No. 1: Anthony Coscia 

Coscia, a partner at Windels Marx Lane & Mittendorf, is also the chairman of Amtrak and one of three trustees of the Gateway Development Program Corp., the nonprofit organization managing the railroad bridge and tunnel undertaking.

Under President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion infrastructure plan, Amtrak could get upward of $80 billion, and likely approval for long-awaited financing and permits for the $1.8 billion Hudson River tunnel project repeatedly blocked by Trump administration officials.

No one is more pleased than Coscia that this infrastructure plan now has a commitment from federal partners and expects to move “full speed ahead” on Gateway, unlocking billions of dollars in funding and clearing bureaucratic hurdles.

In addition, Coscia was named to Gov. Phil Murphy’s Restart and Recovery Commission, which helped plan how the state reopened businesses after months of a virtual lockdown imposed to control the pandemic.

In private practice, Coscia has handled corporate litigation and transactions. He is no slacker, extremely busy, largely because of his work on transactions involving infrastructure, health care and real estate logistics, all areas that saw high levels of activity this past year. In addition to all of his railroad efforts, he has been involved in a number of substantial transactions including the Horizon reorganization, the merger of SUEZ/Veoli, the St. Peter’s-RWJB merger, the Rutgers New Jersey Cancer Institute and a fair number of acquisitions related to e-commerce and logistics.

Coscia’s background also includes notable stints on the boards of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and the New Jersey Economic Development Authority.

He could not give a timeline for when he expects the groundbreaking to start for the tunnel, but said he expects construction to at least be underway before the end of Biden’s first term. “We feel very lucky,” Coscia told NJBIZ in May. “We spent the last decade becoming a strong company for this moment in time when there’s a president who puts a very high value for what we do and is willing to put a significant amount of support behind it.”