ANALYSIS
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Analysis
WHAT CLIENTS WANT CONSTRUCTION CLIENTS ARE KEY TO ALL THE INDUSTRY’S MAJOR CHALLENGES, INCLUDING NET ZERO, BUILDING SAFETY, SKILLS, DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION AND PLENTY MORE. WILL MANN SPEAKS TO A CROSS SECTION OF ‘CLIENT SIDE’ CIOB MEMBERS ABOUT THEIR POST-PANDEMIC PLANS
“We have to think about the long-term effects of covid-19” Virginia Borkoski FCIOB Senior vice president, program planning and delivery, Metropolitan Transportation Authority, New York City
The MTA has been able to accelerate construction work during the pandemic
annual capital spending of $51.5bn (£36.4bn) before covid-19. “I lead the external partner programme, guiding private-sector designers and contractors through the technical implementation of projects that require MTA review and approval,” Borkoski explains. “This includes design and constructability reviews, construction initiation and oversight, and project ‘close-outs’. My unit is only about 30 people, so for major projects we would bring in expertise from other MTA units.” Her team’s work covers three types of project: ‘adjacencies’ are projects being delivered by other developers and agencies within 200ft of MTA property; public agencies projects involve partnering with bodies such as utilities; developer improvements involve working with property owners to incorporate improvements to stations in their developments. “A developer improvement example is the new subway entrance to Grand Central at One Vanderbilt Avenue, a 77-storey skyscraper in Midtown, part of $220m [£155m] of
transit improvements bundled into the project,” Borkoski says. Despite the pandemic, she has remained “as busy as ever”. “There were delays to some projects, but generally, the MTA has been able to accelerate construction work,” she says. “For the first time in the history of the subway, we shut down overnight, from 1am to 5am. Publicly, the reason was we were disinfecting. But we have also used those shutdowns to advance work such as track repairs and accessibility upgrades.” She thinks the fall in ridership will affect project planning. “We are looking at a multi-billion-dollar deficit and we have no federal funding,” she says. “The subway is safe – there are 18 air changes per hour – and people are coming back but not that quickly, so we have to think about the long-term effects of covid-19 on ridership.” But there is still a huge amount of development going on in Manhattan, she adds. “In the East Midtown rezoning, developers are taking down 100-storey buildings to
A lifelong New Yorker, Virginia Borkoski graduated from the city’s Pratt Institute, took a master’s at New York University, and is now in her second spell at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). Her office is at 2 Broadway, in Lower Manhattan, where she was working on ‘9/11’. “We watched the towers burn, and felt them fall” is how she remembers it. She began her current role as senior vice president, program planning and delivery in 2017, and is one of over 2,000 construction and development staff at the MTA, which had projected 18 | CONSTRUCTION MANAGER JULY/AUGUST 2021
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