Among those invited by lawmakers to the State of the Union address Tuesday night was Gearóid Keogh, 38, a construction worker scheduled to be a guest of Sen. Chuck Schumer — an appearance, though, Keogh ultimately missed due to Amtrak delays.
Schumer, the Brooklyn-born lawyer, and Keogh, the Bronx-born foreman, have both been instrumental in the Hudson River Tunnel project that the Trump administration has been trying to kill — Schumer as its biggest booster in the U.S. Senate, and Keogh as one of the men and women tasked with building the thing.
Born to Irish immigrants, Keogh grew up in Woodlawn. Over the past 16 years, he’s worked on an array of some of the most prominent Gotham construction projects: the Freedom Tower, the 9/11 memorial, Kennedy Airport’s Terminal 4 and the MTA’s East Side Access project.
For the past seven months, Keogh, a member of Laborers’ Local 731, has been a foreman at a construction site off of the West Side Highway in Manhattan, preparing the New York-side landing for a massive twin-tube rail tunnel that will ultimately connect Penn Station to the New Jersey Meadowlands.
Talking to the Daily News while waiting for his train to D.C., before learning he wouldn’t be able to make the major political event, Keogh said he chose to work on the tunnel project because he assumed the job would be a long and stable one.
“I’d worked for the contractor in the past, on East Side Access,” he said. “So when they got that job, I saw the longevity [of it]. I wound up requesting to go on [the tunnel] job.”
But that was months before the project — the $16 billion centerpiece of an effort to double the number of passenger rail lines between the Garden State and Gotham — got caught up in the political gamesmanship of the Trump administration, with the president blocking millions in congressionally promised funds earmarked for it.
An eleventh-hour legal battle resulted in federal court order to temporarily return the funding — but not before the project’s last line of credit ran out, forcing the layoffs of about 1,000 construction workers, Keogh included.
As of Tuesday, those workers were back on the job. But as the federal government continues to assert to the courts that it can cut that funding off again, it’s unclear how long the work can continue.
“For the last two weeks, obviously, I haven’t been getting paid,” Keogh told The News. “I was prepared to sit out a couple of weeks. Other than that, I would have had to start looking for a new job. Because bills mount up, you know? The uncertainty is stressful. You gotta work.”
“January and February are really slow,” he said of the construction business. “Pretty much everyone that got laid off wasn’t really finding anything else.”
Keogh said he and his colleagues didn’t think they’d end up in this situation when the Trump administration first cut off the project’s funding in October — early on the first day of the federal government shutdown.
“To be honest, the general consensus back in October was that we were going to be fine, because the [project] was already funded,” he said. “Everyone didn’t sweat, they said, ‘It’s not going to affect us.’ … But everything changed.”
Keogh said he and his colleagues were getting “a little nervous” in the run-up to the court decision that ordered the feds to temporarily unfreeze the funds.
“Thank God, the money was released,” he said.
“It definitely makes you a little reluctant to be on a job like this where [funding] could be affected, you know, [by] one push of a button,” he said. “Some other job [with city or state funding], you know, less politics, probably makes things run a little smoother.”
Asked what he wanted New Yorkers to know about why he was planning to head to Washington, Keogh said, “Accountability.”
“If Washington says that the money is awarded, we expect them to prove it,” the foreman said. “Keep funding available — don’t take it out on the everyday worker.”
“Someone’s got to hold them accountable, you know?” he said of the Trump administration. “Because we’re the ones who suffer.”
“There’s thousands of jobs on the line here,” he said. “Real paychecks, people’s pensions, families that need to be supported.”
