The cost of bringing LIRR service to Grand Central Terminal is ballooning.

The price tag for the East Side Access Project has grown to $11.2 billion.

When it was first proposed in 1999, the project was supposed to cost $4.3 billion.

By 2009, two years after the work began, the cost had jumped to $7.3 billion, and it kept climbing.

"When we incur another billion dollars, alarm bells should be going off and we should be deeply concerned," said MTA Board Member James Vitiello.

"We as an authority have to be as realistic as to what the cost of a project is going to be," said MTA Chairman Joe Lhota. "We're burdened with the fact that somebody came up with a number and they said the number was what it was."

The completion of the project keeps slipping further into the future. The latest projections call for service to start in 2022.