Maryland Gov. Wes Moore to unveil new design for Baltimore's Key Bridge on Tuesday
BALTIMORE — Gov. Wes Moore and the Maryland Transportation Authority plan to unveil the new concept for the design of the Francis Scott Key Bridge at Tradepoint Atlantic on Tuesday.
The new design marks is a 'significant milestone' in the multiyear project to restore the connection with the community, enhance safety and improve accessibility and economic growth, according to a news release.
Along with Lt. Gov. Aruna Miller, Maryland Transportation Secretary Paul J. Wiedefeld and MTA Executive Director Bruce Gartner, Moore plans to host a news conference outlining the new developments at 11:30 a.m. at Tradepoint's Sparrows Point facility.
On March 26, 2024, the Dali container ship, which weighed more than 112,000 tons loaded with freight, experienced a reported power outage near the Baltimore bridge and smashed into one of its principal supporting piers around 1:30 a.m. The bridge crumbled in an instant, sending a crew of workers, who were repairing potholes on Interstate 695, tumbling into the frigid river below. Six highway construction workers were killed.
The Dali had just left the Port of Baltimore for an intended monthslong voyage to Sri Lanka.
Officials have pledged to hold those behind the ship accountable for the crash, depending on an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board. The independent federal agency is probing everything from what went wrong aboard the ship to the bridge's previous design.
The replacement bridge is expected to be completed by October 2028 and will cost between $1.7 billion and $1.9 billion, according to state officials. Congress has approved full funding for the project.
Construction crews on barges, drills, cranes, tugs and service vessels have begun drilling to collect soil samples and map subsurface waterways around the Key Bridge. Officials with the MTA said noise impacts and traffic disruptions will be minimal and will not significantly impact navigation on the Patapsco River.
Demolition of the remaining structure is slated to begin this spring with construction beginning shortly thereafter.
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Politico
2 hours ago
- Politico
Cuomo's management of the MTA was fraught — and offers a look into how he would lead NYC
NEW YORK — One of Andrew Cuomo's testiest exchanges with a campaign rival offered a revealing look into how the former governor ran the nation's largest transit system. During the final debate in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, Brad Lander claimed that, as governor, Cuomo had 'screwed' and 'cheated' immigrant workers who washed subways during the pandemic. In batting down the allegation, Cuomo reminded New Yorkers that sometimes he acknowledges he's a micromanager — and sometimes he doesn't. 'They should never have hired illegal immigrants — if it is true,' Cuomo said of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. 'But obviously I had nothing to do with them hiring anyone.' Lander balked at Cuomo's use of the term 'illegal immigrants' and fired back, saying the orders for the cleaning service 'came from on high.' 'Oh, I see,' Cuomo said. 'So every contract that the MTA contracts, you want me to be held responsible? Come on.' The idea for the cleaning was something Cuomo announced in late April 2020, prompting an unprecedented overnight closure of the subway system. And for anyone familiar with his reputation as a micromanager, it's not a stretch to think Cuomo could actually be responsible for the contract. After all, as governor, Cuomo involved himself in rethinking how to repair the tunnel that carries the L train, picking the color of subway tiles and pressing the MTA to spend a quarter billion dollars to decorate a bridge with colorful, pulsating lights. At other times, though, Cuomo has claimed the MTA wasn't his thing. 'I have representation on the board,' the then-governor said in 2017, downplaying his role. 'The city of New York has representation on the board, so does Nassau, Suffolk, Dutchess, Putnam, Rockland, other counties, OK?' His rivals aren't buying it. According to them, the former governor's rollercoaster leadership of the MTA informs how he would helm the country's biggest city. Lander, Zohran Mamdani and the alliance of progressives seeking to block Cuomo from winning the Democratic primary have tried to capitalize on every perceived weakness, from his treatment of women who accused him of sexual harassment to the nursing home Covid-19 deaths during his tenure. Cuomo has denied wrongdoing. Some of his MTA controversies — especially his redirecting of transit funds to struggling state-run ski resorts and his mixed messaging about who runs the agency — have been part of the battery of campaign attacks against him. 'The first thing that New Yorkers deserve out of a leader is an acknowledgment of their own responsibilities,' Mamdani, the state assemblymember eating into Cuomo's lead, told POLITICO on Saturday. 'There were years where he tried to tell New Yorkers that the MTA was actually under the auspices of Bill de Blasio, and what we need is someone who owns up to the scale of the crisis at hand.' Cuomo campaign spokesperson Rich Azzopardi responded by ticking off the former governor's list of accomplishments. 