Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Governor Kathy Hochul attended the official groundbreaking of the $2.25 billion Interstate 81 Viaduct Project in Syracuse on Friday.

Hochul announced that the project, which is funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, will include a local hiring provision, set to allocate 26,000 local union construction jobs.

She was joined by Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Senior Advisor for the Biden Administration Mitch Landrieu and New York Civil Liberties Union Director of Racial Justice Lanessa Owens-Chaplin at Dr. King Elementary School for the groundbreaking event.

“As we officially break ground on the I-81 viaduct project, this will be one of the largest transportation projects in New York state history, and arguably the most important infrastructure that Syracuse has seen in at least a century,” Hochul said.

The state has also secured $300,000 to train Syracuse youth through construction apprenticeship programs for the project, Gillibrand said.

The project will replace the Almond Street viaduct with a community grid of surface-level streets and a business loop. The grid will work to disperse traffic traveling north-south and east-west while redistributing high-speed traffic to portions of Interstates 481 and 690, according to the DOT.

The groundbreaking follows decade-long discussions about the removal of the 1.4 mile overpass, which demolished Syracuse’s 15th Ward in the 1960s.

Hochul said the original construction of I-81, along with other government infrastructure projects across the country, facilitated white flight.

Schumer, who has advocated for the redesign of I-81 for several years, said the project is not only supporting improved infrastructure and transportation for central New York, but also reconnecting communities.

“For decades, I-81 stood as a concrete symbol of the city’s racial division, a barrier to jobs, to opportunity, to progress for the 15th Ward and neighborhoods that have been divided since it was built,” Schumer said. “The groundbreaking today starts to change that.”

The Federal Highway Administration approved the community grid plan in May 2022. The project’s progress was halted in November 2022 after State Supreme Court Justice Gerard Neri ruled in favor of “Renew 81 For All,” an advocacy group that filed a lawsuit against the New York State Department Of Transportation on the grounds that the construction posed environmental dangers to the majority-Black Southside community.

Neri allowed the project’s progress to resume in February, but required the DOT to complete further environmental impact studies and traffic studies to address the impact of the removal.

While Neri ruled that demolition of the highway cannot commence until these studies are finalized, the state can begin work on the northern interchange, the southern interchange and northern local streets.

Today’s groundbreaking marked a turning point for Syracuse and other cities that have experienced similar infrastructure issues, Schumer noted.

“Today, we begin to right an over 50 year wrong,” Schumer said. “Today, we will make Syracuse a national model for the future of transportation.”

Published on July 21, 2023 at 9:59 pm

Contact Kendall: kaluther@syr.edu