For a guy so worried about World Trade Center cost overruns, Gov. Cuomo sure is taking chances. His arbitrary decision to move the site of the new St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church back to Liberty Street — reversing three years of planning — threatens to jack up development costs unpredictably and disastrously.
In fact, it might be time to start worrying about the “new World Trade Center” all over again.
The Post’s Fredric U. Dicker reported yesterday that an ongoing Cuomo audit will find “extravagant” overspending by the Port Authority at the WTC. There’s no way to evaluate the claim until the audit becomes public. But the governor’s sudden emphasis on reining in costs without respect to the need for more progress indicates his priorities don’t lie in completing a project that’s critical to the state and city’s future.
Cuomo’s intervention on behalf of the church certainly smacks of a reversion to the early days of chaotic “Ground Zero” planning, when former Gov. George Pataki’s micromanagement resulted in bizarre rules and guidelines that delayed work for years and drove up costs astronomically. The situation came to be known as “Pataki’s pit.”
Instead of a replacement church rising at 155 Cedar St. — site of the original, tiny house of worship that was destroyed on 9/11 — a new church three and a half times larger is to be constructed in front of, and just north of, the former Deutsche Bank tower site at 130 Liberty St.
The new location had been inexplicably chosen by Pataki in 2003 but later ruled out by the PA — for a good reason: It sits directly atop a mammoth subterranean construction job, the Vehicle Screening Center, through which truck deliveries to everything at “Ground Zero” must pass.
St. Nicholas parishioners deserve a place to worship. But the urgency of building the VSC without interference by the archdiocese, which stalled closing a deal, was a reason the PA booted the planned replacement back to Cedar Street in 2009. The two sides then fought over the location, financing and other issues, finally going to court.
Cuomo’s handpicked engineering consultant, Peter M. Lehrer, recently determined that putting the church on Liberty Street would not interfere with the VSC or delay work elsewhere at the WTC. Of course, that’s the conclusion the governor wanted.
But everything below ground at the WTC is interlocked. No one can be sure that the VSC won’t need to be modified from current plans to support a blast-proof platform for the church above it and as well as the church itself.
That could easily jeopardize the VSC’s planned completion by 2013 — when it must be finished to allow secured vehicular access to all components of the 16-acre site across the street, including office towers and the Memorial Museum.
Remember: It’s because of the site’s notorious “game of inches,” in which everything is connected with everything else, that every deadline was missed before Christopher Ward became PA executive director in 2008 — a fiasco that caused the PA to pay Larry Silverstein more than $150 million in fines.
Cuomo and the now-emasculated PA are trying to call his action a “compromise.” They say the new church will cost the agency less than it was originally supposed to — a mere $25 million for a platform to support the church, compared to the $50 million-plus it was slated to spend to help pay for the church itself.
But, as Cuomo himself seems to grasp, costs only go up, not down. The rosy estimate is based on a building that has not even been designed yet. The unpredictable consequences of moving the church could end up costing all of the site’s “stakeholders” — the PA, Silverstein, the MTA and the memorial — even more than they’ve already put in.
Cuomo and the PA also say the church will occupy a “footprint” of just under 4,100 square feet, much smaller than the 8,000 the archdiocese wanted at first. That’s misleading. By late 2008, when the PA and the church were still trying to nail down a deal, the footprint had already been whittled to 4,600 square feet — compared with the original church footprint on Cedar Street of only 1,200 square feet.
Why so large a new church for a congregation estimated to be fewer than 200 parishioners? Well, it will include a “nondenominational prayer and meditation center.” Hello? Isn’t that the function of the 8-acre memorial and 7-stories-deep museum across the street?
That Cuomo’s first public stroke at the WTC seems not only unnecessary but risky doesn’t bode well. Neither does the fact that he’s taking his time to name a successor to Ward, the only PA executive director who was able to get anything done after 9/11.
In the next few weeks, we’ll learn a lot more about the governor’s commitment to complete rebuilding the World Trade Center — or not to.
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