'Governor Cuomo increased MTA operating funding by $2 billion a year, passed the largest capital plan in history, increasing it 125 percent to $54.8 billion, and he proudly finished the Second Avenue Subway and Moynihan Train Station — two projects generations of politicians talked about but didn't have the slightest clue how to actually build,' Azzopardi said. He pointed to the L train tunnel project and the East Side Access project, which connected the Long Island Rail Road to a newly opened Grand Central Madison terminal. 'The advocates and the far left didn't support that nor did they support hiring 500 MTA police to combat subway crime — history has borne out both those decisions,' Azzopardi added. That isn't nearly all there is to Cuomo's track record when it comes to the MTA, though. To understand Cuomo's role with the MTA, it's important to know who's actually in charge. The agency's board has a complex balance of power, with the New York City mayor, suburban county executives and state Senate having some say over its voting members. The governor, though, controls the nominating process, has more board representatives than anyone in the state and picks its chair and CEO. Early in his administration, Cuomo was so notorious for keeping his distance from the agency's problems that John Raskin, the former head of the Riders Alliance, made it his mission to get straphangers to understand the power Albany had over their commutes. In the summer of 2015, the group took a cardboard cutout of Cuomo on a tour of the subway system to make its case. That hands-off approach made Cuomo's exchange with Lander all the more galling to the transit advocacy group. 'He's still running away from the major responsibility he had to New York City as governor,' said current Riders Alliance spokesperson Danny Pearlstein. At City Hall, Cuomo would have far less power over the MTA than he did as governor, but as governor, in one of many clashes with Mayor de Blasio, he called it the 'city subway system.' 'As governor, he defunded and badly weakened the subway system and caused the summer of hell,' Lander said Saturday as he campaigned outside an Upper West Side subway station. The so-called summer of hell was an infamous series of transit problems in 2017 that began with Amtrak's Penn Station but also included MTA infrastructure breakdowns that left its customers suffering from the worst on-time performance of any major rapid transit system in the world. As that hell was beginning, Cuomo said his responsibility for the MTA merely consisted of appointing a few people to its board. But during his tenure, he also exerted control. In 2016, he was publicly reported to be 'hands on' and fretting about details like circuits that were complicating work on the Second Avenue subway. In early 2019, he was hailed for avoiding a shutdown of the L subway line. By the time a new subway boss, Andy Byford, arrived at the agency in 2018, Cuomo was 'sinking his hands deeper every day,' according to the late New York Times reporter Jim Dwyer, a legendary observer of the subway system. By spring 2019, another local news outlet had enough fodder to compile a list of Cuomo's 'greatest MTA micro-managing hits.' Out on the campaign trail, Cuomo has pointed to an unsafe subway system as one of the reasons he's running. In the speech launching his bid, he talked about an era when 'government worked and the subways were safe. But today people stand with their backs against the walls, away from the tracks and away from each other, wary, on guard, afraid they might be the next victim, afraid of New York at its worst.' Cuomo has run his campaign for mayor on a platform of experience and competence, including his three terms as governor, as New York attorney general and as U.S. secretary of Housing and Urban Development. 'The mayor of the city of New York — we have to understand that that is basically a management job,' the former governor told a Brooklyn megachurch Sunday. His opponents contend that's the point and have mocked him for precisely that when it comes to the MTA. Mamdani submitted bids for equipment once purchased to fulfill Cuomo's dreams of a choreographed, colored light show on the MTA's bridges, and he criticized the multimillion-dollar check Cuomo's administration once had the MTA cut to bail out upstate ski resorts. Homelessness in the subway, by Cuomo's own account, worsened during his and de Blasio's tenures: In 2019 — more than eight years after he took office — Cuomo said the homeless problem in the train system was 'worse than ever.' The pandemic accelerated that. Because of lost ridership during the pandemic, the MTA was facing the worst financial crisis in its history when Cuomo resigned in August 2021 following the sexual harassment allegations. There was turmoil at the top, too, after Cuomo's repeated spats with MTA leaders, including Byford, who resigned amid feuds with Cuomo. Before stepping down in 2021, Cuomo attempted to change how the agency was run by proposing a leadership structure that would give him even more say, echoing a move his father had tried four decades earlier. None of this appears to be forgotten under Gov. Kathy Hochul. During her time in office, there have been occasional indirect shots at how things once were under her predecessor. MTA CEO Janno Lieber recently thanked Hochul and state lawmakers for signing off on a budget deal that helps fund a $68 billion multi-year capital plan, the largest in the agency's history, but one focused primarily on repair work. Lieber said the deal acknowledges that the MTA needs money for repairs and isn't 'some weird bailout' to invest in essential infrastructure. 