Authorities broke
ground Tuesday on a $4 billion remake of LaGuardia Airport in New York.
“This is an
exciting day,” New York Gov. Andew Cuomo said during an afternoon press
conference, flanked by vice president Joe Biden.
“What we are doing is exciting. How we are doing it is exciting.”
The project,
which is being undertaken as a public/private partnership between the Port
Authority of New York and New Jersey and a consortium of contractors called
LaGuardia Gateway Partners, is expected to take slightly more than five years.
Two-thirds of the cost will be shouldered by the private sector and by existing
airport fees, officials say.
The work will
involve the demolition and complete rebuild of LaGuardia terminal B and the central hall. Air trains will be built to connect commuters to the Long Island
Railroad and to ferry passengers around the airport. New infrastructure will be
constructed to accommodate high-speed water taxis into Manhattan. And the entire
terminal area will be moved 600 feet closer to the Grand Central Parkway,
providing more space for flight operations.
In conjunction with the redo of terminal B, Delta Air Lines
plans to renovate LaGuardia terminals C and D, which it controls. The airline
and the port authority have yet to strike a deal on the work, but at the news
conference Tuesday, Henry Kuykendall, a Delta vice president, asserted his
employer’s commitment to redeveloping those terminals on a parallel track with
the remainder of the project.
Cuomo said Tuesday that the full LaGuardia upgrade is expected to
cost $7 billion.
Speaking at the press conference, Biden stressed the importance of
infrastructure projects, not just in helping the U.S. compete, but in
sustaining the middle class.
“It’s consequential. Our lifeblood depends upon it,” he said.
In 2014, Biden said that if he blindfolded someone and took him to LaGuardia,
that person would think he was in “some third world country.”
The LaGuardia project is expected to create 8,000
jobs. The airport will remain open throughout the work.
The renovation at New York’s LaGuardia Airport includes terminal B and the central hall; it does not include terminal A, the Marine Air Terminal. Terminal A was incorrectly identified as part of the redevelopment in a previous version of this article.