No.7 station hits buffers.

A 10th Avenue station planned for the No. 7 Subway extension will cost hundreds of million of dollars more when it is built because the MTA is delaying its construction. Located midway between the extension's route from Times Square to 34th Street and 11th Avenue, the station was planned to provide riders with better accessibility to the far West Side but won't be included as part of the extension project because of budgetary constraints.

Ironically, the MTA indicated that the budget saving move would end up costing the agency more in the long run. MTA officials didn't know when the authority would come back to complete the station, but stated that building it in the future instead of as part of the rest of the extension would prevent the MTA from utilizing cost saving construction efficiencies that would result from incorporating it into the bigger project. Mysore Nagaraja, the MTA's president of capital construction, said the delay would likely boost the station's price tag from $200 million to as much as $400 million or more. At least one MTA board member, Andrew Albert, said that he would oppose the delay and mobilize political action.

"I'm going to try to get some elected officials together to demand that the station be built as part of the extension project," Albert said.

But other board members said the delay may be inevitable because of the MTA's precarious financial position. The authority has projected billion dollar deficits in the next few years and has already struggled to keep the No. 7 Extension within its $2.1 billion budget. Last month, the MTA was forced to conduct a $10 million value engineering study to bring the project's cost back down after it had swelled to $2.4 billion. "He's obviously right, the reality is that you should do that station at the same time," MTA board member Barry Feinstein said of Albert's opposition to the delay. "If we could put together $200 million or $300 million extra it would save us a fortune of money, but who pays for it? The city doesn't have any obligation to do it. We would pick up the cost later, but I don't know where that money is."

According to the project's current financial arrangement, the city has agreed to pay for the extension by redirecting real estate taxes from the far West Side to service the project's bonds, which were just given A and A- ratings by Standard & Poor's and Fitch respectively. But the MTA, aside from the cost of land acquisitions related to the extension's construction, has agreed to be responsible for all cost overruns, a level of exposure that transit watchdogs say the authority can hardly afford given its looming fiscal problems.