SEPTA general manager Joseph M. Casey said Friday that the agency's cash infusions for 22 capital projects might have to wait indefinitely. The Ardmore project's $10 million is on that list. Casey blamed Washington - that is, federal officials' nixing of the proposal to put tolls on I-80.
Despite the setbacks, Dranoff and Lower Merion officials predicted late last week that the oft-delayed project would eventually clear its fiscal and design hurdles.
Douglas S. Cleland, the township's manager, said Lower Merion commissioners will take up Dranoff's request on June 16. They will do so at a meeting of a panel whose name fairly conveys the Ardmore project's goal: the economic revitalization committee.
Cleland said he didn't expect the delay to kill the deal. "Carl Dranoff continues to express his confidence that he can and will complete this project," Cleland wrote in an e-mail.
Word of the likely delay drew the equivalent of a weary sigh from a politician who was a key force in launching the Ardmore project by helping to secure a federal grant for the effort - in 2004.
"The progress on this project has been frustrating, and I am becoming increasingly concerned that continuing delays will ultimately threaten the federal funds I have already worked to obtain," U.S. Rep. Jim Gerlach (R., Pa.) said in a statement Friday night. "Rather than asking for more delays, the residents and taxpayers deserve a redoubling of efforts by all parties - Amtrak, SEPTA, the township, and the developer - to get this project done as expeditiously as possible."
