Thursday Headlines: Helping The Hudson Line Edition
The MTA has kicked off the design phase of a $270 million project to fortify Metro-North’s Hudson Line between Spuyten Duyvil and Hastings-on-Hudson, a stretch that’s flooded and mudslid its way into service disruptions for years thanks to its precarious perch between the river and steep slopes. The $19.7 million contract, awarded to a joint venture of STV and WSP, is the first real step in an $800 million resiliency push under the MTA’s 2025-2029 Capital Plan.
MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber has been making this pitch for years, and he made it again Wednesday. “Mass transit is the antidote to climate change, but we need to deal with the accelerating impacts it is already having on our system,” Lieber said.
Metro-North President Justin Vonashek, whose railroad has watched this exact corridor wash out again and again, put it in more personal terms. “We have a responsibility to protect this corridor and the people who depend on it every day,” he said.
The funding traces back in part to state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, who secured $20 million for a related resiliency project further down the line after Hurricane Ida flooded the tracks in 2021. She said the new investment builds on that earlier work. “This investment in the Hudson Line is a crucial step in safeguarding our commuter network and protecting the communities that rely on it,” Stewart-Cousins said. Construction on the new project isn’t expected to start until 2029.
Elsewhere in the Empire State:
- A new Siena poll has Gov. Kathy Hochul leading Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman 50% to 41% among likely voters, while 63 percent of New Yorkers oppose building large data centers in their part of the state and 75 percent oppose renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America.” (BTPM)
- Latino leaders and elected officials gathered in Buffalo are focusing on immigration, affordability and other issues facing New York’s Latino communities as they organize ahead of the November election. (WXXI News)
- Cheektowaga Town Supervisor Brian Nowak is running for Erie County Democratic Party treasurer with a reform agenda that would increase financial oversight, make party leadership more transparent and require the party to follow its own bylaws. (Investigative Post)
- Gov. Hochul says she plans to campaign alongside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Bronx) as the two Democrats seek to build enthusiasm among voters ahead of November’s election. (WRVO)
- Ithaca’s Common Council is considering raising the mayor’s $30,000 salary, with city leaders debating whether the position’s workload and the city’s cost of living warrant bringing elected officials’ compensation closer to a living wage. (The Ithaca Voice)
- A woman was badly injured when her e-bike collided with a vehicle at Oneida and Hobart streets in Utica Wednesday afternoon, sending her to the hospital as police investigate the crash. (Syracuse.com)
- State Sen. Shelley Mayer, the new chair of the Democratic state Senate Campaign Committee, says Democrats are targeting several upstate races as they try to add seats in November. (State of Politics)
- The MTA is preparing a public-information campaign to teach riders how to use OMNY’s fare cap, after continued complaints from riders who don’t realize they must use the same card or device for all their taps to qualify for the $32 weekly cap. (amNewYork)
- New York City Council members are pushing legislation that would create “low-traffic neighborhoods” in five parts of the city by requiring DOT to install traffic-calming measures such as speed humps, medians or intersection barriers to discourage cut-through driving. (Gothamist)
- Brooklyn Democratic Party Chair Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn is proposing to expand the party’s executive committee from 42 members to more than 68 ahead of a leadership vote that could otherwise see reformers take control of the county party. (The City Reporter)
- New York school districts are finding that electric buses can be difficult to keep running in cold weather, with some districts reporting charger and heating failures after waiting years to receive vehicles that are increasingly required by the state’s school-bus electrification mandate. (The New York Times)
- Hochul abruptly fired New York’s chief technology officer, leaving the administration without publicly explaining the reason for removing the state’s top technology official. (The New York Post)
- Republican congressional candidate Jackie Auringer has faced scrutiny over YouTube playlists containing videos with racist and homophobic slurs in their titles, while she campaigns for a House seat in New York. (Judge Street Journal)
- Bruce Blakeman is pitching himself as a Republican who can win over Democrats in his challenge to Hochul, while arguing that his record in Nassau County and positions on state issues give him crossover appeal. (NY1)
- For Car Free Day, Newsday reporter Alfonso Castillo ditched his car for a trip from Valley Stream to the paper’s Melville offices using a bike, the LIRR, a Suffolk County bus and his own two feet, finding that the roughly 25-mile journey took more than two hours each way. (Newsday)
Read More:
Streetsblog has migrated to a new comment system. New commenters can register directly in the comments section of any article. Returning commenters: your previous comments and display name have been preserved, but you'll need to reclaim your account by clicking "Forgot your password?" on the sign-in form, entering your email, and following the verification link to set a new password — this is required because passwords could not be carried over during the migration. For questions, contact tips@streetsblog.org.
