The day after an Amtrak official warned that July's delays for NJ Transit riders could become the "norm," New York Sen. Charles Schumer told an audience of transportation experts that failing to build a new tunnel under the Hudson River would be "insane."
"We are talking about throwing the world's largest monkey wrench into the gears of New York's economy," he said in a speech Tuesday morning at the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University.
Schumer said he agrees with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo that the federal government should take the lead on funding the new tunnel, which is estimated to cost $14 billion.
Federal officials haven't committed to a particular level of funding, but didn't reject the idea outright. "We're willing to do our part but the region needs to step up," the U.S. secretary of transportation, Anthony Foxx, said, in a statement following Schumer's speech. "To date, nothing has been rejected because nothing has been offered other than a request to come to the table."
Schumer also said New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has a special responsibility to lobby Republicans in Congress because New Jersey residents make up 80 percent of the ridership who would be affected, and because Christie canceled the previous plan, known as ARC.
"It was a bad idea to stop it and a worse idea to cannibalize it for projects that ought to be funded by New Jersey's Department of Transportation," Schumer said.
Christie's deputy press secretary, Nicole Sizemore, took issue with Schumer's characterization. "It's easy for Sen. Schumer to make these claims when New York wasn't contributing a dime to the ARC progrect and didn't step up to take on any of the cost of the project's overruns," she wrote in an email a few hours later.
Two weeks ago, Foxx asked Christie and Cuomo to meet over the tunnel. Christie plans to do so next week, but Cuomo so far has not agreed to a face-to-face meeting, saying he wants the federal government to offer funding first.
Schumer called for the creation of a new development corporation to work with the federal government, Amtrak, New York, New Jersey and the Port Authority to secure financing for the tunnel and related improvements. He said he hopes most of the money would come from federal grants, though he added a loan through the Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing Program is also a possibility. (Cuomo said the states could not afford a loan.) Schumer also said Amtrak should use profits from its Northeast operations to fund the improvements.