What we know about the future of Philly's Chinatown Stitch project
Why it matters: A traffic jam of conflicting voices is creating confusion about whether Philly will ever see the nearly $159 million it was promised to cap the Vine Street Expressway.
Catch up quick: Congress recently passed President Trump's " big, beautiful bill," which, among other things, clawed back funding for projects through the federal government's Neighborhood Access and Equity Program.
That's the program that awarded the Chinatown Stitch project a roughly $159 million grant last year to fund its final design and construction.
Then, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) told the Inquirer last week the Trump administration would release more than $1 billion in federal grants for dozens of infrastructure projects across the Commonwealth approved under the Biden administration.
Yes, but: The Chinatown Stitch project isn't among the projects on the list of grants Fetterman's office provided to Axios.
Fetterman's spokesperson didn't immediately respond to Axios' request for clarity on Chinatown Stitch's future.
What they're saying:"Everybody's confused," Philadelphia Councilmember Mark Squilla tells Axios.
Some state officials expressed optimism that the funding is coming.
PennDOT is awaiting "official word" from the Federal Highway Administration, spokesperson Krys Johnson tells Axios, though the agency is "encouraged" by signs that long-promised funding is finally moving.
Philly's Office of Transportation and Infrastructure Systems, meanwhile, says it hasn't received any new guidance from the feds, spokesperson Matt Cassidy tells Axios.
The other side: Squilla doesn't believe the newly released funding applies to the project, and U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle is skeptical.
"I will continue to demand answers from the Trump administration on the status of this grant," Boyle says.
What we're watching: Despite no assurances, the city and its project partners are moving forward with planning, Squilla says.
PennDOT had previously told Axios it committed $10.2 million in initial federal funding to the project's initial study and preliminary design.
What's ahead: Over the coming months, the project team will refine designs for the highway park cap and Vine Street traffic lanes, Cassidy says. Plus: A business plan for the park.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Boston Globe
2 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
The billionaire behind mysterious immigration ads targeting Miami Republicans
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'We are seeing a replay of what I saw when I was 12 years old and left Cuba,' said Fernández, 73, who is known as Mike. 'It is beyond troubling. It is scary.' Advertisement Fernández is a former Republican who left the party more than a decade ago to register without party affiliation. The ad campaign, run by a political group called Keep Them Honest, has made Fernández something of an outlier in Florida, which has moved decidedly to the political right. That trend has occurred throughout Miami-Dade County, where several cities have some of the country's highest levels of foreign-born residents, most of them Hispanic. Republicans have defended President Trump's crackdown on illegal immigration as necessary to ensure the rule of law after the number of migrants crossing the southern border surged in recent years. Advertisement Fernández's immediate goal is to help oust in next year's midterm elections at least one of the state's three Cuban American Republican members of Congress: Representatives Mario Diaz-Balart, Carlos A. Gimenez, and Maria Elvira Salazar. The three Republicans, however, have not entirely supported the White House's immigration crackdown. They have pushed back against the administration's move to strip deportation protections from hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, a rare instance of dissent between congressional Republicans and Trump. Salazar has also noted that she filed legislation to provide some immigrants a path to legal status, though the effort has not gained much traction. When a local Spanish-language television station asked Diaz-Balart recently about the ads, he said that it was a point of 'much pride' for 'the extreme left to criticize me.' 'Congressman — it's not them,' Fernández wrote, referring to the 'extreme left,' in a letter that he plans to publish soon to reveal his campaign involvement. 'It's us.' It was not previously known that Fernández has led the ad campaign, but he has excoriated the three Republicans before. In May, he wrote a letter urging them to stand up to Trump. He also took out full-page ads against them in the Times and The Wall Street Journal decrying their 'complicity and cowardice.' Fernández knows his campaign to unseat any of the three representatives might fail: They are well known, none of their districts are very competitive and, Fernández said, there does not appear to be strong prospective Democratic candidates to challenge them. Advertisement As much as he is pouring his money into the ads, Fernández acknowledged that just spending his fortune may not be enough to reach his goal. 