Shomari Figures, a former Justice Department official, and state Rep. Anthony Daniels will seek a runoff election in the Democratic primary for Alabama’s Second Congressional District, according to The Associated Press.

Voters had their first say in the newly formed Second District, which was redrawn after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that Alabama had illegally undermined the power of black voters.

Former state senator Dick Brewbaker and Caroleene Dobson, a real estate attorney, received enough votes to reach the runoff for the Republican primary. The second elections are on April 16.

The new district cuts hundreds of miles across the state, passing through the state capital of Montgomery, much of the seaport city of Mobile and parts of the Black Belt, rural counties where enslaved cotton plantations were nourished by rich soil.

Because Black voters have historically supported Democratic candidates in the state, the Second Congressional District is now seen as an opportunity for Democrats to flip the seat. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report, after redrawing the map, changed the district’s ranking to a likely Democratic seat.

The newly formed district could also lead to the state sending two black representatives to Washington for the first time in its history. Mr. Figures and Mr. Daniels are both black, and Representative Terri Sewell, a black Democrat in the 7th Congressional District, is expected to win reelection.

Mr. Figures and Mr. Daniels prevailed in a crowded Democratic field that included a handful of state lawmakers and longtime politicians. Mr. Figures, who previously worked for the Justice Department and the Obama administration, is the son of Michael Figures, a civil rights attorney and state senator who died in 1996, and his wife, Vivian Davis Figures, who successfully ran for his seat after his death.

“People really see an opportunity for new leadership, experienced leadership — they are invested in having someone who can go to Washington and actually try to get things done,” Mr. Figures said in an interview last week, adding “ Bringing the experience that we have to the table, I think, is something that has really resonated with people.

Mr. Daniels grew up in the district and is now the top Democrat in the Alabama House of Representatives.

“As minority leader in the House of Representatives, I’ve had the opportunity to reach all these different areas of the state of Alabama without directly representing them,” Mr. Daniels said in a recent interview. The newly formed Second District, he added, “gives us a unique opportunity to do something special.”

Republicans have vowed to defend the seat, especially at a time when the party’s control of the House of Representatives hinges on just a few seats.

“I never thought I would return to politics,” Mr. Brewbaker recently told the crowd at a candidates forum at a library in Mobile. But he added: “We have to find a way to come back together and rebuild this country.”

Rep. Barry Moore, the Republican who currently represents the Second District on Capitol Hill, did not seek re-election. Instead, he challenged Rep. Jerry Carl, the Republican incumbent, in the primary for the First Congressional District.

Mr. Moore emerged victorious in those primaries on Tuesday evening, according to The Associated Press.

Mr. Moore, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, has emphasized his opposition to many of the key spending and defense policy bills that Mr. Carl, a member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, was willing to support .

The first thing Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez told donors gathered at a recent wine and cheese campaign fundraiser was the role she played in securing $600 million in federal funding to rebuild one of America’s major thoroughfares the region, the outdated Route I-5. bridge.

“Bringing that grant home was a dogfight,” said Ms. Perez, 35, a first-term Democrat from a rural working-class district in Washington state who twice voted for former President Donald J. Trump and faces one of the toughest re-election races in the country this year.

“My community is going to build that bridge,” she told the room full of gray-haired donors gathered in a crowded living room in Washougal, Washington, with giant windows overlooking the Columbia River. “This is our job.”

Ms. Perez sees this funding as a major coup for her district and her re-election campaign. But the bridge in one of the nation’s most competitive districts has become a political piñata in the race, which will almost certainly pit Ms. Perez against far-right Republican Joe Kent, whom she defeated by less than 1 percentage point in 2022. .

Mr. Kent, who denies the legitimacy of the 2020 election and has called those jailed for participating in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol “political prisoners,” has branded the rebuilding plan an “Antifa superhighway.” He has claimed that the proposed project, which includes light rail and tolls, will bring unwanted urban elements from Portland into the car-centric, predominantly white community of Clark County, Washington, essentially serving as “a highway for crime and homelessness in Portland.” Vancouver,” he wrote on social media.

