The Trump administration’s refusal to distribute promised funds for the Hudson River Tunnel project will force work to stop and put nearly 1,000 construct workers out of a job by week’s end, officials with the The Gateway Develop Commission said Thursday.
“Tomorrow work on the largest, most urgent infrastructure project in America will come to a pause,” Gateway CEO Tom Prendergast told reporters Thursday, standing amid idle cranes at the project’s 12th Ave. access shaft, one of the tunnel project’s four active construction sites affected by the funding.
“Funding pledged to the project in fully executed grant and loan agreements has not flowed since October 1st,” he said. “On Friday, tomorrow, nearly 1,000 workers will lay down their tools after spending nearly $1 billion and countless hours of hard work on this project.”
The Trump administration announced it would no longer distribute billions in congressionally-approved funds to the GDC in October during the first day of the federal-government shut down, citing a need to ensure the project was in compliance with contracting rules that the feds had changed just hours before.
But weeks later, as Gateway officials demonstrated compliance, the Trump administration shifted gears.
White House spokesman Kush Desai claimed the funding freeze was over the fact that Democratic lawmakers had supposedly not been “prioritizing the interests of Americans over illegal aliens.”
As of this week, the tunnel project has exhausted it’s contingency line of credit, save for some of what GDC will need to wind down the project, Rinaldi told The News — including mothballing the massive tunnel boring machine currently sitting in pieces off of Tonnelle Avenue in Jersey City.
Nearly 1,000 construction workers could be laid off the project as early as this weekend if the Trump administration continues to block the funds.
“It’d be a real shame to have to close these gates and lay these booms down of these cranes and send all of our guys home, just to wait on some response from some politicians,” said Giulio Petroni, a foreman on the site with Laborer’s Union Local 731.
“We just want to keep on working, we want to keep on providing for our families.”
GDC sued the Trump administration earlier this week, alleging the refusal to fund the tunnel constituted a breach of contract, but that case isn’t expected to be taken up before this weekend.
An emergency hearing in a second suit — an eleventh-hour effort to restore the funding brought this week by the states of New York and New Jersey — is expected in Manhattan federal court on Friday.
