The MTA bungled routine garage repair work so badly the agency now has to fork over an additional half a million dollars and add another year onto the project’s timeline.
Basic design mistakes in a $2.7 million project to repair a maintenance garage on Randall’s Island had transit officials asking the MTA board for an extra 20% to complete the work on the facility, where MTA Bridges and Tunnels parks and services its vehicles and equipment..
Jamie Torres-Springer, president of MTA Construction & Development, said the MTA is still reviewing the reason for the blunder.
“Whenever there is an issue that results from design errors, we go after the perpetrators of those errors and make sure that they’re fully on the hook for it,” Torres-Springer said.
Either way taxpayers will be on the hook for another $582,550 to fix exit corridors and other “miscellaneous” spaces at the RFK Bridge Fleet Garage.
The schedule has also slipped by a year, with expected completion pushed from April 26, 2026 to April 22, 2027.
In a staff summary prepared for the May board meeting, MTA officials said that the contractor, SP Construction Management, Inc., found “differing site conditions and other discrepancies between the Contract drawings and actual field conditions.”
MTA Construction & Development bluntly wrote, “These changes appear to be the result of in‑house design errors or omissions.”
The same document said the agency is “evaluating the cause of these issues in order to prevent similar issues from recurring.”
Torres-Springer tried to spin the screw-up as unavoidable at a press conference after the board approved the contract change.
“The construction process very often results in conditions being discovered that you don’t know about until you start work,” Torres-Springer said.
MTA head Janno Lieber has repeatedly touted MTA Construction & Development’s work as “faster, better and cheaper,” including in his budget testimony to state lawmakers as he argued for continued funding for the agency’s $68.4 billion capital plan.
“We’re getting work done faster, better and cheaper than ever,” Lieber said to the state lawmakers on Feb. 3.
Because of the design errors at the garage, the MTA had to issue new drawings that added work, including sloped base slabs with more floor drains, a new pump for drainage and a full replacement of a deteriorated roof with new supports.
Some other planned elements, such as a new door, stair, canopy and drywells, were dropped from the project.
The extra construction work will cost more than $270,000 and another $309,000 is budgeted “for impact costs associated with the delay,” board documents said.
