 |
|
 |
 |
 |
|
Sobering Revelations on WTC Progress
“The schedule and cost for each of the public projects on the site face significant delays and cost overruns,” Port Authority executive director Chris Ward told the Governor in a 32-page report released June 30. Ward’s assessment on the completion of those public projects—the memorial and museum, Calatrava-designed transit hub, massive retail, a performing arts center, vehicle security center, and all the infrastructure to go with it—is so dire that the new Port Authority chief said it would be another two months before he could even predict how many more billions it all will cost, and when it will be completed. The report reveals a web of 26 interconnecting, complex projects, each with a cost and completion date that hangs on a solution to the problems of others. It is, as Ward put it in his report, “akin to a game of pick-up sticks, where if you move one stick, it is nearly impossible not to move all of the others.” Among a dizzying list of impediments: •Conflicts between the MTA’s building of the Cortlandt Street subway station and the Port Authority’s work on constructing Greenwich Street affect the completion of all the other projects. •Which law enforcement agency will police the site? Every project, according to the report, depends on that decision. •The vehicle security center, the memorial and museum, transportation hub and Freedom Tower and reconstruction of Route 9A all stand to be delayed because of lack of coordination between the Port Authority and state Department of Transportation. •A stalemate over land negotiations with the Greek Orthodox Church, whose building was destroyed on Sept. 11, is a barrier to constructing a security center for vehicle inspection. In turn, the center is needed before most of the other projects on the site can be completed. There is also the matter of the Deutsche Bank building coming down before the vehicle security center can be built. And that date, too, is an unknown following lengthy delays in the aftermath of the fatal fire in the building last August. “We didn’t really anticipate some of the things we were faced with every day,” said Roy Johnson, who is in charge of the project for LVI Services, the contractor that is doing the work. “So our initial schedule kind of went out the window.” But Avi Schick, chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which owns the building and is the agency overseeing the deconstruction, said so many other challenges still lie for the vehicle security center that the Deutsche Bank building will surely come down before the center is ready to go up. “The Port Authority,” Schick began, “has identified the need to design the security center as the need to budget for it, the need to work with the New York City Police Department on a security plan, the need to invent the technology to run it, the need to acquire the land from the Greek Church to get the site and the need to get this [Deutsche Bank] building down.” Julie Menin, chair of Community Board 1, calls it “absolutely wrong and unacceptable” that all the deadlines are being missed seven years after the attacks. “There has been endless forgiving of the fact that the public has not been given the truth and that has to stop,” she said. Menin blamed buck-passing among overlapping agencies, a lack of leadership, and unrealistic deadlines set by Gov. George Pataki and motivated, she said, by his Presidential ambitions at the time. “All these factors made a perfect storm of inaction,” she said. “Politics are over,” Ward proclaimed to a breakfast meeting of Lower Manhattan leaders June 1, sponsored by the Downtown Alliance. Towards that end, Ward is setting up a new governing structure that will have final say over all major decisions on the site. “What we now face,” he said, “is the most complex and difficult construction job you can imagine.”
[Home][Back][Search][Contact] The Tribeca Trib · 401 Broadway, 5th Floor · New York, NY · 10013 · 212.219.9709 |