It’s an example of how Republicans, many of whom oppose President Biden’s sweeping trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, are trying to turn even the most basic local issues into battlegrounds in the country’s culture wars during this year’s election , in which control of Congress is at stake. . Kent’s attacks, which rely on buzzwords from the far right, put the bridge at the center of a national political debate that vilifies the left and plays on fears of demographic change.

“We don’t want the problems of downtown Portland to be dumped directly into our Vancouver district,” Mr. Kent said recently in a Facebook Live chat. “If you look at the murder rate and the crime rate, that’s the last thing we want in Vancouver.”

Republicans have long opposed investments in public transportation, preferring instead to spend on highways. Mr Kent says he wants the historic bridge to be preserved and more lanes added elsewhere to ease traffic congestion.

Mr. Kent declined to be interviewed and agreed to provide only written comment for this story. After The New York Times sent his campaign a list of questions, his aides published them along with the answers in a press release.

In the release, Mr. Kent denied that he was playing on racist fears by opposing the bridge project and accused Ms. Perez of lying about her role in financing it, while also blaming her for mishandling the bridge project.

“The drug addicts and criminals in their tent colonies spreading their crime from Portland to Vancouver are almost entirely white, and Antifa is overwhelmingly white,” Kent wrote.

Although predominantly white, Portland has the largest immigrant population in Oregon and has seen more than 1,400 refugees from Afghanistan arrive since August 2021. As the city struggles to provide temporary shelter for migrants arriving from the southern border, Mr. Kent claimed that Democrats are allowing “illegal invaders” to flood into American communities.

Mr. Kent said Ms. Perez’s real priorities were “protecting the rights of biological males to invade women’s sports, spaces and bathrooms” and said her full involvement in financing the new bridge included “ writing a letter to Pete Buttigieg,” the Secretary of Transportation.

In an interview, Mr. Buttigieg said Ms. Perez “absolutely played a role” in the project’s selection to receive the largest grant of its kind.

“We choose projects based on their merits,” Mr. Buttigieg said. “Effective advocates help illustrate these merits.”

Built in 1917, the Interstate 5 bridge is one of the two major intersections between Washington state and Oregon, with about $132 million worth of freight crossing the bridge every day, as well as about 69,000 commuters from Ms. Perez’s district. It is the main connector for an entire region of the Pacific Northwest, but is widely believed to be at the end of its life.

The area has become so busy that vehicles crawl across the area at speeds of 55 kilometers per hour for many hours a day. The entire structure is supported by piles of Douglas fir trees sunk into the mud – “pretzel sticks in chocolate pudding,” as Vancouver Mayor Anne McEnerny-Ogle likes to describe it – putting it at high risk of total collapse. of a major earthquake.

“There are projects that are simply too large and too complex to be accomplished through existing financing mechanisms,” Mr. Buttigieg said, explaining why the project had received such a large grant. “Additional support is needed.”

He described the Interstate 5 bridge as the “worst freight bottleneck in the region” and said it was an example of “a state-of-the-art bridge designed 100 years ago that can and should be replaced .”

In 2022, Ms. Perez, who ran a car repair shop, defeated Mr. Kent, a Trump-backed retired Green Beret whose wife had been killed fighting ISIS, by just two votes in each precinct in the district. Now Mr. Kent is back, hoping to be swept to victory with Mr. Trump at the top of the ticket.

There are other Republicans running in the primaries, but Mr. Kent’s emergence from that small field is already considered a fait accompli; the state Republican Party suspended its articles of association so it could support him in the primaries and outside groups trying to maintain Republican control of the House of Representatives plan to support him.

And Mr. Kent has already made the Interstate 5 bridge a focal point of his campaign.

“Voters across the district are uniting behind my message of common-sense conservatism: build a bridge with no tolls and no light rail, get spending and inflation under control,” he said.

As she traveled through her district in her Toyota Tundra in the rain and snow last week with her dog Uma Furman in tow, Ms. Perez said she tries not to think about Mr. Kent too much. “I really try not to get into his head so much. I shouldn’t get into DC’s head, nor into Joe’s head.”