'We're not waving around a ton of shiny baubles,' he said. 'We love new projects — no secret they have helped to transform and grow the system — but we must maintain, we must preserve this system.' After leaving office, Cuomo changed his position on at least one important MTA-related policy: the congestion pricing tolls he signed into law to fund subway upgrades. Last year, as he was pondering his political future, he and his former aides criticized Hochul's handling of congestion pricing — first for embracing it, then for temporarily tanking it. With the midterm elections looming and Republicans critical of the policy, Cuomo questioned in March 2024 whether 'now is the right time to enact' the tolls; that June a top adviser criticized Hochul for pausing the program before it went into effect. For his transit critics, Cuomo did everything wrong, except for congestion pricing; while Hochul did everything right for the MTA, except for the five-month period where she paused congestion pricing. Now, Hochul is one of the program's biggest champions, in part because it's shown she can stand up to President Donald Trump, who has opposed the toll. Hochul has shown a willingness to take ownership of issues plaguing the MTA. She pushed plans to redevelop Penn Station, struck a funding deal with New Jersey on new train tunnels under the Hudson River, advanced plans for a new transit line between Brooklyn and Queens and agreed to fund increased police patrols in the subway system amid a major crime spike. Within months of winning a full term, she had filled the MTA's budget gap. And she hasn't burned through MTA leaders, instead having remarkable stability after years of tumult. Even when congestion pricing went off the rails, she and Lieber stood together. If Cuomo wins the primary and goes on to be elected mayor, advocates who did battle with him over his MTA management are bracing for the worst and hoping for the best. 'The hope is that Cuomo grew a lot as a person and manager and can actually delegate because, if he can't, then the city is going to be dysfunctional in a different way than it was under Eric Adams,' said John Kaehny, executive director of the government accountability group Reinvent Albany. 'But if the MTA is your only basis of comparison, then it bodes very poorly for the city.' Jeff Coltin contributed to this report.
Yahoo
a day ago
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Anne Arundel's Steuart Pittman elected new chair of Maryland Democratic Party
BALTIMORE — The Maryland Democratic Party unanimously elected Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman as its new party chair Saturday, according to a news release. Pittman was the preferred choice of Gov. Wes Moore and outgoing party chair Ken Ulman, who left June 13 after less than two years on the job. The new leader will be tasked with shaping Maryland Democrats' strategy after perhaps the toughest state legislative session in recent memory and ahead of critical elections next year. 'Steuart Pittman's success, experience, and leadership in Anne Arundel County is a significant asset for Democrats across the state,' Moore said in the release. 'He has a track record of winning tough races and knows how to get things done.' Pittman, who has served as county executive since 2018, presided over crime reductions in Anne Arundel and led the county to earn the first two AAA bond ratings in its history. He worked as a community organizer at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now before holding elected office, according to the release. 'I hope to utilize my background and experience to elect as many Democrats as possible and continue to move Maryland forward,' Pittman said in the release. Pittman told The Baltimore Sun last month that the actions of President Donald Trump, which have greatly impacted the large base of federal workers in Maryland, give the Democratic Party a 'huge opportunity to grow.' 'People who voted for Trump voted for a lot of reasons,' Pittman said. 'And most of them didn't know that they were electing somebody who was going to threaten the economic well-being of the state.' According to the release, Pittman will close out his personal campaign account to legally assume the party chair position by the end of June. Chair of the Maryland Democratic Party is an unpaid position. As Pittman is term-limited as Anne Arundel County executive, three Democrats have already jumped into the race to replace him: County Council members Allison Pickard and Pete Smith, as well as James Kitchin, a special assistant to Pittman who was previously a teacher and public policy researcher.
