Ever since The Post first suggested in December that GWBridgegate created a rare opportunity for bold reform at the Port Authority, our case has only grown stronger.
E-mails that have emerged since then show how officials manipulated the agency for rank political purposes. They highlight the dysfunction inherent in a $7 billion-a-year, 7,000-employee behemoth headed by two bosses with distinct agendas: the governor of New York and the governor of New Jersey.
Surely the time’s ripe for someone — perhaps Congress, which created the PA in 1921 — to take a good, hard look at this agency and consider ways to pare it down and narrow its mission.
Some good news: There are now signs the agency is heading in the direction we suggested in December, and aiming, at least, to scale back its sprawling portfolio.
Even as the incriminating e-mails were emerging, Executive Director Pat Foye told us the agency would be “returning to [its] core mission” and focusing on “transportation infrastructure.” The new course, he said, was being taken “as directed by both governors.”
The agency is making a “substantial investment in airports, bridges and tunnels, ports” and the PATH system, Foye said. Several projects are already in motion:
- A $1.3 billion plan to raise the roadway of the Bayonne Bridge, letting larger ships pass underneath to access local terminals.
- A $5.2 billion investment in upgrades at LaGuardia and JFK airports.
- Rehab work at the GW, including new suspender ropes, at a cost of $1.3 billion.
- Upgrades to Staten Island’s New York Container Terminal and the Port Authority Bus Terminal, to the tune of $250 million.
The PA is also moving to privatize, with plans for a commercial developer to build and run a new Goethals Bridge, at a cost of $1.5 billion. This will be the first such arrangement with the private sector anywhere in the Northeast, the agency says.
There’s more contraction afoot, too. Indeed, the PA has already divested (or plans to soon) its stakes in a number of real-estate and other commercial or industrial enterprises, including major retail holdings at the World Trade Center, a waste-to-energy power plant in New Jersey, the Staten Island Teleport and Bathgate Industrial Park in The Bronx.
These moves can’t come fast enough.
But it’s not clear they’ll cure all the PA’s structural ills: jobs based on patronage; political interference in what ought to be non-political decisions; the dual chains of command because of the two states; the inevitable inefficiencies of a large bureaucracy; and so on.
The GW lane closures were a terrible breach of responsibility. Even worse would be to let this moment pass and settle for a few political scalps without addressing the underlying structural problems with the Port Authority that invited this abuse in the first place.