Ms. Perez tries to stay in the minds of her constituents. On Capitol Hill, Ms. Perez is the rare Democrat who often breaks with her party on big votes, often drawing the ire of progressives who she believes do not value working-class priorities.

“On the floor I really have to pay attention to my voices,” she said. “It’s this constant analysis of, ‘How much can I afford to piss people off to do what I think is right?’”

Ms. Perez was one of four Democrats who voted for an annual defense policy bill that Republicans loaded with conservative social policy mandates that would limit access to abortion, transgender care and diversity training for military personnel. She defended the vote, saying it was important to support the military and that the Senate would always “clean up” the bill by removing partisan amendments she disagreed with.

She also sided with Republicans on a bill to repeal Mr. Biden’s student loan relief initiative. And Ms. Perez has supported the censure of two Democrats, Reps. Jamaal Bowman of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. Yet Mr. Kent has portrayed her as a supporter of Democrats and Mr. Biden, attacking her for opposing a tough immigration law, among other things.

It has left Ms. Perez in a bit of a political no man’s land. In the capital, her social circle consists mainly of two Republican Bible study groups, including Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, the current chairman of the Republican House campaign arm who is actively pushing her toward defeat.

Ms. Perez, along with other Democrats representing districts Mr. Trump won, “received a passing grade last cycle; no one has laid a glove on them,” Mr. Hudson said during a recent briefing with reporters. He said his job was “to inform voters about their data.”

Still, Ms. Perez, whose father was an evangelical pastor, says she often feels more at home among religious Republicans.

“I feel like my party is ashamed that I am a Christian,” she said. She is broadly dismissive of some of her own colleagues’ values, which she believes are out of touch.

“I hear my colleagues complaining that they don’t make enough money,” she said of her fellow lawmakers, who make $174,000 a year. “Do you know what the average income is in my community? You should be ashamed of yourselves.” (The median income in her district is $43,266.)

When Ms. Perez was elected, her Republican opponents tried to portray her as someone who would operate as an undercover, West Coast version of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another young working-class woman whose election to Congress no one saw coming. But Ms. Perez said she has little in common with the progressive New York star, nor does she have much in common with the other young women in Congress, even socially.

“Our districts are really very different,” she said of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. “It’s very lonely, working all the time. You go back to your apartment, eat some frozen peas and go to bed.

At the evening fundraiser last week, Ms. Perez focused on her work on local issues, but under pressure from donors eager to express concerns about Mr. Biden and his re-election campaign, she had little praise to offer.

“I am not here to apologize for his actions or his messages,” Ms. Perez said. “I am very dissatisfied with the way Biden is using his power, but when does it become a choice between that and Trump?”

Later, as she sat in her old auto shop office before catching a flight back to Washington, Ms. Perez tried not to worry too much about what would happen if she lost her re-election race. She would return to this simpler life, she said, and be happy not to miss so many bedtimes with her toddler. But the idea of ​​losing to Mr. Kent was difficult to accept.

“It’s just very obnoxious and condescending for him to take on the mantle of fighting for the little guy,” she said. “It might work for one election cycle, but people are going to need jobs. It works until the bridge collapses – and then what?”

The first thing Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez told donors gathered at a recent wine and cheese campaign fundraiser was the role she played in securing $600 million in federal funding to rebuild one of America’s major thoroughfares the region, the outdated Route I-5. bridge.

“Bringing that grant home was a dogfight,” said Ms. Perez, 35, a first-term Democrat from a rural working-class district in Washington state who twice voted for former President Donald J. Trump and faces one of the toughest re-election races in the country this year.

“My community is going to build that bridge,” she told the room full of gray-haired donors gathered in a crowded living room in Washougal, Washington, with giant windows overlooking the Columbia River. “This is our job.”

Ms. Perez sees this funding as a major coup for her district and her re-election campaign. But the bridge in one of the nation’s most competitive districts has become a political piñata in the race, which will almost certainly pit Ms. Perez against far-right Republican Joe Kent, whom she defeated by less than 1 percentage point in 2022. .

