ALBANY—For the second time this year, Governor Andrew Cuomo is proposing to hold off efforts to fund desperately needed sewer infrastructure projects in order to pay for more conspicuous and politically valuable initiatives.

In January, he proposed a $2 billion bond to pay for educational technology that supplanted a $5 billion environmental bond proposal to fund sewer repairs and other environmental initiatives across the state.

On Wednesday, the Thruway Authority is expected to give final approval to accept a $256 million loan from the state Environmental Facilities Corporation’s clean water loan fund to help finance a new Tappan Zee Bridge. The money—half of Cuomo’s original $511 million proposal—comes from a fund typically used to pay for expensive sewer repair projects and other initiatives that protect clean water and mitigate pollution.

The loan has raised the ire of local elected leaders, newspaper editorial boards as well as environmental groups. It may even be subject to an independent state investigation.

Cuomo has repeatedly boasted of his efforts to move forward on the long-stalled—and much-needed—Tappan Zee replacement project, calling it a bipartisan effort.

With a $4 billion price tag, the so-called New New York Bridge would be one of the country’s largest and most conspicuous public works projects, and a potential centerpiece of current and future Cuomo campaigns.

On Tuesday, Cuomo was asked by reporters in Central New York how he would spend $4 billion in legal settlements from banks and insurers, including more than $3 billion from French bank BNP Paribas, for breaking U.S. sanctions. Infrastructure will be one of the areas where the money will be spent, he acknowledged for the first time.

“We have some building to do, we could do more for infrastructure, we could do more to invest in education, and we can do more to cut taxes,” Cuomo said.

Pressed on whether he would use the money for the Tappan Zee project—which he still has not said how he would fund—Cuomo declined a direct answer.

“I’m trying to save it. You’re trying to spend it,” he told the reporter. “You are one of those big spenders they talk about. You should be in Albany. I’m saving.”

Money still remains in the clean water revolving loan fund and municipalities can still apply for the funds to repair sewers, Thruway spokesman Dan Weiller said. He said the Thruway loan would not harm any current or future projects.

Sewer repairs, by contrast with new bridge contruction, are mostly invisible to the public. And they cost a lot of money, even though they can save millions or billions of dollars down the road, said E.J. McMahon, executive director of the fiscally conservative Empire Center. He said it’s common for politicians from both parties to put off infrastructure repairs in favor of other projects that will draw voter attention and approval.

The education bond act, which will put iPads and laptops into the hands of schoolchildren, will now appear alongside Cuomo’s name on the November ballot instead of a bond act that proposed spending more than twice the amount on sewers and clean water projects.

“Politicians playing to the basest instincts of voters don’t make investments in existing infrastructure, they want to do new stuff, whether it’s a new bridge or new iPads,” McMahon said. “They see much less payoff in the gritty infrastructure.”

The only time the public thinks about sewer and water infrastructure repairs, for the most part, is when that infrastructure fails.

As was the case last month when, on the day State Senator John DeFrancisco of Syracuse joined with members of the Public Authority Control Board to approve the clean water fund raid, a sewer main broke in his hometown and shut down streets.

Similar infrastructure problems exist elsewhere in the state. For example, Albany still has wooden pipes that are more than a century old, while New York City dumps 30 billion gallons of sewage overflow into the waterways surrounding it.

The state needs at least $30 billion in infrastructure repairs, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli estimates, an amount that continues to grow every year.

© 2014 Capital New York