[INSPRATIONAL MUSIC STING] - We're now joined by Michael Hellstrom, who is Vice President and Eastern Regional Manager of the Laborers' International Union of North America.

Good to see you, Mike.

- Same here, Steve.

Good.

Thanks for having me.

- Couple things here.

The organization, describe it, and LIUNA is the acronym, right?

- Yeah, Laborers International Union of North America represents 530,000 construction workers across America and Canada, 40,000 of them right here in the Eastern Region, 25,000 here in the state of New Jersey.

- And you have been a member since '84, 1984?

- Yeah, from a very young age of 17 years old, I joined my union, and proud member for about 42 years and counting.

- Well done.

Also, thank you for your service in the Navy.

- Oh, thank you.

- 1985 to '89, Somalia and the Persian Gulf.

Thank you very much for your service, Mike.

- Yeah.

- Hey, Mike, we had on the Governor today, and by the way, go on our website, SteveAdubato.org, look for the half hour with the Governor.

Big chunk of that was about Gateway.

Mike knows a little bit about Gateway.

Mike, describe the Gateway Tunnel.

Also Kris Kolluri, head of New Jersey Transit, talking about it as well.

From your perspective, what is the economic /employment implications of all these stops and starts at the Gateway Tunnel?

We're taping on the 17th of March.

It is in fact St.

Patrick's Day.

Pick it up from there, Mike.

- Yeah, look, it's the biggest infrastructure project in America.

I mean, it's vital to not just New Jersey's economy, but really, the Northeast economy and America's economy, right?

If the tunnels were to fail, right, you know, being 112, 115 years old and they were to fail, it could impact 20 to 25% of America's GDP, which I just think is an alarm bell for America to understand that this is a big project that needs to be built right now so that we don't have a catastrophic event happening that could impact the economy all across America, especially here in the Northeast.

And look, thousands of our members are anticipating this project from the days back in the Christie Administration when it had a first false start 17 years ago, trying to get this project going.

And finally, here we are with shovels in the ground and getting ready to bore tunnels, and, you know, we have an administration in Washington, D.C., that just wants to play games with infrastructure.

That is not a partisan issue.

It's an American issue, and this is vital to the American economy, especially here in New Jersey and the New York area.

- Explain to folks, Mike, what happens every time there's a halt.

Say the Trump administration again says, "Listen, we found another reason to stop this."

I know the courts got involved last time, but when it stops, explain to folks, Mike, what that really means to people's lives.

- Yeah.

First of all, you know, when you stop a project, you are essentially wasting millions of dollars because all of the progress that has been completed up to the point of the stoppage, you then have to secure all that work.

You just cannot abandon the site and just walk away from it.

So all that progress just has to be tidy too, that costs a lot of money to do, and then to restart the project and really get those contractors to come back, remobilize, get all that manpower back to the project, and hopefully, that manpower didn't go off to other projects because, you know, working people wanna work, right?

They just don't wanna sit on the sidelines and wait.

They'll go out and find another job.

And that could impact contractors' ability to find skilled hands to be able to perform the work that needs to be performed.

So the cost overruns are just a waste of taxpayer dollars and just a waste of resources when we should be building the biggest infrastructure project here in America.

- Mike, are you and your colleagues with the Laborers' and others involved in this, including the Governor, and we talked about Kris Kolluri at New Jersey Transit and others, are you waiting for more... Are more federal dollars supposed to be coming?

- Yeah, so this project is funded by a $6.5 billion grant from really the United States Department of Transportation, the biggest federal grant that has ever been granted towards any kind of infrastructure project in America.

That's the magnitude of the grant.

And then both New Jersey and New York are coming up with the other essentially 50% of the $16 billion that we'll take to build two new tunnels and rehab the two existing tunnels.

So it's a bi-state partnership between New Jersey and New York with the federal government as a partner in it.

And so it's a three-way partnership.

Both states are gonna put up their money.

The federal government has to put up their money, and this is something that Congress has already allocated the money to.

So we don't need any further approvals.

We don't need anything other than the federal government just sending its money to the Gateway Development Commission so that it can continue to work and build these tunnels out.

- You know, Kris Kolluri said to us, what's interesting is that, and again, Kris is the former head of the Gateway Corporation, so he understands it well, and he negotiated a lot of these deals, right, Mike?

- Yeah.

- With the feds.

He said to me, "Steve, the President, and no one else in the federal administration is saying the project's not worthy.

They're not saying that at all.

They're coming up with issues having to do with DEI, or it's wasting.

I'm not sure what the issue is."

Is it clear to you, Mike, that there's a rationale for any of these, the feds stopping?

Is there any rationale, other than we have the right to do it, so we're doing it.

Take us to court.

- No, absolutely not.

I mean, I think that the government, you know, look, the Trump administration's desire to play politics here with critical infrastructure, it's an insult to us as working people.

It should be an insult to commuters.

It should be an insult to people that rely upon that infrastructure to get to and from both either New York and New Jersey.

He's toying around with it just because he can.

There is no issue here that should stop the federal government from funding this project.

As I said, Congress has already allocated the money, and when Congress allocates the money, that's the power of Congress to spend.

And the President only has to send the money.

That's all he has to do here, but he's doing it really for political purposes.

- I'm gonna put you on the spot, Mike.

I bet a fair number of your of laborers, right, voted for the President, a fair number.

- Yeah.

- 'Cause I think that's true in a lot of organizations, including organized labor.

How clear is it to them that there's no reason for this to be done, and they didn't vote for the president to be president to do something like this?

- Yeah, I think you're exactly right.

I mean, definitely they are definitely seeing that this is not what they voted for.

They may have voted for other things that Donald Trump- - Yeah, there are whole bunch of reasons - He had campaigned on, but they definitely did not vote to become unemployed.

And as such, when the shutdown was getting ready to happen, you know, we had those interviews and face-to-face conversations with our members, and they literally told us from really their own voices that, "Look, we may have voted for him, but we surely didn't vote for this," right?

And it's almost essentially that Donald Trump doesn't want to build big, beautiful things, right?

This is not an American-first agenda.

And you know, if we had one message to the President, it would be fulfill his obligation as President and do big, beautiful things in this country.

And building the Gateway Tunnel project is one of those big, beautiful things that he could be building.

- Mike Hellstrom is Vice President and Eastern Regional Manager of the Laborers' International Union of North America, otherwise known as LIUNA.

Hey, Mike, thank you.

It won't be the last time we have you.

We'll keep talking about this.

A hugely important project.

Thank you, Mike.

- Thanks very much.

I appreciate being here.

Thank you.

- You got it.

Stay with us.

We'll be right back.

- [Narrator] State of Affairs with Steve Adubato is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

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