MTA board members ripped into the agency’s head engineer Monday — accusing him of hiding the leakage issues at the new Hudson Yards station for several years and complaining that they found out about it only when The Post broke the story last week.
“For those of us who are on the board and are out there taking questions a lot, we need more information than what we’re reading in the paper,” said MTA board member and city Department of Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg.

“We need more information right now. If we’re just going by what’s in the paper, that’s not good for any of us.”

Board member Allen Cappelli called the leaking No. 7 train station debacle “a significant blemish on this agency.”

“We might not be out of pocket a single dollar at the end of the day, but this is costing us the public’s trust,” said Cappelli, referring to Yonkers Contracting agreeing to the repair work on its own dime.
The Post revealed last week that the station was a chronic wet mess because of a construction failure and that the MTA, builder and subcontractors had been arguing about it — and suing each other — for years before the $2.4 billion terminus opened last September.

Michael Horodniceanu, the president of MTA’s Capital Construction arm, argued that although he knew of the leaks for several years before the station opened, the problems would come and go, so he always thought they would be handled.
The MTA still doesn’t know the exact cause of the problem, he said.
Horodniceanu also admitted that Yonkers Contracting asked to use a different kind of concrete than was specified in the building specifications, but that the agency decided it was “equal” and approved it.
Sources close to the builders said the substituted material was significantly cheaper.
The MTA board also agreed on Monday to convene an independent task force to get to the bottom of what went wrong and how to best fix it.