It’s been more than two years since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, killed thousands, put a hole in the Pentagon, and leveled New York’s Twin Towers at the World Trade Center. Challenged with rebuilding the transit structure is the Lower Manhattan Transit Recovery Project. According to Sara Banda, communications manager for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which oversees the Lower Manhattan Transit Recovery Project, “The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has established a goal that 20% of our expenditures go to minority- and women-owned businesses.” However, the Federal Transit Administration was unable to provide a specific racial breakdown of contracts awarded to minority- and women-owned business enterprises.
Milligan & Co. L.L.C., a Philadelphia-based minority- and veteran-owned consulting and CPA firm, is one company that was recently awarded a $700,000 contract by the Federal Transit Administration to provide financial management oversight of transit rebuilding contractors for the Lower Manhattan Transit Recovery Project. The 50-person firm began working with the Federal Transit Administration in 1991 and “is slated to provide its financial management oversight [for the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey] through 2004, but may provide ongoing assistance through completion of the project,” says the firm’s principal, Charles Holmes.
The New York Metropolitan Transit Authority and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which received most of the $4.75 billion allocated to the Lower Manhattan Transit Recovery Project, are the first two grantees of the city’s transit infrastructure recovery initiative. The entire $21 billion project, including rebuilding the World Trade Center, will span 10 years.
Navy veteran and founder John Milligan spent nine years at PricewaterhouseCoopers prior to launching the firm in 1985. Milligan is currently involved in the assessment of light rail projects at the Bay Area Rapid Transit in San Francisco, Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority in Boston, and Tren Urbano in Puerto Rico.