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The price tag for the MTA's problem-plagued East Side Access megaproject to link the LIRR to Grand Central Terminal has risen another billion dollars to about $11.2 billion - more than 2 1/2 times the original estimate when the project was first proposed in the late 1990s.
The MTA is blaming much of the latest $955 million budget increase on Amtrak, saying that its failure to provide needed help at a critical work site in Queens has resulted in lengthy delays and ballooning costs.
Despite the latest setback, MTA officials say the project - called the largest public works effort underway in the United States - will remain on schedule to be completed by the end of 2022, thanks in part to new management strategies that will speed up the pace of the work.
Metropolitan Transportation Authority chief development officer Janno Lieber, who last year took over management of East Side Access, acknowledged that MTA mismanagement of the project was also a factor in the latest cost overrun.
Among the agency's mistakes, Lieber said: setting unrealistic budget and timeline estimates "without really knowing the complexity" of the project; unnecessarily splitting the project into 50 different contracts that have frequently conflicted with each other; making discretionary design changes after the project was well underway; overpaying for some contracts that were not competitively bid and even at one point ordering steel beams that were the wrong size.
"We bear some of the responsibility. But the principal change impact to the cost is the extension of the time of the construction. And that is mostly attributable to Amtrak," said Lieber, referencing what the MTA has said is Amtrak's inadequate cooperation at the Harold Interlocking in Queens, where all work involving Amtrak's overhead catenary wire system must be overseen by the federally funded intercity passenger railroad.
In a letter to new Amtrak president and chief executive officer Richard Anderson sent Friday, Lieber said Amtrak had "ignored"...