Politico
3 days ago
- Politico
America's biggest rail service faces peril from both parties after years of ‘Amtrak Joe' Biden
BENEATH THE EAST RIVER, New York — Twelve years after Hurricane Sandy's brackish floodwaters poured into some of the Northeast's busiest rail tunnels, the damage is still apparent from pooling water and crumbling casing. Political leaders who mattered most — from former President Joe Biden to the region's governors — all backed a $1.6 billion repair of the Amtrak tunnels connecting Manhattan and Long Island. But now Donald Trump is president and New York is taking a more adversarial approach to Amtrak. Even though repair work started last month on the Sandy-damaged tunnels beneath the East River, Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and members of her administration threw intense last-minute shade on the project. They suggested Amtrak cannot be trusted, doesn't care about its customers and compared its officials to a used car salesman. The sharp elbows suggest a new peril for the national railroad following the 'Amtrak Joe' Biden years, when the administration showered billions of dollars on the railroad and New York rail projects, including the separate $16 billion project to build new tunnels beneath the Hudson River connecting New Jersey and New York. Amtrak's leader recently stepped down in a peace offering to Trump and the railroad is facing major layoffs and renewed pressure to turn a profit. If Amtrak doesn't have the confidence of Northeastern Democrats like Hochul, whose state is home to the flagship New York Penn Station and its busiest passenger routes, it's not clear who Amtrak can count on. 'Am I confident?' Hochul said during a recent press conference. 'I don't know.' Hochul's recent criticism of the East River rehab, paired with open hostility toward Amtrak from officials at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, are yet another sore spot between the Democratic governor and the Trump administration over transit — one among many. Trump is trying to kill New York's signature congestion pricing program. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy recently seized control of the high-profile overhaul of Penn Station and handed it to Amtrak, under the supervision of former MTA head Andy Byford. But the tunnel clash adds animosity to what was once widely regarded as a slam dunk repair project by Amtrak to its own tunnels. Sandy flooded two of four East River train tunnels, leaving behind a salty residue that's eating away at the concrete casing. Since then, Amtrak has been working on a plan to fix the century-old tubes by closing them one after another for two-and-a-half years of repair work. The closures could prompt delays for Long Island commuters if something goes wrong in any of the other tunnels. Hochul worries those delays could shred public confidence in transit after the state is 'finally getting our footing.' 'The last thing I want to do is have a setback that can go on for years,' Hochul said. 'So I was very clear in my messaging to Amtrak: Don't screw this up.' As the tunnel repair project loomed, Hochul and the MTA asked Amtrak to rip up its closure plans and take a different approach known as 'repair in place,' which would shift the work to nights and weekends and keep the tunnels open during peak commuting times. In doing so, she and her allies have used rhetoric that would have been hard to imagine when Biden was president. 'Amtrak's track record for us is a little terrifying,' MTA CEO Janno Lieber said, citing unrelated problems with Amtrak's system that caused massive headaches for New Jersey commuters last summer. Lisa Daglian, the head of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA, cited a history of Amtrak system problems to suggest that if something went wrong with the East River tunnels, the 2017 'summer of hell' transit crisis in New York City would look like a 'warm spring day.' In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy and members of the state's congressional delegation have expressed frustration with Amtrak, but for other reasons and in more muted terms. Murphy, a Democrat, stepped in to broker a peace between Amtrak and NJ Transit last summer after the two railroads got into a spat over who was to blame for massive delays for Garden State commuters. Now, every few months, Murphy gathers NJ Transit and Amtrak leaders in front of cameras to field reporters' questions about their joint work. Not so in New York. New York's criticism of Amtrak intensified shortly after Duffy announced in mid-April that it would be in charge of Penn Station, a move that sidelined the MTA and Lieber, who has his own particular vision for what should happen there. It's hard to know if the tunnel flare up aimed at Amtrak is part of a tit-for-tat, but it's a theory few people are discounting given that the MTA and Amtrak had been talking about the tunnel work for years. 