Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: Getty
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over New York City’s tilt toward Trump in November. His populist agenda seemed to especially resonate in working-class communities, propped up by the broader sense that the city’s systems — and how they function on a daily basis, or don’t — are inexplicably broken. But it should be said: Over the past four years, the Biden administration has rained money on New York City. Boosted by federal infrastructure and climate laws, the city has received up to $2.4 billion from Washington, the most of any metropolis by far. That pot, nearly triple what the city gets in a good year, is funding everything from street trees to a wholesale redesign of Delancey Street.
Sure, the president and the governor are chummy (the mayor maybe not so much), and the Senate is run by a guy from Park Slope who loves big transit projects himself. But mention that grand total around City Hall, and people point to Meera Joshi. The deputy mayor of operations, who oversees practically everything built with public funds, is credited with leading a master class on how to score Biden dollars, coordinating agencies under her purview to band together rather than compete for federal grants with an “all of the above” approach to applying for them.
Now, the closest person the city has to an “infrastructure czar” must wrangle that gigantic portfolio through a second Trump era, when, once again, anything with New York’s name on it feels precarious. To hear how the city hopes to keep the dollars flowing, and ensure, say, that the BQE doesn’t collapse, we sat down with Joshi at City Hall.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Let’s talk first about your funding wins. What were the biggest “gets” for New York these last few years?
There were really two, equally important for different reasons. The first is QueensWay. The Biden administration’s broad view of urban infrastructure — that there’s more to a city’s foundation than asphalt and concrete — meant NYC was awarded $117 million to transform a long-defunct and publicly unusable rail corridor into a 3.5-mile linear park connecting Rego Park to Ozone Park in Queens. It will connect 93,000 people to green space who previously didn’t have easy walking access and create a throughway between ten schools. This is infrastructure that wouldn’t likely be funded in the absence of a broad view of the term.
The second is funding for the Brooklyn Marine Terminal. Ninety percent of our goods come in by truck right now, as opposed to the national average of 70 percent. Here in New York, we’re expected to accommodate a 43 percent increase of freight by 2045. That is a lot of freight — and it comes with real costs. The Biden administration granted us a $160 million investment that will enable us to transform the 122-acre Brooklyn Marine Terminal into a modern port and mixed-use community hub, upgrading three piers to move freight on the waterways and reduce our city’s reliance on trucks.
Looking ahead to the next administration, you know how it works — you’ve spent time in Washington yourself. [Joshi oversaw the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration in 2021.] Project 2025 calls for the repeal of both the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, which granted funds to a lot of NYC projects, and proposes a freeze on the billions of dollars still unspent. Does that worry you?
Well, Trump says everything will be faster, so let’s see. This would be a perfect case. We’d love to get money faster. But ultimately, a lot of what we apply for are projects with bipartisan support. Under FEMA, for example, we’re looking to build out green infrastructure because our sewer system can’t handle the water that we’re seeing, and that’s going to exist no matter who’s president. I think people are becoming acutely aware of the need for that — not just in blue states but in red states, too. It’s not so politically aligned anymore. Because a lot of what we’re building for is protection against heat, excessive rain, lack of rain, and dirty air.
It’s true that, for now at least, there seem to be calls for unity. The governor and president-elect reportedly spoke about making Penn Station and the subways “beautiful again.” (Even though those pleasantries went nowhere in 2016.) But behind the scenes, officials are rushing to get everything from congestion pricing (which you just voted to approve yourself as an MTA board member) to fixing up the Port Authority bus terminal approved before Trump returns to office. I’m curious how you think things will shake out. What are one or two projects that you’re really hoping for investment in?
Looking forward, we are advocating for some more traditional megaprojects that need federal funding to secure construction. The triple cantilever, a key link of the BQE and one of the primary economic arteries of the region, carries 130,000 cars and over 13,000 trucks per day. It is long past its projected useful life. This critical construction project is reliant in no insignificant part on federal contributions. Without movement on this project, it is not inconceivable that truck traffic will have to be banned in the not-too-distant future.
This is a generationally challenging project that has stymied administrations for decades, thanks in part to the lack of cooperation between state and local leaders. But under our administration, and in great partnership with Governor Hochul, we have gotten further on this project than any mayoral administration in the past three decades. I am hopeful that we will be able to make real progress on it in the coming years.
That timeline sounds pretty alarming. And I’ve seen the price tag for repairs float somewhere around $5 billion. So the Feds would have to step in, I imagine. Do you really think that’s going to happen under the next administration?
The BQE is the poster child of the need for infrastructure investment. The need for it comes from both sides of the aisle. There are those that will say it needs to be addressed today because the cantilever is falling down; there are traffic jams; nobody likes the noise and pollution that it causes. And then there’s also people in the trucking industry that say this is an actual artery. You all order from Amazon every day. How’s your package going to get to you if we don’t have a reliable pathway to transport goods? So it’s a well-recognized problem.
We were rejected BQE funding under Biden because they considered us too early in the process. We’ve moved the project along on the concept and the traffic reviews, and we expect to start our official environmental review in the spring of 2025. That’ll start a two-year clock, which puts us in prime position to apply for funds then.
But that’ll be 2027, and Trump will likely still be in office. What if his administration could care less? What’s the backup?
We have to change on a dime. We’ve done that in lots of circumstances before. I’d say even putting together the task force to apply for federal infrastructure dollars was sort of changing on a dime. These are big projects that outlast administrations. They’re marathons, not sprints. They have a life of their own. For example, nobody could have foreseen the reason that we have to stop our Delaware Aqueduct repair project. We’re about to make a historic connection to a bypass tunnel we’ve been waiting to do since 2013. And now because of drought conditions, we have to stop it, which had nothing to do with the election.
So every big project has a few A, B, and C plans built into it. It’s the nature of complex infrastructure work. But I think what gives me solace at the end of the day is that the critical nature of them carries a lot of weight, which keeps these projects moving forward. Even though it’s never a straight line.
