Get the Gateway project moving, now. “It’s not my tunnel”, Cuomo told reporters.
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Christie, Sens. Cory Booker and Bob Menendez and Foxx said in a joint statement that they had a “substantive and productive meeting” and “all of us are committed to working together on a path forward on this critical project”.
It was not clear if Schumer has had any luck in the past few hours coming up with imagery more frightening than “transportation Armageddon” to help jump-start talks on his plan, or whether he has resorted to adding “winning the lottery”, “buying a fleet of metal detectors”, and “finding El Chapo and making him build new tunnels” to his list of funding possibilities.
On Tuesday, Cuomo’s office backtracked, saying they were never specifically invited to Tuesday’s meeting, which Cuomo spokeswoman Dani Lever said was understood to be focused on “New Jersey transportation infrastructure” and not the tunnel specifically. But now, as Christie runs for president on his claim of having been a prudent and competent guardian of New Jersey’s finances, the tunnel problems have inspired a spate of news reports, including one by The Record newspaper in New Jersey’s Bergen County saying the cancellation wasted .2 billion that had been spent on engineering.
Last week, Cuomo, a 57-year-old Democrat, rejected the federal government’s offer of a loan to fund Gateway.
Christie has said recently on the presidential campaign trail that he would be willing to revisit the issue of tunnel if New York is willing to up its contribution to the project but not if the proposal is identical to the earlier project he canceled in 2010.
On a tour of the tunnel and electrical system at Penn Station Monday that included Amtrak officials and New Jersey Senate President Stephen Sweeney, the scope of the problem became more evident and not only because, as if on cue, a disabled train earlier in the morning had caused an hour’s backup.
“Our next tunnel project must work for everyone, benefit everyone, and be paid for by everyone”, Hakim said.
Cuomo didn’t attend Tuesday’s meeting and said last week that it was premature to hold a meeting on the tunnel. “To do that, we need to develop a true partnership between Amtrak, the states and their transit agencies, and the federal government as soon as possible”.
Amtrak supports an 80 percent federal, 20 percent local funding split, but its influence in Washington is extremely limited. So at some point in the late 2020’s, all four tunnels will most likely be in service.
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The primary obstacle remains a financial one, and New York’s would-be partners on the tunnel project don’t inspire great confidence. “It is an Amtrak tunnel that is used by Amtrak and by New Jersey Transit”.
