyth said he had expected some push back from the contractors who had designed the previous solution but said they were extremely accommodating.
“It was really a very positive working collaboration,” he said. “Some of us going into it were a little bit skeptical.”
Elected officials were also surprised to hear the shutdown had been called off. State Sen. Brad Hoylman, a Democrat whose district includes the Manhattan stops on the L train and welcomed the new plan, said he had only been briefed just before the announcement.
While Cuomo said a stranger had drawn his attention to the shutdown, Hoylman suspected that other constituents, and colleagues, were also a factor.
“The pending chaos is probably what motivated the governor,” Hoylman said. “And people whispering in his ear that this was not going to go well.”
New York City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, chairman of the council’s Transportation Committee, said New York’s efforts to prepare for the L train shutdown should be assigned a monetary value and counted as part of the city’s future contributions to the MTA.
“That’s money that could have been used for other things,” he said.
Rodriguez said council members and staff had spent hundreds of hours preparing for the shutdown and meeting with residents, including holding a hearing last year. He said that he supported the new plan but that it should have been introduced much sooner.
Council Speaker Corey Johnson said that while the averted shutdown was good news, residents deserved better than a surprise change, especially since many had already uprooted their lives.
“I’m having a tough time with this,” he said. “For years, the MTA told New Yorkers that a shutdown was unavoidable. Now, at the last minute, we’re presented with a new proposal with no details on cost or a solid time frame.”
Joseph Lentol, a veteran Democratic assemblyman from North Brooklyn, said he was pleased by the new plan but still concerned about the potential effects on businesses focused on entertainment and night life.
Still, Lentol said, he was “happy for my constituents, if this plan can work.”
“This is what governors should be doing,” he added. “Coming to the rescue.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.