NJ: Former MTA boss hired to oversee $16B Gateway tunnel project as new CEO

Vowing that “on time and on budget has to be the mantra,” former Metropolitan Transportation Authority CEO Thomas Prendergast was hired Thursday to run the agency building the $16 billion Gateway rail tunnel under the Hudson River.

The Gateway Development Commission unanimously voted Thursday to hire him as its second CEO Thursday. He will lead the agency building what Prendergast called the largest and most urgent infrastructure project in the nation.

“Infrastructure is what built New York. Infrastructure is what sustains the New York metropolitan region, and is the future of the metropolitan region,” Prendergast said after the vote.

“We need the HTP ( Hudson Tunnel Project) to provide reliable service to the commuters, the ultimate stakeholders,” he said. “They’re the ones who depend on it and the economy depends in it.”

Prendergast replaces Kris Kolluri, the agency’s first CEO, who oversaw obtaining a milestone $6.8 billion federal grant from the Federal Transit Administration in July and getting construction underway on both sides of the Hudson River in 2024.

Prendergast will earn an annual salary of $395,000, the same as Kolluri, and will start in the next few weeks, said Stephen Sigmund, a commission spokesperson.

“Kris Kolluri and the GDC have done an incredible job in two years to stand up an organization, get funding and get the support of all the people needed to do a project like this,” Prendergast said. “In any time period that would be remarkable, but in two years it is truly remarkable.”

Prendergast’s hiring was supported by several speakers before the vote.

Jerry Keenan, New Jersey Alliance for Action president, cited Prendergast’s credentials and used a New York Yankees analogy to make his point.

“Yesterday, I referred to you and and your hall of fame resume. We know you know how to get it done for next decade and a half,” he said.

“Kris Kolluri was our starting pitcher; he got us to where we are,” Keenan said. ”Tom, you are Marino Rivera, you are our closer.”

Prendergast served as MTA CEO and chairman from 2013 to 2017. Prendergast most recent position was executive in charge of the New York region for AECOM, a infrastructure consulting firm. Before that he had a 25-year career with the MTA over several periods of time.

Prendergast was recommended by the commission’s CEO search committee, which interviewed him and consulted with the governors of New Jersey and New York and Amtrak officials about his qualifications to be CEO.

Prendergast, 71, takes the reigns as the commission moves into a role overseeing construction of the actual tunnel under the Hudson and rehabilitating the two existing 114-year old tunnels now in service.

Gateway also includes other rail infrastructure work from Secaucus Junction to Penn Station New York.

It is expected that under Prendergast’s tenure contracts to do the main tunnel boring work under the Hudson between the two states will be awarded this year.

Among Pendergast’s accomplishments during his executive tenure at the MTA was being “instrumental in securing a 5-year capital plan to improve and modernize New York’s public transportation systems, including Second Avenue Subway and East Side Access,” according to his biography.

Those projects also had controversy for being over budget and behind schedule, for a variety of reasons.

East Side Access was $7.5 billion over an original $3.5 billion budget and 10 years behind schedule. It opened in early 2023 under a new name, Grand Central Madison.

That project bored two new rail tunnels in Queens and Manhattan to bring Long Island Rail Road trains into a new east side Manhattan deep cavern station underneath Grand Central Terminal.

The first 1.8-mile phase of the long-promised Second Avenue subway, opened in 2017, has the distinction of being the most expensive subway extension ever built. It cost $4.5 billion, according to a study of transit project costs by NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management.

One speaker made a reference to those mega project issues.

“He knows this corridor,” said Carlo A. Scissura, president and CEO of New York Building Congress. “He’s been through some wonderful days and not so wonderful days working on this corridor. This is the guy to get the job done.”

A Jan. 3, 2024, update of a Federal Transit Administration risk report calls for the project to be completed on Nov. 9, 2040, which builds in an additional 56 months of flexibility in the construction schedule for unexpected developments.

Completion of the two new tunnels is forecast for June 2038, under the FTA schedule, however commission officials expect a 2035 completion date for the new tunnels and rehab of the existing tunnels to be finished in 2038, when Prendergast would be 85.

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