Hochul Allocates $54 Million to Continue Work on Second Avenue Subway

Gov. Kathy Hochul said on Tuesday that New York State has found the money to restart work on a long-awaited extension of the Second Avenue subway line in Manhattan.

Continued construction on the project had been in question after Ms. Hochul halted congestion pricing, a tolling program that would have helped pay for it.

The first phase of the Second Avenue subway opened in 2017 and stopped at East 96th Street on the Upper East Side. Politicians have promised for decades to bring the line to East Harlem in order to give a historically neglected community better transit access and shift passengers away from some of the country’s most crowded train lines.

But the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the subway, stopped working on the roughly $7.7 billion project when Ms. Hochul in Juneindefinitely suspended congestion pricing, which would have generated billions for capital improvements to the mass transit network.

On Tuesday, the governor’s office said that the state would devote $54 million from discretionary funds reserved for infrastructure upgrades to continue the subway project. That allocation, they said, would allow work to go on as scheduled. The M.T.A. awarded its first construction contract for the project in January. At the time, the authority expected to complete the project in the 2030s.

It could also help prevent the M.T.A. from losing $2 billion in federal spending for the extension. That grant is conditioned on a certain amount of local funding, said Representative Adriano D. Espaillat, a Democrat whose district includes East Harlem.