Where's the Money?

As part of the $787 billion stimulus package pushed by President Obama, mass transit agencies around the nation were to get a boost. New York City's mass transit agencies got a total of $1.57 billion.

Where did that money go? It hasn't been spent, even though the City has several seriously lagging capital projects, to say nothing of projects that could have been accomplished in relatively short time to maintain and upgrade service in areas around the city that were in dire need.

Transit agencies in the city have received $1.57 billion in federal stimulus funds for capital projects, but so far have only spent a tiny fraction of the money that was intended to create jobs, a new study by the New York Building Congress has found.

"It has been almost six months since Congress and the Obama administration approved the stimulus package, yet close to nothing has been expended on the capital side," said Building Congress president Richard Anderson.

"We have seen a good deal of spending on workforce programs and health and social services, all of which are important. Unfortunately, those expenditures do not provide the same bang for the stimulus buck as direct construction spending."

Using data from the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council, an umbrella group of transit agencies, the Building Congress found that virtually none of the stimulus funds for big-ticket transit projects has been spent.

Slightly less than half of the approved funding will go to two Transit Authority projects, the Fulton Street Transit Center, with $423 million, and the Second Avenue Subway, which gets $276 million, the report says.

Fulton Street Transit Hub remains little more than a hole in the ground, and is years behind schedule.

It's a block away from Ground Zero, and remains a black eye for the MTA, which wanted to turn it into a Grand Central Station for Lower Manhattan, where multiple train lines converge within blocks of Wall Street, and yet the maze of passageways are extremely difficult to navigate and several lines do not connect at all, even though they're within a block of each other.