'We were surprised by this sudden disavowment of a plan that we had worked together on for a long time,' said Laura Mason, Amtrak's executive vice president for capital project delivery. New York contends it has long harbored worries about Amtrak's plan to close one tunnel for 13 months of repairs, reopen it and then close the other for 13 more months. The East River tunnels are used by Amtrak, the MTA's Long Island Rail Road and NJ Transit, which sends trains to Queens so they can be ready to head back to New Jersey during rush hour. NJ Transit has not raised a ruckus over the tunnel project. But LIRR, which is part of the MTA, is the biggest user of the tunnels. And its leader, Rob Free, is worried because it sends more than 450 trains and 125,000 customers through them each day. In early May, Amtrak handed LIRR an easy anecdote to bash it with even before repairs began: Poor quality control meant one of the tunnels wasn't ready to go after an overnight outage, inconveniencing tens of thousands of Long Island commuters. If another tunnel had been closed for repair when that happened, there would have been even more delays and cancellations. 'The governor of New York seems to be more concerned about Amtrak customers than they do,' Free, the head of LIRR, said during a press conference in remarks that echoed Hochul's own. Mason of Amtrak responded that the critique 'didn't hurt because it wasn't true,' but she was frustrated by Free 'misrepresenting the collective effort that went into these plans.' Mason said that while the MTA has had concerns, it has been part of the project for years — the MTA has helped get the money for the project, signed off on the design and participated in the procurement. But there's been a bipartisan group of New York members worried about Amtrak for a while, including everything from Amtrak's service cuts to the full closure of the tunnels. Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's ideas about how to run a railroad also loom over the dispute. To avoid a shutdown of the L subway line in 2019, Cuomo's administration instead shifted most of the work to nights and weekends. He was hailed as a sort of hero at the time and wanted to use that same repair-in-place approach on other projects, including Gateway. Now Hochul wants to use the idea for the East River tunnels. Amtrak recently fought back against it by offering a rare media tour of one of the East River tunnels to show just how fragile the tunnels are and why it considers repair-in-place unworkable. The tour began on a recent Thursday with a descent into Tunnel 2 at 1 a.m. Down there, travelling on the back of a truck in an otherwise empty tunnel dozens of feet below Manhattan's 1st Avenue and the East River itself, Amtrak officials pointed to the extent of the damage done by time and Sandy. Rickety catwalks meant for escape in an emergency seemed questionable at best. Water dripped from the ceiling, pooling near tracks in a way that could force trains to slow or stop. Cast-iron casing crumbled in one Amtrak worker's hand. The tunnel repairs Amtrak is making should ensure people can escape in an emergency. It won't stop all the dripping, but it's expected to prevent puddles from shutting down service and will upgrade the tunnel's interior and electrical work. 'What we're designing is a tunnel that helps itself,' said Liam McQuat, Amtrak's vice president of engineering services. 'This has been 12 years in the making.' The biggest impression Amtrak made was just how hard it would be to cram in work on nights and weekends: It seemed hard enough to get a gaggle of reporters in and out of the tunnel — no trains could travel in the tunnel that had to be blocked off and powered down for safety. The message Amtrak sent was that trying to get hundreds of workers and all their equipment in and out of the tunnel each night and have the tunnel reopened in time for the morning commute would be challenging and inefficient. It could also triple or quadruple the time it would take to make the repairs. In a press conference the next day, Free dismissed Amtrak's tour as the work of a car salesman. 'The salesman pulls the car up, you sit in the car, pulls at your heartstrings, pulls at your emotions,' Free said. 'But at the end of the day, it's about the details, it's about what's the bottom line.'