Mr. Kent, who denies the legitimacy of the 2020 election and has called those jailed for participating in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol “political prisoners,” has branded the rebuilding plan an “Antifa superhighway.” He has claimed that the proposed project, which includes light rail and tolls, will bring unwanted urban elements from Portland into the car-centric, predominantly white community of Clark County, Washington, essentially serving as “a highway for crime and homelessness in Portland.” Vancouver,” he wrote on social media.

It’s an example of how Republicans, many of whom oppose President Biden’s sweeping trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, are trying to turn even the most basic local issues into battlegrounds in the country’s culture wars during this year’s election , in which control of Congress is at stake. . Kent’s attacks, which rely on buzzwords from the far right, put the bridge at the center of a national political debate that vilifies the left and plays on fears of demographic change.

“We don’t want the problems of downtown Portland to be dumped directly into our Vancouver district,” Mr. Kent said recently in a Facebook Live chat. “If you look at the murder rate and the crime rate, that’s the last thing we want in Vancouver.”

Republicans have long opposed investments in public transportation, preferring instead to spend on highways. Mr Kent says he wants the historic bridge to be preserved and more lanes added elsewhere to ease traffic congestion.

Mr. Kent declined to be interviewed and agreed to provide only written comment for this story. After The New York Times sent his campaign a list of questions, his aides published them along with the answers in a press release.

In the release, Mr. Kent denied that he was playing on racist fears by opposing the bridge project and accused Ms. Perez of lying about her role in financing it, while also blaming her for mishandling the bridge project.

“The drug addicts and criminals in their tent colonies spreading their crime from Portland to Vancouver are almost entirely white, and Antifa is overwhelmingly white,” Kent wrote.

Although predominantly white, Portland has the largest immigrant population in Oregon and has seen more than 1,400 refugees from Afghanistan arrive since August 2021. As the city struggles to provide temporary shelter for migrants arriving from the southern border, Mr. Kent claimed that Democrats are allowing “illegal invaders” to flood into American communities.

Mr. Kent said Ms. Perez’s real priorities were “protecting the rights of biological males to invade women’s sports, spaces and bathrooms” and said her full involvement in financing the new bridge included “ writing a letter to Pete Buttigieg,” the Secretary of Transportation.

In an interview, Mr. Buttigieg said Ms. Perez “absolutely played a role” in the project’s selection to receive the largest grant of its kind.

“We choose projects based on their merits,” Mr. Buttigieg said. “Effective advocates help illustrate these merits.”

Built in 1917, the Interstate 5 bridge is one of the two major intersections between Washington state and Oregon, with about $132 million worth of freight crossing the bridge every day, as well as about 69,000 commuters from Ms. Perez’s district. It is the main connector for an entire region of the Pacific Northwest, but is widely believed to be at the end of its life.

The area has become so busy that vehicles crawl across the area at speeds of 55 kilometers per hour for many hours a day. The entire structure is supported by piles of Douglas fir trees sunk into the mud – “pretzel sticks in chocolate pudding,” as Vancouver Mayor Anne McEnerny-Ogle likes to describe it – putting it at high risk of total collapse. of a major earthquake.

“There are projects that are simply too large and too complex to be accomplished through existing financing mechanisms,” Mr. Buttigieg said, explaining why the project had received such a large grant. “Additional support is needed.”

He described the Interstate 5 bridge as the “worst freight bottleneck in the region” and said it was an example of “a state-of-the-art bridge designed 100 years ago that can and should be replaced .”

In 2022, Ms. Perez, who ran a car repair shop, defeated Mr. Kent, a Trump-backed retired Green Beret whose wife had been killed fighting ISIS, by just two votes in each precinct in the district. Now Mr. Kent is back, hoping to be swept to victory with Mr. Trump at the top of the ticket.

