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The Dinkins administration is aggressively freeing up construction dollars and speeding projects way ahead of building schedules, even as it slashes capital spending plans for the next several years.
In a counter-cyclical burst, budget officials are jump-starting timetables on dozens of sites where funds have already been committed. These range from the Boardwalk in Rockaway to the concrete upper deck at Yankee Stadium.
The acceleration of $137.2 million in capital spending, aimed at boosting the depressed building trades, also keeps a promise Mayor Dinkins made in his State of the City speech to rush more projects into the bid cycle.
That means a small windfall of almost 50 contracts will be handed out shortly to rebuild the city's crumbling playgrounds in Red Hook, tenements in Flatbush and calibration laboratories in Greenpoint.
While that won't work miracles or reverse the devastation of the construction industry, it will result in a jobs boomlet in a trade where nearly one out of every two hard hats is out of work.
"The speed-up in capital dollars for capital projects in fiscal 1992 will create more than 3,500 jobs," says Rudolph J. Rinaldi, director of the mayor's office on construction.
That's just the beginning. If successful, the next phase of the plan gets under way in fiscal 1993 when the city speeds construction of the Third Water Tunnel by accelerating $250 million in capital commitment schedules.
The excavation of "Shaft 26-B" and the tunneling of "Queens-Brooklyn" were slated to begin in 1995 under a complex construction cycle for the tunnel, which was started in 1970 and...