Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials said earlier this month that they are keeping to their promise to complete the Fulton Street Transit Center on budget and on schedule, despite the agency’s struggles of the last year.

“We’re doing very well in terms of progress on the construction,” Uday Durg, the MTA’s program executive in Lower Manhattan, told a Community Board 1 committee on Tuesday. “We have the funding for those projects and we’d like to use the current market conditions to get them built as quick as we can.”

In May, transit officials released a revised schedule for the $1.4 billion megaproject, which will connect 12 subway lines to the PATH trains, and include more than 25,000 square feet of retail space. That schedule predicted the project would be complete in June 2014. The MTA had originally hoped to complete the construction by last year, but cost overruns and a budgeting crisis within the agency slowed progress to a crawl.

Often touted as the “Grand Central Station of Lower Manhattan,” the new Fulton Street Station will be partially funded by $424 million in federal stimulus money, a little less than 40 percent of the $1.1 billion grant that the agency was first promised from the federal government. A year prior, it was revealed that the original price tag of $755 million had almost doubled. Without the federal money, the station’s unique oculus design would have been scrapped. 

Since the money was delivered in August, Durg said the agency was able to finalize several contracts earlier than expected, including deals for construction of a new mezzanine and elevators for the A/C and J/M/Z platforms, as well as new entrances to the station on Williams and Dey Streets. Those projects are expected to be complete between May 2011 and March 2013.

Crews will finish later this year pouring the foundation for the new station’s vaunted main concourse, which will encompass a balcony of retail stores and restaurants and topped with an angled, cone-shaped dome to allow natural light to reach even the lowest levels of the complex. The next part of the station to be returned to everyday service, Durg said, would be the northbound platform of the Cortlandt Street R/W station, closed in 2005 due to work on the adjacent World Trade Center site.

Committee member Tom Goodkind lauded the MTA for, so far, sticking to its revised schedule despite a tumultuous year. Only a few months earlier, the agency came within a hair’s breadth of implementing drastic fare hikes, as well as cuts in jobs and services, in order to make up a budget deficit of more than $1 billion. 

“I compliment [the MTA] on keeping this online during very difficult times,” Goodkind said. “It’s just great news that you’re going ahead with this full force.”

Two pieces of the project have been finished for some time. The agency completed improvements on the 2/3 platform in 2006, and a new entrance to the 4/5 Train on the east side of Broadway at Maiden Lane opened in 2007.