There are other Republicans running in the primaries, but Mr. Kent’s emergence from that small field is already considered a fait accompli; the state Republican Party suspended its articles of association so it could support him in the primaries and outside groups trying to maintain Republican control of the House of Representatives plan to support him.

And Mr. Kent has already made the Interstate 5 bridge a focal point of his campaign.

“Voters across the district are uniting behind my message of common-sense conservatism: build a bridge with no tolls and no light rail, get spending and inflation under control,” he said.

As she traveled through her district in her Toyota Tundra in the rain and snow last week with her dog Uma Furman in tow, Ms. Perez said she tries not to think about Mr. Kent too much. “I really try not to get into his head so much. I shouldn’t get into DC’s head, nor into Joe’s head.”

Ms. Perez tries to stay in the minds of her constituents. On Capitol Hill, Ms. Perez is the rare Democrat who often breaks with her party on big votes, often drawing the ire of progressives who she believes do not value working-class priorities.

“On the floor I really have to pay attention to my voices,” she said. “It’s this constant analysis of, ‘How much can I afford to piss people off to do what I think is right?’”

Ms. Perez was one of four Democrats who voted for an annual defense policy bill that Republicans loaded with conservative social policy mandates that would limit access to abortion, transgender care and diversity training for military personnel. She defended the vote, saying it was important to support the military and that the Senate would always “clean up” the bill by removing partisan amendments she disagreed with.

She also sided with Republicans on a bill to repeal Mr. Biden’s student loan relief initiative. And Ms. Perez has supported the censure of two Democrats, Reps. Jamaal Bowman of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. Yet Mr. Kent has portrayed her as a supporter of Democrats and Mr. Biden, attacking her for opposing a tough immigration law, among other things.

It has left Ms. Perez in a bit of a political no man’s land. In the capital, her social circle consists mainly of two Republican Bible study groups, including Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, the current chairman of the Republican House campaign arm who is actively pushing her toward defeat.

Ms. Perez, along with other Democrats representing districts Mr. Trump won, “received a passing grade last cycle; no one has laid a glove on them,” Mr. Hudson said during a recent briefing with reporters. He said his job was “to inform voters about their data.”

Still, Ms. Perez, whose father was an evangelical pastor, says she often feels more at home among religious Republicans.

“I feel like my party is ashamed that I am a Christian,” she said. She is broadly dismissive of some of her own colleagues’ values, which she believes are out of touch.

“I hear my colleagues complaining that they don’t make enough money,” she said of her fellow lawmakers, who make $174,000 a year. “Do you know what the average income is in my community? You should be ashamed of yourselves.” (The median income in her district is $43,266.)

When Ms. Perez was elected, her Republican opponents tried to portray her as someone who would operate as an undercover, West Coast version of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another young working-class woman whose election to Congress no one saw coming. But Ms. Perez said she has little in common with the progressive New York star, nor does she have much in common with the other young women in Congress, even socially.

“Our districts are really very different,” she said of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. “It’s very lonely, working all the time. You go back to your apartment, eat some frozen peas and go to bed.

At the evening fundraiser last week, Ms. Perez focused on her work on local issues, but under pressure from donors eager to express concerns about Mr. Biden and his re-election campaign, she had little praise to offer.

“I am not here to apologize for his actions or his messages,” Ms. Perez said. “I am very dissatisfied with the way Biden is using his power, but when does it become a choice between that and Trump?”

Later, as she sat in her old auto shop office before catching a flight back to Washington, Ms. Perez tried not to worry too much about what would happen if she lost her re-election race. She would return to this simpler life, she said, and be happy not to miss so many bedtimes with her toddler. But the idea of ​​losing to Mr. Kent was difficult to accept.

“It’s just very obnoxious and condescending for him to take on the mantle of fighting for the little guy,” she said. “It might work for one election cycle, but people are going to need jobs. It works until the bridge collapses – and then what?”

A private development company with an alternative vision for recreating Manhattan’s Pennsylvania Station said Wednesday that its plan would be significantly less expensive than a rival proposal backed by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

ASTM North America’s new plan includes renovating Penn Station, the busiest rail hub in the United States, and encasing Madison Square Garden in a towering stone facade. The unveiling came days after New York Governor Kathy Hochul signaled that the state was ready to move forward with a renovation.

