Gov. Cuomo on Monday defended the extravagance of adding taxpayer-funded stripes of blue and gold tiles in two rebuilt East River tunnels — and insisted that “all New Yorkers should be proud” of the projects.
Cuomo’s defense of the pricey outlay came hours after The Post exposed the add-on.
During an unrelated news conference at JFK Airport, a reporter asked Cuomo why he felt it was necessary to decorate the tunnels with stripes in the state’s official colors given the MTA’s cash woes.
“It was a $588 million project, all federal funds. Done on time and on budget and done well and done right, and all New Yorkers should be proud of it,” Cuomo replied.
Sources have told The Post he spent $20 million to $30 million more to buy and install the colored tiles during reconstruction of the Queens-Midtown and Brooklyn-Battery tunnels, which were damaged by flooding from Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
Plans originally called for all the tiles to be white, and the extra money for the colored tiles came from contract modifications totaling $62.6 million that the MTA board approved in November 2016, minutes of the meeting show.
Cuomo spokeswoman Dani Lever denied the colored tiles added $20 million to $30 million to the project’s price and referred questions about the cost to the MTA.
MTA records show the colored tiles cost $7.3 million, and a construction-industry source familiar with the projects said they drove up costs by millions because they are thicker than the white.
MTA Chair Joe Lhota said on Monday that the total price tag for the tile jobs in both tunnels was $39.2 million. He denied the colored tiles added to the installation cost.
“This is not a complicated pattern. This is a straight line,” Lhota said, noting it was all paid for with a grant from Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Democratic challenger Cynthia Nixon blasted Cuomo over the tiles, saying it showed how he “continues to prioritize vanity projects instead of investing in the actual infrastructure to fix our subways.”
“The governor’s priorities are out of whack because his donors don’t ride the New York City subways, and neither does he,” Nixon told reporters in the Broadway-Lafayette subway station.
The state Republican Party accused Cuomo of a “new normal” of “long delays, train malfunctions and even dangerous derailments” in the subway system.
The GOP said last year’s “Summer of Hell” in the subways had given way to a “grueling purgatory for riders due to Cuomo’s penchant for wasting billions of dollars on vanity projects instead of doing what needs to be done to make government — including the trains — operate properly.”
Additional reporting by Lois Weiss and Nolan Hicks