Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Mamdani broke ground on a $35.7 million stormwater project in Harlem and East Harlem, according to a statement from the governor's office.
The project is designed to cut street flooding in the two neighborhoods while also holding back drinking water bound for Central Park's reservoir system, the release said. The governor's office did not break out a construction timeline or the prime contractor in the announcement.
Projects like this one run through the city's DEP and state DEC pipelines as green infrastructure work — rain gardens, bioswales, and underground detention — rather than a single big-pipe job, which is why the dollar figure lands smaller than a typical trunk-sewer contract. That makes it the kind of award that's easy to miss on the bid board because it's announced as a ribbon-cutting, not posted as a solicitation.
Harlem and East Harlem have been chronic flood complaint zones for DEP's 311 system for years, and this is the kind of contract that typically splits into civil site work, landscape/planting packages, and drainage structure install — three separate trade lanes even on a project this size.
No subcontractor list or GC was named in the governor's release. The RFI Wire could not independently confirm bid history for this specific contract as of publication; it does not appear on the current public bid board.
**What to do next:** If you do civil site, drainage, or green-infrastructure work in Manhattan, this is worth a call to DEP's capital projects office to find out whether the construction contract already went out to bid or is still ahead of you — a $35.7 million green-infrastructure job this size is almost always split into multiple trade packages, and nothing here says that's been decided yet.