ASTM officials said during a presentation on Tuesday that the company’s plan was better than the one supported by the MTA because it would be $1 billion cheaper and result in a more unified train concourse.

The announcement would likely spark a conflict between ASTM and the MTA, whose chief, Janno Lieber, said in April that the plan was wastefulpartly because it involved paying the owners of Madison Square Garden, which sits atop the station, a hefty fee to demolish part of the complex.

Although Amtrak owns the building, the decision on which redesign plan to follow was expected to be made jointly by the railroad and the states of New York and New Jersey, which control the MTA and New Jersey Transit.

Civic leaders have been advocating for a new Penn Station since the 1990s, when former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan proposed converting the old James A. Farley Post Office building across Eighth Avenue into a train concourse. That idea became a reality under former Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, but it has done little to ease the crowded and gloomy conditions at Penn Station itself. Attempts to renovate the train interchange have been hampered by the presence of an arena on it, and officials have argued for the Garden’s relocation for years, to no avail.

While other plans to renovate Penn Station have been proposed and then rejected over the years, several city and state officials and leaders of influential non-profit organizations have expressed support for ASTM’s proposal. The bulk of any renovation would be funded by state and federal tax dollars.

Responding to the MTA’s criticism, Peter Cipriano, the senior vice president of ASTM North America, said during a presentation on Tuesday that his company’s proposal would be cheaper and that there was a clear plan to pay for it.

“They have more than $7 billion, and where the money for that is coming from is completely unclear,” he said, referring to cost estimates for the MTA plan, which are as high as $10 billion.

The ASTM proposal includes the purchase and demolition of the theater in MSG, a 15,000-square-foot site on the west side of the entertainment complex, to make way for two new light-filled train concourses: a grand entrance on Eighth Avenue with 55- foot ceilings and a 105-foot atrium in the center of the block where trucks are currently unloading equipment. The renovation would ease access to all 21 tracks, reduce congestion and allow for additional track capacity in later upgrades. Construction could be completed in six years, the company said.

ASTM would pour $1 billion to jump-start the project and rely on a mix of state and federal funding to cover the balance. The company would then manage and operate the station for 50 years, while the three railroad companies using the space — Amtrak, New Jersey Transit and the MTA — would pay a total of about $250 million a year for the privilege. Any construction cost overruns would be borne by the private company.

The cost to buy the theater from MSG would be less than $500 million, Mr. Cipriano said. In the ASTM plan, Madison Square Garden Entertainment, which is run by billionaire James Dolan, would also pay to renovate the garden’s signature drum.

The plan was unveiled in March. The design team, led by PAU and HOK, the architectural firm that co-designed La Guardia Airport’s acclaimed Terminal B, has since made several changes.

Gone is the glassy box that would have surrounded MSG, replaced by a contemporary Neoclassical dais of limestone or granite, with lines echoing the Corinthian columns of the Beaux-Arts Farley Building across the street.

Demolition of the theater would not only create space for a dramatic new entrance, but also free up space for an alternative truck loading scheme that is critical to traffic flow, said Vishaan Chakrabarti, PAU’s creative director.

“This cannot be dismissed as cosmetic,” he said.

The MTA plan would accomplish many of the same goals, with the exception of a new Eighth Avenue entrance, which the agency has called unnecessarily expensive because the majority of passengers use the Seventh Avenue entrance. The MTA has estimated that the total cost of building the Eighth Avenue train concourse would be $1.5 billion to $2 billion.

The ASTM plan is less expensive in part because the design would not remove a critical structural bridge between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. The removal could add more than $1 billion to construction costs, Mr Chakrabarti said.

Jamie Torres-Springer, the president of MTA construction and development, said rebuilding the mid-block bridge was important to the agency’s plan.

ASTM also worked closely with engineering firms familiar with the intricacies of the garden. Mr Torres-Springer said the MTA was not interested in paying for technical details it already had.