'It cannot just be cash on the table,' he said. By putting his name to the campaign, Fernández said he would like to initiate a 'movement' of like-minded donors, activists, and voters to commit to robustly challenging congressional Republicans in the midterms, who he says have not done enough to challenge the Trump administration's immigration policies. Fernández said he had privately persuaded more than 30 donors, about a third of them Republicans, to contribute since April to Keep Them Honest. As a 'dark money' group, Keep Them Honest can fund issue ads and does not have to disclose its donors. He would like more of them to speak publicly but is not sure if they will for fear of retaliation. Fernández said he had received threats and lost investors, friends, and close contact with some family members as a result of his political involvement. By his estimation, Fernández donated more than $30 million to Republican candidates over the years, including small contributions in the past to Salazar, whom he is now targeting. He also served as finance cochair of the 2014 reelection campaign of former governor Rick Scott, a Republican, and donated millions to Jeb Bush's Republican presidential campaign in 2016. After Trump won that year's primary, Fernández endorsed Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, in the general election. Fernández's family arrived in New York in 1965. He remembered how other immigrants in the city, from Mexico and Ireland, gave him snow boots and a coat. He later served as a paratrooper in the US Army. Advertisement He recently rescinded a $10 million donation to Miami Dade College and a $1 million donation to Florida International University, both public institutions. It was a response to state lawmakers and Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, repealing legislation from 2014 that allowed certain immigrants who were brought into the country illegally as children to pay in-state tuition rates. Fernández had forcefully lobbied for the original law, which hangs framed on his office wall. He said he was redirecting some of that money to a nonprofit that provides students lacking permanent legal status with scholarships to private schools. 'I have to leave a mark,' he said, 'an example to my family and my children.' This article originally appeared in
Wall Street Journal
3 minutes ago
- Wall Street Journal
Texas Democrats Leave State to Foil Republican Effort to Redraw State's Congressional Districts
AUSTIN, Texas— Democrats in the Texas state House fled the state Sunday afternoon, in an attempt to thwart plans by President Trump and Gov. Greg Abbott to redraw the state's congressional districts. Abbott, a Republican, called a 30-day special session of the state legislature after requests by the White House to change the state's congressional maps to add five new Republican seats. That special session started July 21, with the new maps presented last week.
New York Post
32 minutes ago
- New York Post
Tulsi Gabbard explains why Russia must have thought Hillary Clinton win was ‘inevitable'
The Russians privately felt it was 'inevitable' that Hillary Clinton would triumph in the 2016 election, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said on Miranda Devine's 'Pod Force One' podcast. Despite widespread narratives that Russia was in President Trump's corner, Moscow's objective was to sow chaos in the American political process and brace itself for a Clinton presidency, Gabbard claimed, citing the trove of intelligence documents her team has released. 'It surprised me that all of these documents still existed, quite frankly,' Gabbard said in an episode set for release Wednesday. 'As we've learned in later documents that we've reviewed throughout that campaign, Russia believed that Hillary Clinton would win the election. Advertisement 'They felt it was inevitable.' Last month, Gabbard's team began disclosing a trove of documents that gave a behind-the-scenes look at the intelligence community's machinations during the 2016 election cycle regarding the probe of Russian interference. 4 Tulsi Gabbard accused the Obama administration of mounting a campaign to subvert President Trump. Ron Sachs – CNP for NY Post Advertisement 4 Hillary Clinton once implied that Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian asset. Getty Images This included a House Intelligence Committee report from 2020 that claimed the Russians may have had intelligence that Clinton was 'placed on a daily regimen of 'heavy tranquilizers' and while afraid of losing.' That was supposedly due to her alleged 'psycho-emotional problems, including uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness.' Gabbard pondered why that supposed Russian intelligence wasn't leaked to the public if Moscow's chief objective was to prop up Trump and undermine Clinton. Advertisement 'If Russia aspired to help Trump get elected, which is what the manufactured January 2017 intelligence community assessment says with high confidence, according to Brennan and Clapper, then Putin would have released the most damaging information and emails to help President Trump,' she said. 'It was intentionally withheld and not released because they assumed that Hillary Clinton would win that election, and their plan,' Gabbard added, citing the 2020 House Intelligence Committee report, '[was to] wait until maybe days or weeks before her inauguration to release these documents.' The Russians were widely alleged by US officials to have hacked Democratic National Committee emails during he 2016 campaign. 4 Narratives about Russian interferences in the 2016 election haunted President Trump during his first term. AFP via Getty Images Advertisement The 2020 House Intelligence Committee report had concluded that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin's 'principal motivations in these operations were to undermine faith in the US democratic process' and that he didn't necessarily prioritize propping up one candidate over the other. 'The American people, I think, have been, and our republic, has been most harmed by this,' Gabbard said of the Russia collusion narrative. 