Bids Land Early for Penn Station; Nadler Blasts Process as Tainted by Trump

“This is not a process insulated from politics. Donald Trump—not transit experts, not New Yorkers—makes the final call.”

With those words, Rep. Jerry Nadler lead a frontal assault on Amtrak’s process for selecting a Master Developer to transform Penn Station:

“First, there is no transparency. Three developer teams have been shortlisted behind closed doors—all three with strong connections to the Trump administration and its donors, and all three actively lobbying the White House. No RFP has been released. No public hearings. No community input.”

Nadler and the other elected officials, all Democrats who represent Penn Station and its neighborhood, had been engaged in a low-level feud with Amtrak to force it to release the key document, the Request for Proposal, that it is using to negotiate with the three finalists for the Penn Station project.

But after Amtrak’s man-in-charge of the project, Andy Byford, said he could not release the RFP because it would compromise the procurement process, the elected officials escalated the fight with a news conference inside the station.

“When all three finalists have ties to Trump’s political world and the White House picks the winner, that is not a competitive process. That is a political favor waiting to be handed out.”

Thus, the long and tortured process for making amends for one of New York’s original development sins, the destruction in 1963 of the original Penn Station, entered the Trump era of partisan polarization.

Amtrak, a federally owned corporation, owns Penn Station, but for several years the planning for its future was divided between the MTA, in charge of improving the station itself, and Amtrak and New Jersey Transit, who were overseeing how to expand the station’s capacity to handle the growth of service with New Jersey in the years ahead.

But exactly a year ago, the Trump administration, feuding with New York on several fronts, threw the MTA off the job and consolidated the rebuilding of the station and expanding its capacity under one leader, Byford.

Amtrak officials note that Byford has met extensively with community representatives, including the local elected officials and their staff, as he homed in on selecting a private partner for the massive project.

On Thursday, April 30, Amtrak announced that “USDOT and Amtrak have received all three submissions” from the three finalists for Master Developer of the Penn Station project.

Byford will review the submissions along with a “Technical Evaluation Team” over the next month and is expected to make a recommendation in June, the statement said.

An Amtrak official said Byford will present his recommendation for approval to the Amtrak Board, the Federal Railroad Administration and the White House. The official described this as “standard practice all over the world for a project that will receive billions of dollars from the federal government.”

After the recommendation is approved, Byford has promised a year of public engagement, including an extensive environmental review, before any final decisions are made on design or funding of the new station.

https://www.westsidespirit.com/news/amtrak-says-no-final-decisions-on-penn-station-before-public-weighs-in-AD5731604

Earlier in the week, the US Department of Transportation, which oversees Amtrak, slapped back at Nadler. “While the Congressman frantically tries to pad his unimpressive legacy, the Trump Administration remains laser-focused on delivering a big, beautiful train station for New Yorkers at the Speed of Trump.”

While the concern of the elected officials was clear, their goal was not.

“We don’t need Penn Station decided by Trump donors,” said Tony Simone, state assembly member whose district includes Penn Station. “We must take this process out of his corrupt hands.”

It wasn’t clear what that alternative process would be. Nadler stressed in his statement a bigger role for the MTA. “The MTA has been shut out,” Nadler said. “The agency that serves millions of New York commuters every single day has no meaningful seat at this table.”

Amtrak however stressed that the MTA was welcome to that table, where New Jersey Transit is already sitting

“MTA continues to be an active partner in the NY Penn Station Transformation process by sitting on our Station Working Advisory Group, participating in project meetings, and having the opportunity to sign a Memo of Agreement (MOA) on the project, which they declined, and NJ TRANSIT accepted,” an Amtrak statement said. “Although they are choosing to rely on the terms of their lease, they have an open invitation to reconsider and sign the MOA to become full partners on the project.”

In the labyrinthian world of Penn Station, Amtrak owns the property from the street down (the Pennsylvania Railroad sold off from the street up to build The Garden and an office building), but its largest users are the MTA’s Long Island Railroad and New Jersey Transit.

The immediate issue is the selection of a private developer to partner with Amtrak on what it calls the “transformation” of the Station. Trump himself has acknowledged having meetings related to the project even as Byford was trying to insulate the selection process from allegations of unfairness.

He described one of those meetings in a phone call recently to the New York Post. The Post writer, Miranda Devine, was preparing a column endorsing a plan for Penn Station supported by a major Trump donor, Tom Klingenstein, who also promotes the revival of classic architecture.

That plan would move Madison Square Garden across Seventh Avenue to make way for a park and new train hall with design echoes of the McKim, Mead and White original.

But Trump telephoned Devine to say that moving the Garden was impractical and that he favored another plan supported by two other allies, James Dolan, owner of the Garden, and Steven Roth, CEO of Vornado Realty Trust, which is part of one of the three finalist development consortiums, that would leave the Garden in place and rebuild around it.

Andrew Cuomo says that was originally his idea, but it has been promulgated more recently by the consortium including Vornado and led by Halmar, the US subsidiary of the Italian developer ASTM.

Trump told Devine he spoke to Roth and Dolan. Other sources reported that he met with supporters of the Klingenstein plan, from the Grand Penn Alliance.

“We will not be presented with a done deal cooked up in secret between the President and politically connected billionaires,” Nadler said. “We will not allow public assets to be handed to private developers under terms the public never saw, never debated, and never approved. And we will not allow the MTA to be frozen out of decisions that directly affect its riders and operations.”

Several Manhattan Democrats, including now comptroller Mark Levine, have praised the Halmar plan.

Nadler noted that the full cost of the project isn’t known, nor the plan for reimbursing the private developer. Byford has pointed out that the full cost won’t be known until a plan is agreed on.

Brad Hoylman-Sigal, the borough President, said Trump tainted the procurement process by meeting personally with potential developers. “New Yorkers want a new Penn Station,” he told Straus News. “But we want it in a way that the scales aren’t tipped toward a favored Trump developer.”