More than $1 million worth of new police cars — bought a year ago to help beef up anti-terror security at area airports — has instead been collecting dust in a Port Authority facility as part of a boneheaded program’s boondoggle.
The nearly 30 Crown Victoria Interceptors — many now with dead batteries — are mothballed in a PA warehouse outside the Holland Tunnel because they had been earmarked for a $90 million high-tech system that was supposed to be set up around the runways of the metro area’s four airports but which has proved to be a fiasco.
As The Post reported last week, the much-ballyhooed Perimeter Intrusion Detection System, or PIDS — which consists of 57 miles of electronic fencing equipped with sensors and closed-circuit cameras — has never worked.
“The cars are brand new and in mothballs,” one official said.
The PA bought the cars last January with the intention of outfitting them with sophisticated radio systems that would interface with the PIDS as part of efforts to tighten airport security.
The auto acquisition was timed to coincide with the completion of the PIDS, which took four years to build and was supposed to be up and running last spring around 57 miles of runway at JFK, La Guardia, Newark and Teterboro airports.
In theory, when 16 pounds of pressure is put on the fencing, a signal pinpointing the breach would be transmitted to a monitoring station, where a specialist would dispatch cops to thwart the potential intruder.
The anti-terror plan called for the car fleet to be equipped with state-of-the-art radios that would pick up the PIDS alarm, enabling PA cops to race toward the potential breach before even being dispatched.
But since the new cars arrived, they have largely sat idle, jammed into a corner of the PA Police Headquarters facility on Erie Street in Jersey City.
PA officials say they bought 51 cars a year ago to work with PIDS, and in a sign of their dimming hopes for the program, slowly started to put 23 of them on the road in the past 12 months for other purposes.
Asked why PA brass have not found any use for the rest of the fleet — especially when the current PA police fleet is aging and averages 100,000 miles per vehicle, a spokesman said, “The Port Authority Police Department allocates resources based on operational needs.”
The spokesman said the PA sporadically used some mothballed cars during September’s UN General Assembly and on New Year’s Eve.