New Jersey and New York have teamed up to sue President Donald Trump’s administration for withholding $15 billion in funding for Gateway, the Hudson River rail tunnels project.
The complaint, filed late Tuesday in the Southern District of New York, alleges the administration is illegally withholding congressionally appropriated funding intended to build a passenger train link between North Bergen and Manhattan and rehabilitate the more than century-old tunnels. The project is on the verge of halting on Friday, the states warn, a risk to the economic future of the U.S. Northeast.
The suit seeks emergency relief to end the indefinite funding freeze by the U.S. Department of Transportation, a defendant. Other defendants are the Federal Railroad and the Federal Transit administrations. The federal funds are needed “to ensure that active construction on the project can continue, that workers do not lose their jobs and the states and their residents are not harmed.”
“It’s really important to make sure that this project, the most critical infrastructure project in our country, continues to go forward,” Jennifer Davenport, the New Jersey acting attorney general, told NJ Spotlight News after she and Gov. Mikie Sherrill announced the lawsuit at a press conference in Newark on Wednesday. “We’re standing up for residents to say we need this money — we need to keep this going.”
The existing tunnels, damaged by Hurricane Sandy-driven floodwaters, service the Northeast Corridor, the nation’s busiest passenger rail route. Amtrak, their owner, says the link is safe but increasingly unreliable. Should the tunnels become unusable by Amtrak and NJ Transit trains, experts warn, a regional economic recession is a certainty. The link is used by roughly 200,000 passengers a day along 457 miles of track that connect Boston and Washington, D.C.
The filing comes after the project’s overseer, Gateway Development Corporation, sued the Trump administration this week, alleging breach of contract. The states’ lawsuit is based on a different legal argument
“New Jersey and New York didn’t have a contract, but that doesn’t mean we weren’t harmed, and that we aren’t going to be harmed,” Davenport said. “The harms for us, again, are the thousands of jobs that are lost, the money that is being spent and will continue to be spent, and what will happen for us for public health, public safety if this doesn’t go forward.”
The costliest infrastructure project in U.S. history is expected to create 95,000 construction-related jobs and generate $20 billion in economic activity. It has an estimated long-term economic benefit of $445 billion.
The Trump administration has given shifting reasons for putting a hold on Gateway, at times alleging federal contracting compliance issues and, at other times, blaming federal government shutdowns. Trump previously said the funds would be blocked to spite Democratic leaders, especially Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York). Davenport said the Trump administration’s changing logic is itself a violation of federal laws and regulations.
“We’ve had different reasons over time as to why the funding is no longer there,” Davenport said. “And what we would argue is that any of them are pretextual, because what we’ve heard exactly out of the president’s own mouth is that it was up to him.”