“It’s very funny – every proposal, big or small, from ASTM has to pay MSG money,” said Mr. Torres-Springer.

On Monday, Ms. Hochul officially jettisoned a plan that had called for the construction of 10 skyscrapers near the existing Penn Station to help fund a new train interchange. She announced the start of a preliminary design process that is expected to culminate in the state issuing a contract for completion of the project.

The timing of her announcement didn’t seem coincidental: It came just days before ASTM was expected to reveal the financial details of its own plan.

The decision to proceed without the tower component came as no surprise. The 10-tower plan, which Ms. Hochul inherited from Mr. Cuomo, involved developing millions of square feet of office space at a time when the commercial market is collapsing and borrowing costs are high. Vornado Realty Trust, the developer that would build those skyscrapers, put its plans on hold in February.

Ms. Hochul said she was “open-minded about all possible scenarios,” which seemed to create an opening for ASTM. She made the announcement while standing next to Manhattan borough president Mark Levine effectively endorsed the ASTM plan, and Anthony Coscia, the Amtrak president, whose railroad is open to the idea. An Amtrak spokesperson declined to comment on this story.

But the ASTM plan is roundly opposed by Mr. Lieber, the president of the MTA, who is angry at the idea of ​​a private company interfering in a lawsuit he was leading.

He and his team have pointed to the station’s new Long Island Rail Road corridor as evidence of the MTA’s ability to competently oversee major projects, and he has objected to the idea of ​​making Madison Square Garden Entertainment to pay to acquire the theater from MSG.

Madison Square Garden Entertainment has indicated that it is open to the ASTM plan. It seems less open to the MTA’s proposal.

During a recent hearing on the Garden’s bid to extend the stadium’s operating license in perpetuity, an MSG representative dismissed the MTA’s plan as “a concept piece” that “doesn’t work from a technical perspective.”

A private development company with an alternative vision for recreating Manhattan’s Pennsylvania Station said Wednesday that its plan would be significantly less expensive than a rival proposal backed by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

ASTM North America’s new plan includes renovating Penn Station, the busiest rail hub in the United States, and encasing Madison Square Garden in a towering stone facade. The unveiling came days after New York Governor Kathy Hochul signaled that the state was ready to move forward with a renovation.

ASTM officials said during a presentation on Tuesday that the company’s plan was better than the one supported by the MTA because it would be $1 billion cheaper and result in a more unified train concourse.

The announcement would likely spark a conflict between ASTM and the MTA, whose chief, Janno Lieber, said in April that the plan was wastefulpartly because it involved paying the owners of Madison Square Garden, which sits atop the station, a hefty fee to demolish part of the complex.

Although Amtrak owns the building, the decision on which redesign plan to follow was expected to be made jointly by the railroad and the states of New York and New Jersey, which control the MTA and New Jersey Transit.

Civic leaders have been advocating for a new Penn Station since the 1990s, when former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan proposed converting the old James A. Farley Post Office building across Eighth Avenue into a train concourse. That idea became a reality under former Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, but it has done little to ease the crowded and gloomy conditions at Penn Station itself. Attempts to renovate the train interchange have been hampered by the presence of an arena on it, and officials have argued for the Garden’s relocation for years, to no avail.

While other plans to renovate Penn Station have been proposed and then rejected over the years, several city and state officials and leaders of influential non-profit organizations have expressed support for ASTM’s proposal. The bulk of any renovation would be funded by state and federal tax dollars.

Responding to the MTA’s criticism, Peter Cipriano, the senior vice president of ASTM North America, said during a presentation on Tuesday that his company’s proposal would be cheaper and that there was a clear plan to pay for it.

“They have more than $7 billion, and where the money for that is coming from is completely unclear,” he said, referring to cost estimates for the MTA plan, which are as high as $10 billion.

The ASTM proposal includes the purchase and demolition of the theater in MSG, a 15,000-square-foot site on the west side of the entertainment complex, to make way for two new light-filled train concourses: a grand entrance on Eighth Avenue with 55- foot ceilings and a 105-foot atrium in the center of the block where trucks are currently unloading equipment. The renovation would ease access to all 21 tracks, reduce congestion and allow for additional track capacity in later upgrades. Construction could be completed in six years, the company said.

