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 with 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 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 Hurricane 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. “If they decide not to pursue the alternative plan, make a decision, right?”
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 was criticized as a simple patch job instead of a permanent solution.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.