'Of course, President Trump went through hell and his family because of this Russia hoax that was manufactured by President Obama and his administration.' Critics such as former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper accused Gabbard of peddling 'patently false' accusations about their Russiagate activities. Much of what Gabbard has released centered around rebuffing a 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), which concluded among other things that 'the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.' Brennan, Clapper and others have pointed to a 2020 bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report, which noted the panel 'heard consistently that analysts were under no politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions.' Clapper and Brennan recenty penned an op-ed insisting that the intelligence community report never referenced 'collusion' between Trump and the Russian government, and stood by their claims that the Kremlin prefered him in the 2016 election. Tulsi Gabbard's Russiagate claims Tulsi Gabbard's claims of election interference focus on the controversial 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, which President Barack Obama ordered his intel chiefs to compile. The report fueled the Russiagate investigations against President Trump. Gabbard alleges it amounted to a political hit job, claiming Obama officials knowingly used shaky intel and then lied about it. Gabbard's new claims are based on a 2020 House Intelligence Committee report, which she has publicly released. Its findings differ in some key ways from both the Obama report and a previously released Senate Intelligence Committee report. Democrats, however, point to the Senate report, which was backed by then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — now Trump's secretary of state. That supports some of the findings of the Obama report. Here are the biggest points — and what the dueling intel reports say: The Steele dossier The House report contradicts the claims of Obama officials that they never relied on the discredited Steele dossier — which was compiled by Hillary Clinton's campaign — as part of the Russiagate investigation. In a 2017 House hearing, Obama CIA Director John Brennan denied that his agency used the Steele dossier for intelligence assessments. However, the full Steele dossier was still included as an attachment to the Obama intel report, the newly public House report found. Additionally, according to the House report, Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe pushed to use the Steele dossier for the Obama intel report. Senior intel officials also confronted Brennan about the legitimacy of the Steele dossier, the House report said, but he shrugged it off. Brennan's response was reportedly, 'Yes, but doesn't it ring true?' The Senate investigation found that the Steele dossier was not used as part of the Obama intel report. Obama's involvement Gabbard claimed Wednesday that Obama ordered the creation of the 2017 intel report and suggested it 'was subject to unusual directives directly from the president and senior political appointees.' She added: 'Obama directed an intelligence community assessment to be created, to further this contrived false narrative that ultimately led to a year-long coup to try to undermine President Trump's presidency.' The 2020 Senate intel report confirmed that Obama ordered the report to be drafted, but did not comment on the political motivations. Obama said that 'the bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.' Did Putin want Trump to win? The Obama report said that 'Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability' and that Putin had a 'clear preference for President-elect Trump.' But the House report contradicted this, saying that Putin's 'principal motivations in these operations were to undermine faith in the US democratic process.' The Russian strongman also seemed to expect Clinton to win, and held back on 'some compromising material for post-election use against the expected Clinton administration.' The Senate report said lawmakers were given 'specific intelligence reporting to support the assessment that Putin and the Russian Government demonstrated a preference for candidate Trump.' Did Russia alter the 2016 election? To buttress her claims that the Obama intel report was political interference, she highlighted the findings of multiple intelligence agencies that Russia 'had neither the intent nor capability to impact the outcome of the US election.' On this, all three reports are in agreement. Gabbard pointed to how Obama ordered the 2017 ICA of Russian interference in the 2016 election and his administration's machinations detailed in the document dump to accuse the 44th president of subversion. Advertisement 'What we now know came from President Obama was a covert mission, essentially, to subvert the will of the American people, create this lie that would challenge the legitimacy of President Trump's election and the four years of his administration, resulting and affecting in what was truly a years' long coup,' Gabbard said. Reps from Obama have refuted those characterizations, saying that the 'bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.' 'Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes,' Obama spokesperson Patrick Rodenbush said in a statement last month. 4 Tulsi Gabbard has drawn President Trump's attention with the document dump on Russiagate. REUTERS Advertisement Gabbard made referrals to the Justice Department based on her findings, and the DOJ has since formed a 'strike force' to comb through the claims.
