The MTA moved forward Monday with plans to keep the Second Avenue Subway extension on track, even as the transit authority wages a federal court battle over $60 million in withheld funding that threatens to derail the long-promised project.
The authority’s board is set to vote Wednesday on awarding the third of four contracts for the planned three-station extension of the Q line, which would push the route north from 96th Street through East Harlem to 125th Street. The vote comes less than two weeks after the MTA sued the Trump administration, accusing the federal government of breaching a 2023 contractual agreement by refusing to release the money.
Jamie Torres-Springer, president of MTA Construction and Development, said the start of work depends on resolving “the uncertainty created by the federal government’s recent refusal to reimburse us.” He added that the authority is “prepared to move quickly once federal uncertainty is resolved,” and committed to delivering the project on time and on budget if the contract award moves ahead as planned.
The work covered by this contract is the most technically demanding stretch of the entire extension. Workers will dig trenches 60 feet deep along Second Avenue between 105th and 110th streets, removing 215,000 cubic yards of earth to construct the 106th Street station. MTA officials described this phase as “perhaps the most technically challenging” portion of the project.
Despite the scale of the excavation, the MTA says Second Avenue will remain open to vehicles throughout construction. Jignesh Shah, senior director for MTA Construction and Development, said “special care will be taken to ensure the access to the buildings, businesses and schools is continuously maintained” along the route. That matters enormously to East Harlem residents and business owners who have already watched their neighborhood absorb years of preparation work. La Amistad Pizzeria and Grill, for one, is currently operating behind construction fencing near the site.
The new work would also connect the existing tail tracks at the northern end of the first phase to a tunnel that has sat dormant since the 1970s, when a fiscal crisis forced the city to halt construction on a subway line first proposed in 1929. That dormant tunnel, unused for more than five decades, would finally be put to use.
Torres-Springer called the project a fulfillment of “a promise almost a century old to bring subway service to East Harlem.” That framing is hard to argue with. The neighborhood has been passed over, promised, and disappointed on this subway extension for generations. The first phase, which opened in 2017 with new stations at 72nd, 86th and 96th streets, stopped just short of East Harlem. The communities north of 96th Street, disproportionately Black and Latino, have been waiting ever since.
Now the federal government is standing in the way. The MTA’s lawsuit charges that the Trump administration’s refusal to release the $60 million has forced the authority to pull money away from other critical transportation projects to cover the gap. The $7 billion total cost of the extension makes federal partnership essential. The MTA cannot absorb a federal funding freeze and simply move on.
This is the tension at the heart of what should be a straightforward infrastructure story. The MTA has contracts. It has a construction schedule. It has a legally binding agreement with the federal government signed in 2023. And yet here we are, with the agency in court trying to force the government to honor its word while simultaneously trying to project confidence to contractors, communities, and commuters that the project remains viable.
If construction begins later this year as hoped, East Harlem residents would finally see real, tangible progress toward subway service that connects them to the rest of the city the way the rest of Manhattan has long taken for granted. Whether the courts move fast enough to keep that timeline intact is now the central question. The MTA is doing what it can to keep moving. The federal government needs to get out of the way.
