NYC NOW - June 11, 2024: Midday News

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

The James Beard awards, sometimes called the “Foodie Oscars,” named Charlie Mitchell of Brooklyn Heights’ “Clover Hill” best chef in New York on Monday. Meanwhile, elected officials celebrate the groundbreaking of a construction hub in Brooklyn for a major offshore wind farm planned 15 miles south of Long Island. Mayor Adams says the project will create 1,000 union jobs by 2026, some of which could go to local students. Plus, MTA CEO Janno Lieber has spoken for the first time since Gov. Kathy Hochul “indefinitely paused” the agency’s congestion pricing plan, creating a budget gap. WNYC’s Sean Carlson talks with transit reporter Stephen Nessen, who was at MTA headquarters to cover Lieber’s remarks.

Welcome to NYC Now. Your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. It's Tuesday, June 11th. Here's the Midday News from Veronica Del Valle. The James Beard Awards, sometimes called the Foodie Oscars, named the best chef in New York last night, Charlie Mitchell of the Brooklyn Heights New American Restaurant, Clover Hill. Mitchell beat out a field of chefs mostly based at Brooklyn restaurants,

like Sofrey and Augie's Counter. Rick Kamak is with the Institute of Culinary Education. He says a few years ago, the awards always went to Manhattan restaurants. Now things are trending east. At one point it was Williamsburg, and then slowly but Chile it became Bushwick, and Bushwick was like, where the hell is Bushwick? Now it's like Bushwick is mainstream. You know, it just keeps going further and further out.

We'll be at the tip of Montauk pretty soon. You can see more details about the winners on our news website. site Gothamist. Elected officials are cheering the groundbreaking of a new construction hub in Brooklyn for a major offshore wind farm that's planned 15 miles south of Long Island. Mayor Adams says the project near Sunset Park Waterfront will create a thousand union jobs between now and 26, and some of them could go to local students. By using our state and city colleges, we can have a feeder into these jobs. It's something that has been ignored before. We're not leaving our students behind.

A company called Equinor is building the wind plant. They say the Brooklyn Hub will act as a staging area for building the turbines. Officials say the 800-Magawatt Empire Wind One project will eventually power half a million homes. Stay close. There's more after the break. You're listening on WNYC. You're listening on WNYC. I'm Sean Carlson.

MTA CEO Janel Lieber has. broken his silence. Governor Hokel's top appointee to the transit agency addressed the media after staying in the shadows. In the day since his boss did a 180 on the agency's congestion pricing plan, Hockel indefinitely paused the plan to toll vehicles driving into Manhattan south of 60th Street, creating a gap in the MTA's budget in the process. W.NIC Stephen Nesson was at MTAHQ covering Lieber's remarks. He joins us now. Stephen has been nearly a week since we heard from Lieber. We haven't heard from him since Governor Hockel killed. the plan that his agency has spent years preparing for? What did he have to say? Well, first of all,

he came out and sort of thanked everyone that had worked so tirelessly for so many years. I think he said something like, you know, 1,800 hours or something of time spent, you know, collectively putting all this together, this congestion pricing plan. There was years in the making. And he did break his silence. And we were sort of wondering, you know, what is he going to say? Is he mad at Hokkel? Is he going to start screaming? And he was very subdued. In fact, I've, I've, maybe never seen him so subdued in my, you know, he's not a flamboyant character by any means, but fiery and very outspoken proponent of congestion pricing. And basically when it came down to this, he's like, you know, the MTA is not a political agency. But sometimes, you know, we don't,

you know, we don't look at things exactly the same way is about as diplomatically as he could put it. Remind listeners what projects the revenue from congestion pricing was supposed to pay for and what happens to them now. Yeah. So, I mean, that is the big thing. What happens next? You said there's like a $15 billion hole in their capital plan that was supposed to pay for new signals, new electric buses, electrical work, basic structural stuff, even like painting, you know, outdoor, elevated station so they don't crumble and rust and collapse. All of that's part of this capital plan, as well as the Second Avenue subway extension. That's actually a big part of it, because the feds gave us over $3 billion to get it started with the promise that we would have the rest of the money.

It's over $7 billion project to complete it. So now they're scrambling trying to figure out, well, you know, how are we going to keep that big chunk of federal dollars, which they don't want to lose? But congestion pricing is not going to come anytime soon. So right now what Chair Lieber really laid out was this sort of draconian cuts that are going to have to happen to this plan. Are we going to do signals? Are we going to do ADA? Another complication is they settled this years-long ADA lawsuit for adding elevators to stations because they are not in compliance.

And they got a deadline for when they need to get this done. A lot of the money to get that done was supposed to come from congestion pricing. So how are riders going to be affected by this pause? Right. So like the biggest thing is how do we not make sure the station, you know, the subway stations and trains don't slip into a state of disrepair? I heard the specter of the bad old days, the 70s, floated, more than once in that, you know, they need to figure out what is the most top priority so that signals don't start failing because it's a real problem.

The, you know, the overhead painted, you know, the painting of the overhead elevated stations, you know, that's a real thing. So they're actually going to bring in the former MTA chair, not Pat Foy, but the one before that, Tom Prendergast, to help them prioritize what are the most important projects so riders don't start really feeling the impact of that lack of funding for new signals. and electrical work, things like that. Now, the MTA, as we've been saying, has been working with the governor's office for years now. How are they taking all of this over at 2 Broadway? Well, it seems like they're taking it in stride, taking a deep breath, but really, like,

they don't have a lot of time. The MTA board is going to meet in two weeks, and they're hoping to start to prioritize which projects need to get changed from the current capital plan. You know, they'd also spend years planning for all these projects, You know, like we said, second avenue subway, there's also like the Park Avenue viaduct, which most people probably don't know about, but is crucial to making sure Metro North trains can leave Penn Station and actually get out of the city. And a lot of that work is underway. And, you know, they have to pick and choose which projects are going to get killed.

Kill your darlings. It's going to be really tough, I think, for them to do that. And also, you know, there's just basic questions about, you know, what are, you know, what about riders? how much are they going to have to pay for this? Because if they don't have the money from congestion pricing, you know, there's always, where is it going to come from? It could come from riders. So that's a concern. I will say, you know, the most emotional I saw the chair get today was thanking all the advocates for all their work. You know, I almost think his voice cracked a little bit to see like the outpouring from all the, you know, protests and congestion

pricing advocates and local politicians who've supported it this whole time. And, you know, they continue to. They've been protesting as we've had on our air for the last couple days. That's WNYC's Stephen Nesson. Stephen, thanks for talking to us. Thank you. Thanks for listening. This is NYC now from WNYC. Check us out for updates every weekday, three times a date for the latest news headlines and occasional deep times and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back this evening.