I spent the morning at the Summit on Financing Tappan Zee Bridge & I-287 Corridor, hosted by Rockland County Legislature Chairwoman Harriet Cornell at Rockland Community College.

I learned a lot about rocks. Not the kind you find smashed up by Tilcon into gravel for roadways. No. Like the kind you look under for funding sources.

Seems financing discussions (especially when it’s about finding a base of $16 billion, let alone all the money on top of that to help with any debt service) brings out the comedian in everyone. Alas, it didn’t bring out any concrete answers on where the funding will come from. (Oh, no! It’s contagious! Look at that: concrete—rock… get it?) For those living under a rock, the TZB/I-287 Project will replace the Tappan Zee Bridge and revamp the 30-mile corridor between Port Chester and Suffern. The project will introduce a bus rapid transit system along the corridor, and commuter rail across Rockland to tie into the Hudson line and down to Grand Central Terminal. While the study for how to design and implement the project continues, so does the study of how to finance it.

New York State Department of Transportation Finance Manager Phil Ferguson started the rock talk rolling. During the morning session, he talked about looking under every rock for funding, talked about “the rocks we’ve looked at,” referring to traditional funding sources. At one point, when some suggestions were made for other funding approaches, he said, “Keep bringing us rocks.”

(He also made a crack about one graphic shown, an upside-down Isoscelese triangle showing how certain options were being narrowed. He called it the “Pink Floyd” chart.—I, of course, am too young to get the reference to the prism on the cover of the Dark Side of the Moon album.)

But the best witticism of the morning (and boy, we needed it) came from Chairwoman Cornell. After Joseph Ruggiero, director of strategic planning for the Office of New York State Comptroller, explained in excrutiating detail the financial struggles faced by the state (think phrases like “debt capacity”), he ended is talk by saying, “Sorry to rain on your parade.” Cornell returned to the podium and said, “Ushers from the State of New York will be passing among you with little caps.”