Jobs Yonkers-bound with MTA contract
This time around, Yonkers and its resident train manufacturer weren”™t left waiting at the station.
After finishing as runner-up bidder last year on a $600 million contract from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Kawasaki Rail Car Inc. this month was awarded an MTA contract for up to $1.83 billion to design and build the next generation of rail cars for Metro-North Railroad and the Long Island Rail Road.
The project, announced by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, is expected to create up to 1,500 jobs at the Kawasaki plant in Yonkers and its suppliers in the state.
Under the contract approved Sept. 19 by the MTA board, up to 676 electric cars will be assembled at the Kawasaki plant at 10 Woodworth Ave. in Yonkers.
A portion of the contract and related development costs are funded with $355.5 million from the MTA”™s 2010-2014 capital plan. The initial contract will provide 92 cars to the LIRR. If funding is available in the MTA”™s 2015-2019 capital plan and the railroads choose to exercise future options, Kawasaki will manufacture up to 304 additional cars for the LIRR and up to 280 cars for Metro-North.
MTA officials said the M9 cars will replace 1980s-era M3 railcars serving the LIRR”™s eight electric branches and Metro-North”™s Harlem and Hudson Lines and will create expanded fleet capacity for both railroads to accommodate growth in ridership. The cars being replaced by Kawasaki”™s products entered service between 1984 and 1986 and will have served the region for more than 30 years when retired.
The MTA in August considered final contract proposals from three manufacturers. MTA officials said Kawasaki provided the “most attractive” pricing.
One week before its MTA contract award, Kawasaki Rail Car closed on the $25.2 million purchase of its Yonkers plant in the iPark Hudson office, laboratory and industrial complex near the city”™s downtown waterfront. The seller, Hudson View Associates L.L.C., is an affiliate of National Resources Inc., the Greenwich, Conn., real estate company that redeveloped the former Otis Elevator Co. property in Yonkers for office and high-tech tenants.
That purchase deal was first announced by Cuomo in April 2011, when Empire State Development Corp. awarded Kawasaki a $500,000 grant to retain 375 full-time jobs in Yonkers. Headquartered in the city since 1985, the company had considered several locations as a permanent base for its U.S. operations but chose to stay at its plant overlooking the Hudson River because its location at the center of the Northeast passenger rail corridor proved most cost-effective, Kawasaki Rail Car CEO Hiroji Iwasaki said at the time. The manufacturer”™s parent company, Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd., is headquartered in Japan.
One year after that announcement, Kawasaki and its bidding partner, the French conglomerate Alstom, lost out on a major contract to produce 300 New York City Transit subway cars by 2016. The partners bid $675 million for the project, while Bombardier Transit Corp. in upstate Plattsburgh won with a low bid of $599.47 million.
Cuomo hailed Bombardier”™s selection as “a major win for the North Country and the entire region”™s economy.” But Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano called it “wrong” for the MTA to award a jobs-generating contract to a manufacturer outside its Hudson Valley service region, where employers “pay millions of dollars in MTA taxes in support of its services.”
Spano in a brief statement called the new contract “great for Yonkers” and said it will allow Kawasaki to continue to grow here, provide jobs “and further build on the economic growth of our downtown waterfront.”