After Mayor's Summit, World Trade Center Builders to Meet Again
A “summit” to resolve differences between developers of the World Trade Center site yielded little in the way of results earlier this month, save for the promise of yet another meeting.
Vowing to put an end to the months-long squabble over construction financing between Larry Silverstein and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey that threatens a near halt of work on the site, Mayor Michael Bloomberg convened on May 21 a meeting at Gracie Mansion of key players in the tumultuous rebuilding.
Seated with the mayor around a long, oval table were Silverstein, State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, New York and New Jersey Governors David Paterson and Jon Corzine, and the Port Authority’s chairman Anthony Coscia and executive director Christopher Ward.
Following their private, hour-long talk, Bloomberg said the group would assemble again June 11 in the hopes of presenting a new “roadmap” for further construction at the World Trade Center site.
“I think we all agree that further delay of the World Trade Center is simply not acceptable,” Bloomberg said. “We have a duty to make Lower Manhattan whole again, we understand that and we want to honor it.”
Leading up to the June 11 meeting, Bloomberg called for a compromise between the Authority and Silverstein but declined to elaborate, saying he did not want a new agreement between the developers of the site “negotiated through the press.”
“This is not one party against another,” Bloomberg said. “No matter how anybody tries to pull us apart and get one side to trade against another, we’re not going to fall for that bait. That’s gone on for much too long.”
Bloomberg invited the group to meet at Gracie Mansion after Silver spoke to a Downtown Lower Manhattan Association breakfast earlier in May, saying he was “fed up” with the stalemate between Silverstein and the Port Authority.
“That we are where we are after this much time is an embarrassment to our city, our state and to the nation,” Silver said following the Gracie Mansion meeting. “Today we were clear to all the parties: it can not go on like this any longer. There must be no more stalled negotiations.”
Silverstein, squeezed by tight credit markets and faced with rising commercial vacancy rates Downtown, wants the Port Authority to back financing for his Towers 2 and 3. If a deal is not reached soon, progress on the site as a whole could again slow to a crawl. But there are no tenants signed on for the 4.4 million square feet of office space in those two buildings and the Authority has balked at the idea, saying it could jeopardize the Port’s other projects in the region.
The Port Authority has offered to invest close to $1 billion in the construction of Tower 4 in exchange for a share of the building’s rent revenue. It would also build the first few floors of Towers 2 and 3, allowing it to complete infrastructure work needed for the memorial museum and transit center. Those above-ground “pedestals” would be outfitted with retail tenants, while construction of the towers remained on hold until the commercial rental market recovers.
Ward has said that backing financing for Silverstein’s office towers before demand for office space downtown resurges would destabilize the market. He said he doubted the June 11 meeting will yield a “fully baked deal.”
“I think the hope is, given the complexity of this, that we’ll have a framework of an agreement that all of the parties will have agreed to,” he said.
Asked what he believed a compromise at the site could mean, Silverstein would say only, “Compromise is a word in the English dictionary, and it’s very important.”
By Matt Dunning