The New Haven Rail Yard Budget Mess

Once again, our elected officials in Hartford have outdone themselves. At a time when mass transit seems the only alternative to high gas prices (ridership is soaring and trains are jammed), they are nickel and dime’ing our state’s transportation future.

The issue: the over-due rail yard maintenance facility in New Haven.

In 2005, lawmakers approved $300 million for these vital shops and repair facilities for our soon-to-be-delivered M8 rail cars. Now, everyone in Hartford seems shocked, stunned or amazed that the project has grown to $1.2 billion.

Mind you… the cost quadrupled partly because the project more than doubled in size, so let’s keep our apples and oranges straight.

At recent hearings, legislators have suggested that CDOT slash its plan, and indeed, the agency itself came up with $11 million in cost cuts. “That’s no more than a ‘rounding error’”, grumbled one lame-duck Senator.

At first, Governor Rell denied that she knew anything of these rising costs, sending her stalwart budget czar, Robert Genuario to fall on his sword by admitting that he had been told about the cost increase but neglected to tell the Governor. Good solider, bad boy.

Then a newspaper FOI suit found out that the Governor’s Chief of Staff, Lisa Moody (remember her… disciplined for soliciting campaign donations for Rell from state workers on ‘company time’?) knew about the price increase all along. And a CT-N videotape of a ribbon-cutting (which I personally attended), showed the Governor 10 feet away from CDOT officials when the media asked, and the agency disclosed, hard numbers about the necessary cost increases. Somebody wasn’t paying attention.
So, what is the Governor’s answer to the soaring cost increase? Why, hire more consultants and spend more money, of course! That’s right… Governor Rell wants to pay $630,000 for another audit of the CDOT plan.

Mind you, CDOT itself just finished paying other consultants to “value engineer” their design, and they’re the ones who found only $11 million in potential cuts.
What’s going on here? Who’s to blame? Or is this just “business as usual in Hartford”?

In my view… Let’s not blame CDOT for designing the kind of rail facility we really do need. Instead, blame our elected officials for not having designed and built it a decade or two ago when we should have and could have done so for much less.
Playing catch-up in the expensive transportation business is, well, expensive.
Lawmakers were shocked to hear that the MBTA built a similar locomotive shop for $258 million. But that was in the 1990’s when Hartford was ignoring transportation under the Rowland administration. Rome was burning and we all danced a jig to Rowland’s fiddling with taxes.

More recently, George Bush’s $3 trillion war in Iraq is also costing us dearly. The US dollar has plummeted in value, oil is soaring and construction materials are doing likewise because of Pentagon demand.

Engineers told lawmakers they now must factor in 10% annual inflation, not 3% as in years past. And because the New Haven rail yard project continues to 2017, well, you do the math.

I have seen the CDOT plans for the New Haven shops and, while neither our lawmakers nor I am engineers, they seem to make sense to me. We need these facilities! They are not a Lexus… just a Chevy as outside consultants have confirmed.

CDOT was wrong to low-ball the costs at $300 million without having finished the necessary design work. And maybe $1.2 billion is a bit high. But CDOT has explained the added costs and the longer we dicker, or waste more money on more consultants (the only people making money on transportation these days), the higher the cost will ultimately be.

We should have made these investments in transportation decades ago. Now we are paying the price. Let’s not compound these problems with further delays and political posturing. Get on with it!

CDOT's "Big Chill" To Commuters

Winter’s here… the time commuters dread the most. Will the trains run? Will they have heat? What if it snows? And now, a new worry… which platform will they depart on?

To continue with the needed caternary (overhead power-wire) replacement program (now ten years late and $100 million over budget), CDOT recently told commuters they’d have to board their morning rush hour trains from the opposite, or New Haven-bound, platform. Worse yet, this disruption to their morning routines would continue for four months!

When the CDOT announcement was posted at stations November 28^th, I called the agency in my capacity as Chairman of the Metro-North Commuter Council and asked, basically, “what are you thinking?!?” This was a major alteration with no notification to the Commuter Council and only days of notice to passengers.

I reminded the senior rail officials at CDOT that there is no shelter, no canopies or heat on those platforms. There are no amenities or vendors of coffee and newspapers, hard-working folks who could go bankrupt without business for four months. There are no ticket machines on the New Haven-bound platform meaning late-arriving passengers would be whacked $5 for on-board ticket purchases.

My CDOT contacts said “sorry, work must go on and this is the only way.” I said, “We’ll see”. And we did.

Members of the Commuter Council reached out to local elected officials warning them to expect some irate calls from constituents come Monday, December 4^th when the scheme was to go into effect. Using my professional PR skills, I got in touch with the media and told them what was afoot. Both of these efforts reached the Governor’s office, and in less than one day the plan was killed.

(Read Governor Rell’s press release on this issue and you’ll see an almost verbatim transcript of the Commuter Council’s media release. That kind of plagiarism I love!)

The Governor told CDOT to find an alternative plan to keep caternary work going and keep commuters warm. And CDOT did, quickly… announcing that bridge plates would be erected from Milford to Stamford, perhaps delaying trains by a few minutes. Everybody wins… especially commuters.

Why did CDOT attempt the “Big Chill” in the first place? Are these bureaucrats evil or stupid? In fact, they are neither. But they are focused on the business of running the railroad, sometimes forgetting the passengers those trains carry. They are also under-staffed, over-worked and dangerously distracted, waiting for the Governor’s Commission on the Reform of CDOT to issue its report and tell them if they still have a job.

I’d also suggest that many CDOT staffers are probably demoralized by the constant second-guessing they receive from Governor Rell, well intentioned as it may be. None of which is to excuse this amazingly crazy, ill-conceived plan to send commuters into the cold all winter for the expedience of contractors working on the wires.

So this winter when you’re waiting “dark and early” for your morning train, huddled in a heated waiting room with a cuppa Joe warming your hands, think of what might have been if the bureaucrats had got their way. And then you’ll understand why the Rail Commuter Council exists.