President-elect Donald Trump wants to make New York City’s crumbling Penn Station and subways “beautiful” again, The Post exclusively can reveal.
Trump spoke Thursday afternoon with Gov. Kathy Hochul, who congratulated him on his stunning election victory in a conversation “focused on collaboration,” a source with knowledge of the call said.
The pair’s chat touched on the city’s deteriorating transit infrastructure, and Trump expressed interest on working together with Hochul on fixing up Penn Station and the subways, the source said.
Hochul also brought up federal support for infrastructure funding through the CHIPS and Science Act, as well as funding for the Second Avenue Subway.
The call came just a day after Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James more-or-less declared war on the incoming Trump administration in a defiant press conference.
And Hochul at least partly appeared to fulfill her pledge of liberal resistance by making a point to tell Trump in the call that she would fight for New Yorkers on protecting abortion rights, according to the source.
Despite their differences and heated rhetoric, however, Trump and Hochul seemed to find common ground on Penn Station.
Hochul has famously called the Midtown transit hub a “hell hole” – an assessment that few, if any, would disagree.
And Trump, a real estate magnate prone to slapping his name on high-profile construction projects, himself has called the entirety of his native New York City a “hell hole.”
Finally delivering on years of promised fixes for the claustrophobic and decaying Penn Station – which has become a haven for homeless New Yorkers, much to the chagrin and fear of locals, commuters and tourists – would then be a natural collaboration for Trump and Hochul.
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The controversial plan to expand Penn Station by demolishing city blocks could cost nearly $17 billion – a plan running in tandem with the completion of the $16 billion Gateway Project involving the construction of a new tunnel linking New York and New Jersey and refurbishing existing century-old Penn tracks that were badly damaged by Superstorm Sandy in 2012.
Questions over the whopping cost and best plans aside, any project to rehab the Penn Station eyesore — through which run hundreds of MTA, Amtrak and New Jersey Transit trains — would require significant support from the federal government and incoming Trump administration.
Speaking at the SOMOS political conference in Puerto Rico on Friday, Hochul described her call with Trump as “lengthy.” Trump told her he wanted a cooperative relationship and she was taking him on his word, she said.
“Relationships work both ways and as a result of that call I feel confident right now that, as he said to me, that he wants a cooperative relationship with New York,” Hochul told reporters.
She confirmed the two discussed the CHIPS and Science Act, which she said would bring 150,000 jobs to upstate New York. The bipartisan bill marshaled $280 billion in an attempt by the Biden administration to keep the lucrative semiconductor industry in the US amid competition from Taiwan, China and Singapore.
Conservative critics have lambasted it as wasteful corporate welfare, but Democrats such as Hochul view it both as a way to nurture American manufacturing and a rebuttal to Republican claims that the Dems are anti-business.
Hochul also confirmed she spoke to the president-elect about rehabing Penn Station, the Second Avenue Subway project and the need for more federal dollars for the MTA, saying, “there’s no reason New Yorkers can’t enjoy a world class system.”
“We agree that these are important priorities,” she said.
Much-needed federal funding for the MTA, which runs the city’s subways, indeed could also hinge on support from the incoming Trump White House – with or without congestion pricing.
Trump, who has vowed to “terminate” congestion pricing in his first week in office, stymied the program during his first term as president.
His past administration also gave less than $80 million in discretionary grants to the MTA, compared to $4 billion under President Biden. The MTA budget for 2024 was more than $19 billion.
Hochul controversially put congestion pricing – a plan to impose $15 tolls on vehicles entering Lower Manhattan in part to give the MTA a $1 billion-a-year funding source for capital improvements – on “pause” over the summer just weeks before it was slated to begin.
The governor and state lawmakers have since been unable to find a funding replacement – and after Trump’s election Tuesday advocates, for the plan have pushed Hochul to lift the pause before his inauguration, under the thinking that it would be harder for him to kill.
Hochul, when pressed on congestion pricing’s future Wednesday, remained publicly noncommittal – although Politico reported that her office recently took a step to revive it by reaching out to the federal Department of Transportation to see if lowering the planned $15 toll would require another lengthy environmental review.
“I’ll say again, at the time the $15 was too much for everyday New Yorkers when affordability is top of mind for them,” she said. “That does not mean I’m hostile to congestion pricing. To the contrary, I simply said this was a pause.”
Democratic state Assemblyman Tony Simone, who reps Penn Station, was skeptical that the president-elect was serious about working with New York on the project, and called on Trump to maintain federal approval of the congestion pricing scheme.
“If Trump claims to believe in the importance of NYC transit, then he should maintain the federal government’s approval of congestion pricing, which should have started 6 months ago,” he said. “I’ll believe any promises on Penn when I see it.”
– Additional reporting by Haley Brown