ASTM would pour $1 billion to jump-start the project and rely on a mix of state and federal funding to cover the balance. The company would then manage and operate the station for 50 years, while the three railroad companies using the space — Amtrak, New Jersey Transit and the MTA — would pay a total of about $250 million a year for the privilege. Any construction cost overruns would be borne by the private company.

The cost to buy the theater from MSG would be less than $500 million, Mr. Cipriano said. In the ASTM plan, Madison Square Garden Entertainment, which is run by billionaire James Dolan, would also pay to renovate the garden’s signature drum.

The plan was unveiled in March. The design team, led by PAU and HOK, the architectural firm that co-designed La Guardia Airport’s acclaimed Terminal B, has since made several changes.

Gone is the glassy box that would have surrounded MSG, replaced by a Neoclassical dais of limestone or granite, with lines echoing the Corinthian columns of the Beaux-Arts Farley Building across the street.

Demolition of the theater would not only create space for a dramatic new entrance, but also free up space for an alternative truck loading scheme that is critical to traffic flow, said Vishaan Chakrabarti, PAU’s creative director.

“This cannot be dismissed as cosmetic,” he said.

The MTA plan would accomplish many of the same goals, with the exception of a new Eighth Avenue entrance, which the agency has called unnecessarily expensive because the majority of passengers use the Seventh Avenue entrance. The MTA has estimated that the total cost of building the Eighth Avenue train concourse would be $1.5 billion to $2 billion.

The ASTM plan is less expensive in part because the design would not remove a critical structural bridge between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. The removal could add more than $1 billion to construction costs, Mr Chakrabarti said.

Jamie Torres-Springer, the president of MTA construction and development, said rebuilding the mid-block bridge was important to the agency’s plan.

ASTM also worked closely with engineering firms familiar with the intricacies of the garden. Mr Torres-Springer said the MTA was not interested in paying for technical details it already had.

“It’s very funny – every proposal, big or small, from ASTM has to pay MSG money,” said Mr. Torres-Springer.

A spokeswoman for MSG Entertainment said there had been no discussion with the MTA about charging the agency for technical services.

On Monday, Ms. Hochul officially jettisoned a plan that had called for the construction of 10 skyscrapers near the existing Penn Station to help fund a new train interchange. She announced the start of a preliminary design process that is expected to culminate in the state issuing a contract for completion of the project.

The timing of her announcement didn’t seem coincidental: It came just days before ASTM was expected to reveal the financial details of its own plan.

The decision to proceed without the tower component came as no surprise. The 10-tower plan, which Ms. Hochul inherited from Mr. Cuomo, involved developing millions of square feet of office space at a time when the commercial market is collapsing and borrowing costs are high. Vornado Realty Trust, the developer that would build those skyscrapers, put its plans on hold in February.

Ms. Hochul said she was “open-minded about all possible scenarios,” which seemed to create an opening for ASTM. She made the announcement while standing next to Manhattan borough president Mark Levine effectively endorsed the ASTM plan, and Anthony Coscia, the Amtrak president, whose railroad is open to the idea. An Amtrak spokesperson declined to comment on this story.

But the ASTM plan is roundly opposed by Mr. Lieber, the president of the MTA, who is angry at the idea of ​​a private company interfering in a lawsuit he was leading.

He and his team have pointed to the station’s new Long Island Rail Road corridor as evidence of the MTA’s ability to competently oversee major projects, and he has objected to the idea of ​​making Madison Square Garden Entertainment to pay to acquire the theater from MSG.

Madison Square Garden Entertainment has indicated that it is open to the ASTM plan. It seems less open to the MTA’s proposal.

During a recent hearing on the Garden’s bid to extend the stadium’s operating license in perpetuity, an MSG representative dismissed the MTA’s plan as “a concept piece” that “doesn’t work from a technical perspective.”