Delays and cost overruns are plaguing the rehabilitation of more than a dozen subway stations, including some being outfitted to make the system more accessible for people with disabilities, according to a report released yesterday.

The rehabilitation of several stations – portions of Rockefeller Center, Times Square, Jay Street in Brooklyn, and Chambers Street on the nos. 1, 2, and 3 line – was pared down after $400 million was cut from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s capital plan earlier this year. The work is being delayed because the rehabilitation plans must now be redesigned, the report from the MTA’s capital program oversight committee said.

Also, a program designed to meet the requirements of the Americans With Disabilities Act by installing escalators and elevators in 100 of the system’s 468 stations has come under the scrutiny of the transit authority’s engineering consulting firm, Carter Burgess.

In the report, the company admonished New York City Transit for excessive delays in three projects under way or just completed as part of the last five-year capital plan.

At the Euclid Avenue station on the A line in Brooklyn, the transit authority in 2002 hired Gibraltar Contracting Incorporated to build and install three elevators at a cost of $6.9 million. The company was ill suited for the task, Carter Burgess reported, and the authority had to take over day-to-day control of the project.

After granting the company numerous deadline extensions, New York City Transit was contractually forced to forfeit any damages it may have been awarded, setting a dangerous precedent for the future.

“If there are no actual consequences to be incurred by contractors who willfully disregard their legal obligations and commitments” to the transit authority, then why would any contractor feel the need to satisfy the terms of their contract? Carter Burgess asks in its assessment.

A senior vice president for New York City Transit’s Capital Program Management, Cosema Crawford, responded to criticism from MTA board members yesterday, saying that working with the company and losing the right to receive damages was preferable because the project was only a couple of months from completion.

Ms. Crawford said Gibraltar would receive an “unsatisfactory” rating, meaning it will not be able to bid for another contract.

Other stations are facing delays that could stretch to months or years.

The cost of acquiring property in Lower Manhattan to build the Fulton Street transit hub has “skyrocketed” due to the real estate boom since 2002, when the project was conceived. That has slowed progress, a transit official said.

A project to design and install elevators at the 96th Street station on Broadway is scheduled for completion next August, 19 months later than initially planned.

Some of the transit authority’s setbacks have to do with meeting stringent federal guidelines on access for those with disabilities in stations that were built as long as 100 years ago, a spokesman for New York City Transit, Paul Fleuranges, wrote in an e-mail yesterday.

Such demands have contributed to a 90-month delay at the station at 14th Street and Eighth Avenue and a 45-month delay at the Eastern Parkway and Broadway Junction subway hub in East New York, Brooklyn.

Since a capital plan was introduced in 1982 to rebuild the subway system, 170 of the 468 stations have been rehabilitated.