Reformed contracting practices at the MTA saved $300 million in 2023, according to an agency report released Monday.
“This is the new MTA,” Jamie Torres-Springer, head of construction and development for the agency, told the Daily News. “We don’t want to be judged by the standards of 10 years ago.”
Since 2020, Torres-Springer said, the MTA has spent roughly $1 billion less than it expected to pay contractors for capital work.
The new report was a requirement of the 2019 forensic audit of MTA capital spending conducted by accounting firm Crowe LLP. That audit, mandated by the state legislature, found roughly 20% of the MTA’s construction projects from 2014 through 2019 ran over budget.
The firm also said that 8% of the projects in the then-upcoming 2020-2024 capital plan faced similar issues.
The MTA has been able to save in large part because of bundled projects, Torres-Springer said.
The agency’s push to add elevators and other accessibility improvements to subway stations system-wide has taken advantage of bundled contracts, with one firm hired to do the same work across multiple stations.
Most recently, Judlau Contracting was hired to outfit 13 subways stations with accessibility improvements, at a cost of $577 million.
The construction and development boss said such sweeping contracts allowed firms work for less money per station, taking advantage of economies of scale in materials, equipment and subcontracting.
Bundling also allows better coordination, according to Torres-Springer, allowing work to be planned simultaneously to reduce service outages.
Such work is currently ongoing on the No. 7 line, Torres-Springer said.
The construction and development boss also lauded the MTA’s embrace of so-called “design-build” contracting, in which one contract is issued for both design and construction of a given project.
Boosters say the approach allows the people responsible for building a project to have significant input in its design, minimizing unfeasible designs and decreasing the time between pencils on paper and shovels in ground.
Opponents, like Alon Levy, a transportation fellow at NYU’s Marron Institute, say the process amounts to the privatization of mass-transit decisions.
Torres-Springer said the approach isn’t suited for everything the transit agency does. But he credited the approach with shaving time and cost off of the past five years of major work at the MTA.
To date, contracts have been awarded for 46% of the work in the 2020-2024 capital plan. Major work yet to tackle includes the Phase 2 extension of the Second Ave. subway and modern computerized signals on several more subway lines.
The legal challenges to the MTA’s congestion pricing plan have flummoxed efforts to award those contracts.
The MTA’s construction and development department is currently in the process of writing the next five years’ capital plan, due out by the end of 2024.
The MTA’s 20-year-needs assessment, issued last year, is expected to inform the creation of the five-year capital plan due this year.
State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli issued a report in February estimating at least $43 billion in repair and maintenance costs to the transit system in the next five years.
