On Monday morning, federal, state and local officials came together to break ground on the beginning of the Mass Transit Tunnel Project, the largest mass transit construction project in American history.

The press conference marked the beginning of construction of an underpass that will go beneath Tonnelle Avenue and lead to tunnels that will continue through the Palisades Cliffs and end at a new expanded Penn Station in Manhattan.

The $8.7 Mass Transit Tunnel Project, also known as Access to the Region's Core (ARC), is being built by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and NJ Transit. It is projected that 6,000 new jobs will be created each year of construction until 2017, when the tunnel is slated to be complete.

Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff announced that the federal government would pledge $1.35 billion, including a downpayment of $400 million of funding, in federal stimulus funds and $125 million in Federal Highway congestion mitigation funds. The FTA had pledged $3 billion in total to the project. The rest of the funding is coming from state agencies.

Along with Rogoff, Gov. Jon Corzine, Senators Frank R. Lautenberg and Robert Menendez, Congressman Albio Sires, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Chairman Anthony Coscia, New Jersey Transportation Commissioner Stephen Dilts, NJ Transit Executive Director Richard Sarles and North Bergen Mayor and State Sen. Nicholas Sacco were in attendance.

“To say I'm excited today would be an understatement,” said Corzine.

“This is truly a job now of mobility for 100 years effort and took an incredible team to make this happen. This is not about one person, or even generation. I think it truly is time to use the word historical.”

Corzine said that ARC was made possible in part by the efforts of Lautenberg and Menendez, along with other officials in the past that pushed for it to become a reality. He said that the project had national significance because it would create 44,000 permanent jobs and double the current railway capacity.

For more information on the Mass Transit Tunnel Project, read this weeks North Bergen Reporter. – Tricia Tirella