After a year of delays caused by continuing financial uncertainty, the Port Authority is preparing to award the first construction contract for a $400 million extension of the Light Rail Transit system.

	Online Graphic See a map that shows the proposed light rail tunnels and Gateway extension.

The project will extend the light rail system from Steel Plaza to the David L. Lawrence Convention Center and, through twin tunnels under the Allegheny River to the North Shore.

"The feds have given us the green light," Port Authority Executive Officer Paul Skoutelas told an American Public Transportation Association gathering yesterday at the Hilton Pittsburgh hotel.

He said the agency hopes to break ground "with luck, in September or October." A new Gateway Center station will be built on Stanwix Street, Downtown, by the time the project is completed in 2009.

"It [2009] sounds like a long time, but it's not a long time for a project of this magnitude," Skoutelas said.

The announcement came at a general forum titled "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," where speakers included Mayor Tom Murphy; Pirates CEO Kevin McClatchy; Continental Real Estate Cos. vice president Barry Ford; and Chuck Kolling, a longtime legislative lobbyist for the authority, sports teams and the city.

On June 1, the authority began advertising a bid package for the first contract, to bore the twin tunnels under the Allegheny River between PNC Park and Stanwix Street, Downtown. The bids are due July 14.

Skoutelas said the Federal Transit Administration encouraged the authority to get going as a way to save money, even though the two parties have yet to sign a full-funding agreement under which the federal government would pay 80 percent of costs.

The full-funding agreement is now before Congress for a compulsory 60-day review. If there are no objections from Congress, the project will move forward.

"The clock started ticking May 22," Skoutelas said after his address, indicating approval is foreseen by mid-July.

"We're optimistic and the FTA is optimistic" enough to solicit bids for the first contract, the key one at that, he said. "The bidding doesn't commit us to anything," he said.

The Port Authority previously had predicted construction would be started by now. Technicalities and then a new crisis in the operating budget stymied the process.

As part of the full-funding agreement, the agency must demonstrate its ability to operate and maintain the light-rail system for the next 30 years to get capital improvement funds -- not an easy task when the governor has been forced to transfer millions of dollars in highway money to forestall record fare increases and service cuts.

The project covers 1.5 miles: 1.2 miles from Downtown to the North Shore and a 0.3-mile subway spur from Steel Plaza to the convention center.

The new Gateway Center station is billed as a signature piece that will use more than $1 million from Pittsburgh foundations to create a unique, glass-heavy, day-lit, plaza-type station in the grassy triangle bounded by Stanwix Street, Liberty Avenue and Penn Avenue.

North Shore stations would be built just west of PNC Park (a subway station) and just north of Heinz Field (an elevated station integrated into a new parking garage).

Planning, an environmental analysis, engineering and design work have been taking place since 1999. More than $30 million has been invested in the project's development.

"It's critical to us to get the T done," Ford said, noting its importance for Continental Real Estate's plans to start developing housing between the two sports venues.

Continental also is building two office buildings at the site.

"I see it as an absolutely integral part of making the city work," Murphy said. "We need to make transit equal with highways."

All of the panelists said a proposed new parking garage is needed to free up surface parking areas for more vertical development on the North Shore, with the subway project to provide a transit option to tie the area to Downtown in much the way the T has extended the business district to Station Square.

"That's the next stop," Skoutelas said.