CB1 and public question WTC officials on delays

By Matt Dunning
POSTED JULY 11, 2008

Though it will be at least another two months before the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey releases new timelines and budgets for its massive projects at the World Trade Center site, the authority’s newly appointed chief told Community Board 1 members on July 10 he has  “hope” that the planned 9/11 memorial park, at least, will be completed on time.

During a special meeting of CB1’s World Trade Center Reconstruction Committee, Port Authority executive director Christopher Ward, who faced the committee along with six other key players in the redevelopment of the trade center, said he wants to see construction of the memorial park completed and open to the public on or before Sept. 11, 2011, the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks.

“The delivery of the memorial is the driving force, and the date of the ten-year anniversary is the date that we’re working towards,” Ward said. “We believe that there can be an appropriate location...that would allow somber recollection and a healing process on that date.”

Citing the memorial’s planned plaza with its grove of trees, along with the hollowed outlines of the twin towers and their reflecting pools, Ward said it is the Port Authority’s hope that “in large measure,” those parts of the memorial, though not the museum, will be completed.

The eight-acre Memorial Park will occupy the southwest corner of the World Trade Center site, just to the south of where the Port Authority is currently building the Freedom Tower. Ward said the park, which includes two reflecting pools in the shape of the original Twin Towers, is the only element of the Authority’s many reconstruction projects on the site that stands a chance of being completed on time. Late last month, he delivered a sobering assessment of the Port Authority’s progress on the site, saying that most, if not all of the projects – including the planned 9/11 museum that will abut the park, the Freedom Tower, the Santiago Calatrava-designed transit hub and a vehicle security station—are millions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule. Ward said the Port Authority has since scrapped most of its original deadlines for the project’s completion.

A Long List of Questions for WTC Players
CB1 members, and then the public, took turns firing questions at a panel of WTC stakeholders that included Ward, Lower Manhattan Development Corp. chairman Avi Schick, deputy mayor Robert Lieber, World Trade Center Memorial Foundation president Joseph Daniels, Silverstein Properties president Janno Lieber, and the president of the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center, Robert Harvey.

At the top of the meeting, CB1 chairwoman Julie Menin gave the gathered stakeholders a list of ten unresolved issues she wanted addressed by the Port Authority releases its next assessment of the project, which Ward said would be completed before Sept. 30. Chief among Menin’s demands was a new set of “realistic” deadlines for the project’s completion.

“The redevelopment of the World Trade Center site has been plagued by fractious debate for far too long,” Menin said. “We do not want to be promised false deadlines and unrealistic hopes. The residents and businesses of Lower Manhattan need a plan that we can rely on to base our future moving forward.”

Ward had encouraging news in response to one of Menin’s expressed concerns: the stalemate over land negotiations with St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, whose building was crushed beneath the rubble of the south tower. He said those talks, which need to be resolved before the security inspection center can be built, are nearly completed. “I would expect it to be final very soon,” Ward said. 

But Menin had plenty more items on her punch list of unresolved issues. Among them: the demolition of the Deutsche Bank building at the corner of Liberty and West Streets and the completion of the new PATH and Fulton Street MTA train stations as originally designed. Menin said she also wanted the stakeholders, particularly the Port Authority, to re-examine its plan to fill the Freedom Tower with federal and state government agencies and offices, a position that was repeated at the meeting by Paul Stein, speaking on behalf of the New York State Public Employees Federation, who lost 34 of its members in the Sept. 11 attacks.

 “We work hard every day, we’re under a lot of stress, and we don’t want the added stress of working with, what we feel, would be a target on our backs,” Stein said. “We should not be used as political pawns.”

Ward, who was working at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, said he was sympathetic to the union’s position, but the Port Authority could not afford to let fear govern who will occupy the new tower.

“The city and the world will face the same threat throughout the world,” Ward said. “While I recognize the loss that [Stein] referred to, there were private sector people that lost their lives and there were Port Authority people that lost their lives. We face the difficult reality of that going forward.”

CB1 member Michael Connolly said he was disheartened to learn that the planned performing arts center would likely be the very last component of the new trade center to be completed, if at all.

“It seems to have been forgotten or misplaced along the way,” Connolly said. “I think it’s unacceptable, and I would ask that ...we refocus on making sure that the performing arts center is built.”

LMDC chairman Avi Schick said $55 million has already been allocated to the performing arts center, $5 million of which will go towards the center’s planning and design.

“We’re working very closely with the city to advance that work,” Schick said. “The rest of it is waiting for the moment we can identify the place and time and site. It’s not going to get you a building, but it’s a place to start from.”

In response to a question about the impact of Port Authority delays to the building of three Silverstein Properties office towers on the site, Silverstein president Janno Lieber said his company did not yet know the extent to which those delays will hold up his company’s projects.

“We’re still puzzling out some of those issues,” Lieber said. “We’re trying to figure out if we’re going to have slow some of our pieces down in order to deal with some of the realities that Chris Ward and his team are trying to address. Our hope is that we will finalize that analysis with Port Authority for submission in September.”

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