Not so fast… Cuomo says MTA board has to vote on his clumsily-announced plan

Not so fast… Cuomo says MTA board has to vote on his clumsily-announced plan

Image by Lia Kantrowitz

Clearly, the MTA, DOT and Cuomo are just trying to drive us insane. What’s more, there’s no meeting planned until the end of the month:

Cuomo is calling on the MTA board to hold an emergency public meeting to hear the proposal and decide whether to pursue the plan, which would reduce a 15-month full service shutdown of L trains to and through Manhattan to a 15- to 20-month project requiring significantly reduced service on weeknights and weekends.

“What’s next is the MTA board has to vote on whether they want to pursue the plan,” Cuomo said during a conference call with reporters. “If they pursue the plan, the secondary question is that they’d have to renegotiate the contracts with the contractors because the scope of work is different.”[…]

Cuomo was less definitive than he was on Thursday, when he declared that “there will be no [L train] shutdown.” When a reporter asked if the board would in fact need to approve the plan, Cuomo said “I don’t believe so” before being corrected by Ferrer, who said that changes to the shutdown agreement would have to go back to the board.

It’s not immediately clear when or if the MTA board will hold an emergency meeting, though it does have its next regular meeting scheduled for the last week in January. It’s also not clear how scrupulous the board will be in reviewing the new proposal. The body is often viewed as a rubber stamp — especially for initiatives and projects unveiled by Cuomo — though it has become more analytical in recent months.

The MTA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The post Not so fast… Cuomo says MTA board has to vote on his clumsily-announced plan appeared first on Free Williamsburg.