I love stories like this one in today’s Times.
William Neuman, transit beat writer for The Times, discovered that the groundbreaking for the Second Ave. subway cost a cool $89,000. He decided to share that price tag and ask straphangers how they felt about footing the bill. The responses are, of course, classic.
Whether $89,000, a minuscule amount of the $4 billion budget for the subway project, seems like a lot or a little may depend on your perspective. In simple terms, it is the equivalent of about 1,171 30-day MetroCards.
“I object,” said Randi Kornreich, who was waiting yesterday for a No. 6 train at 96th Street and Lexington Avenue. “I’m a penny pincher, and I think any time they can save money they should and pass it along to the citizen who pays enough in taxes already.”
The MTA of course defended their “historic event,” and, really, who can blame them? While Jeffrey Soffin’s rationale behind the event — “it is important to expose the public to our infrastructure to better understand the transit system that drives the regional economy” — sounds fairly unimpressive, it is important to put one’s best foot forward for something that truly could be an historic event.
But what did the Authority get for $89,000? Well, an outside contractor earned $61,000 to clean and renovate the existing tunnel and to build a stage for the event. The authority spent $1,5000 on 300 copies of a promotional DVD and $1,500 on minature miner’s picks inscribed with the date of the groundbreaking. The cost to wire the tunnel for lighting and electrical hookups cost $16,000. Sounds like money well spent.