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Posted by
GojiMet86
on Mon Jan 8 17:39:55 2018, in response to Re: Forget 2nd Ave. Now Subway to Red Hook, posted by Andrew Saucci on Wed Jan 3 21:53:31 2018.
Actually, this came up in September 2016:
AECOM to propose No. 1 train extension to Red Hook
It was proposed by AECOM.
AECOM's vice chairman (and a boardmember) is Dan Tishman.
Tishman is a top donor to Cuomo.
They worked together on Tappan Zee and the NYC area airport makeovers.
Their fathers were close to each other.
Hint, hint, hint...
Deconstructing Tishman
......[Dan] Tishman, who serves as vice chairman and a board member at AECOM, is now the key go-between for the multinational engineering giant and its clients. The publicly traded Los Angeles-based firm acquired his family’s company, Tishman Construction, seven years ago and renamed it AECOM Tishman.
But while Tishman’s government and real estate connections are a major boon to AECOM as it grows its construction outfit and takes on larger projects, his close ties to Cuomo have drawn criticism on more than one occasion. His political alliances also have dragged him into the ongoing feud between Albany and City Hall and sparked accusations of pay-to-play.
Of course, being a major political contributor or having personal ties to a high-level politician doesn’t necessarily mean that an individual or company receives special favors. Yet John Kaehny, executive director of watchdog group Reinvent Albany, noted that situations like these — where a major contributor’s company snags big public contracts — are endemic in the state, largely due to its lack of a pay-to-play law.
“It’s no doubt that you want the governor to be your friend rather than an enemy if you’re competing for a big contract,” he said.
Kaehny referred to Tishman as an “active participant” in New York’s pay-to-play culture, but emphasized that he would be more of an exception if he weren’t. The industry scion, he also noted, is a “large contributor, but not the largest.”
At an Empire State Development meeting in May 2016, a city official called into question Tishman’s ties with the governor. The incident occurred moments before AECOM Tishman was awarded two small contracts totaling just over $8 million for planning and preconstruction work at the Jacob K. Javits Center to prepare it for a $1 billion-plus overhaul.
The construction company couldn’t outright bid on the Javits expansion, since it was part of the original team that built the convention center in the 1980s. But Tishman’s involvement quickly became a proxy for the battle between the governor and mayor.
Peter Wertheim, an ESD board member and advisor to Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen, noted that the company already has a role in the project and that Tishman is one of Cuomo’s top donors. Tishman and his wife, Sheryl, have given $323,625 to the governor since 2007. Wertheim noted that ESD had halted a city-run project at Brooklyn Bridge Park just days before the meeting over concerns that the developer donated to Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“To me, it feels interesting to sit here and be asked to vote on an $8 million contract for one of the governor’s largest donors,” Wertheim said at the time. “This whole process to me is feeling like there’s a lot of subjectivity in how decisions are being made.”
Nearly a year later, ESD approved increasing the Javits contract to $95 million, in order to upgrade AECOM Tishman’s role on the project to the construction manager at risk, which means the company will oversee the project’s various subcontractors. Wertheim didn’t speak out against the contract in that meeting......
......Tishman’s ties to Cuomo stem, in part, from the fact that their fathers were friends and had traveled together in the 1980s.
“We don’t vacation together, but he has no issues calling me, and I have no issues calling him,” he said. “And I’m happy that he can call me and say, ‘Listen, Dan, I need some help on infrastructure.’”
Projects the two have worked on together include the reconstruction of the Tappan Zee Bridge and the redesign and rehabilitation of the city’s airports. In January 2015, Cuomo tapped Tishman to chair a panel charged with creating a master plan for LaGuardia and JFK. Officials broke ground on the $4 billion overhaul of LaGuardia in June, and the governor unveiled the panel’s plans for JFK this January......
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