MTA Says Church Avenue Stop Repairs Completed On Time

Zainab Iqbal -

“There was no delay to the signal project at Church Av.,” says Kevin Ortiz, an MTA spokesperson. “The signal work at Church Av was completed on schedule in 2014.”  However, you would not know that from publicly available information.

This statement comes in response to a story we did yesterday on an MTA service delay report by Independent Budget Office (IBO) Director Ronnie Lowenstein.

In the report, Lowenstein wrote about the many delays in MTA projects such as the one on Church Ave (F/G trains) Station on the Culver line. “One project, at Church Ave on the Culver line, was originally scheduled for completion in August 2014 but is now targeted for 2021,” the report stated.

So, who’s correct?  According to IBO Spokesperson Doug Turetsky, the MTA had not informed the IBO of any corrections needed to be made — even after the report was released. According to Ortiz, “The IBO never reached out to us to review and comment on their findings prior to releasing it publicly. We would have certainly pointed out the inaccuracies of their ‘analysis’.”

According to Turetsky, all of the numbers in the report came from the MTA Capital Program Dashboard, which states that the data was last “updated 03/31/2017”.

This is the project quoted in the IBO report.

According to the information (above) that is publicly accessible on the MTA’s website, the Church Ave signaling project was supposed to be completed in Aug 2014. As of today, 6/15/17, the current completion is still set for 2021, and the project is listed as only 98 percent complete.

According to Ortiz, “The remaining work is unrelated. It’s $1.4M of communication equipment work that was transferred to another project, the Kings Hway Interlocking Project which has completion date of May 2021.”

Publicly available information on the project that Oritz referenced does not state that money was transferred over from the Church Ave project:

“In all likelihood, either the expected completion date or the amount of the project that is finished is wrong,” Turetsky said. “Either way, it’s a problem with the information MTA is publicly providing. So if there’s correcting to be done, it starts with the MTA.”

The MTA states the Church Ave/ Culver line station has been completed since 2014. Let’s hope the information to the public is finally accurately updated with the “Next Update: 06/30/17”.