No. 1: Tony Coscia

This year should be big for Coscia, a partner at Windels Marx Lane & Mittendorf, who is also the chairman of Amtrak and one of three trustees of the Gateway Development Program Corp., the nonprofit managing the estimated $20 billion bridge and tunnel undertaking above and below the Hudson River. Federal funding for Gateway is finally moving after years of fits and starts. While Coscia and other officials are still waiting for news on the 108-year-old Hudson River rail tunnels, for businesses that opt back into their skyscraper offices post-pandemic, Gateway remains an important project.

To top it all off, Amtrak has a friend in the highest of places. President Joe Biden was a frequent rider of the rails between Washington, D.C. and his home in Delaware when he served in the U.S. Senate. He still often relates fond memories of those trips.

“There is no question that there is a new map of the nation’s rail system that Amtrak is starting to draw,” Coscia told NJBIZ earlier this year. “A part of it involves the development of high-speed rail, which looks a lot and feels a lot, like the high-speed rail that people think of when they think of Europe and Asia and other places. But what is just as important is that we believe that our system will give us an ability to connect city pairs where today there is no rail service.”

Coscia is so highly regarded that amid the pandemic’s first wave, he was named to Gov. Phil Murphy’s Restart and Recovery Commission. Coscia’s influence extends into public finance as well. Last year, the law firm announced that Coscia, alongside partner Frank Quinn, John Bitar, and a team of others, closed a $1 billion bond deal with health care giant Hackensack Meridian Health.