NEW YORK: Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York said on Wednesday that with a complete overhaul of La Guardia Airport underway, he wanted to rebuild New York City's other airport, John F. Kennedy International.
Cuomo outlined a plan to spend more than $10 billion modernising Kennedy's terminals and improving the highway and transit systems connected to the airport.
He did not lay out a timetable for the plan or say where the money would come from.
"The next step is to tackle JFK, because La Guardia isn't enough," Cuomo said, speaking at a lunch meeting of the Association for a Better New York, a business group, in Manhattan.
"We need to build a new airport at JFK and go through the same process as we did with La Guardia."
In promoting big infrastructure projects, including the Second Avenue subway, which opened on Sunday, Cuomo is building his legacy in New York, and perhaps raising his national profile.
The plans offered by Cuomo on Wednesday suggest that he does not intend to stop trying to impose his will on the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates La Guardia and JFK.
The authority's commissioners were scheduled to meet yesterday to vote on a $30 billion long-term spending plan that includes only about $1 billion for improvements at JFK.
When Cuomo formed an advisory group in 2015 to study how to improve JFK, he said the panel would make recommendations to the authority. But the authority's chairman, John Degnan, did not see the panel's final report until Tuesday.
"We await an opportunity to review the details of the governor's proposal," Degnan said on Wednesday. "We will have to evaluate it against other compelling capital needs identified by the Port Authority, both within other airports and within other operations that we oversee."
Degnan, an appointee of Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Republican, has been at odds with Cuomo, a Democrat, over the authority's spending priorities. The agency also operates the main commuter bus terminal in Manhattan and Newark Liberty International Airport.
Cuomo pushed for $2.5 billion in the capital plan for improvements at the New York airports, possibly including an AirTrain link from New York City's subway system to La Guardia.
Cuomo's advisory panel suggested that most of the rest of the money -- up to $7 billion -- could come from private sources, including airlines that use JFK.
Kennedy is a collection of free-standing terminals, some of which were built, at least in part, by the airlines that occupy them.
JetBlue Airways and the authority split the cost of building Terminal 5, which opened in 2008. Delta Air Lines has spent more than $1 billion in the recent years to improve its facilities at Terminals 2 and 4.
At La Guardia, the authority has committed $600 million to the rebuilding of Terminals C and D against an estimated cost of about $4 billion. That investment would come on top of a $4 billion rebuilding of the Central Terminal Building there, which began last year.
Cuomo hopes to entice airlines to make similar investments at JFK to compete for customers. He challenged airlines to make offers, saying Delta had called him at 5.45 a.m. on Wednesday.
Cuomo did not mention seeking federal financing. President-elect Donald Trump has said he plans to make an ambitious investment in infrastructure a priority of his administration.
As part of Cuomo's plan for JFK, Matthew Driscoll, New York state's transportation commissioner, said his agency would spend as much as $2 billion to improve the flow of traffic to and from the airport.
The changes would include adding a lane to the Van Wyck Expressway and widening ramps at the busy interchange in Kew Gardens, Queens, which Driscoll said handles 250,000 vehicles per day.
Thomas Prendergast, chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said that transit agencies would explore creating a one-seat ride between Manhattan and JFK.
Travellers must now switch to the AirTrain from the subway or Long Island Rail Road, a transfer that Prendergast described as "schlepping with your luggage."
Though New York City owns JFK, no one from City Hall attended Cuomo's speech.
"Investments in New York City's airports are vitally important to our region's long-term development," said Melissa Grace, a spokeswoman for Mayor Bill de Blasio. "We look forward to hearing more details about the plans for JFK in the months to come." ©2017 The New York Times