The Port Authority’s gargantuan World Trade Center Transportation Hub is costing the cast-strapped agency nearly $900 million, a Post analysis finds — though it was supposed to cost nothing.
That makes it the true worst culprit in the PA’s desperate fiscal plight. To cover the Hub’s overruns, drivers will pay higher tolls for years — if not decades to come — even as the region continues to suffer the worst airports of any “world capital.”
But Gov. Cuomo and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie have publicly held their tongues, pointing fingers instead at PA excesses like overtime abuses that are peanuts in comparison to the Hub debacle. Christie’s silence is understandable, since the Hub is a Jersey-driven project. But why has Cuomo yet to speak out?
When it was launched in 2004, the Hub — a glorified PATH terminal — was supposed to cost the PA next to nothing. Now it’s clear the scheme will drain a minimum $892 million from the agency’s coffers. And the PA’s on the line for further overruns, likely bringing the total over $1 billion if the project ultimately breaks its current $3.44 billion budget before it’s finished, supposedly by late 2014.
The PA’s outlay could also rise if $300 million in insurance proceeds, part of the Hub’s original financing, turns out to have been diverted to other uses. (At some point, sources told us, that cash was merged with a PA general fund rather than being lock-boxed for the Hub.)
Other WTC projects ran over-budget, but none so much as the Hub. And those projects added things that are needed — a new 1 WTC that’s bringing Conde Nast downtown, a Memorial drawing visitors from around the globe.
On the other hand, the Santiago Calatrava-designed terminal won’t add one inch of new trans-Hudson rail capacity. Yet the best-case final PA tab of just under $900 million vastly dwarfs any other PA boondoggle.
So what keeps the Hub project going? It’s the pet of the PA’s Jersey faction. Last February, an influential Jersey PA commissioner, David Steiner, actually told the Star-Ledger he viewed the Hub — not 1 WTC — as the site’s “iconic” centerpiece.
Its main hall is larger than Grand Central Terminal’s. But where Grand Central is used by 700,000 commuters a day, just 40,000 come and go daily through the existing WTC PATH station. Those Jersey commuters will have the run of several concourses, each longer and wider than a football field.
Hailed as resembling a bird in flight when it was first shown in 2004, the Hub has devolved (thanks to money-saving design changes) to a “slender stegosaurus,” as The New York Times’ David Dunlap gently put it.
But now it’s the stegosaurus in the room — the money pit that Cuomo and Christie ignore as they blame Mayor Bloomberg and former PA Executive Director Christopher Ward for alleged WTC overspending.
Sorry: Bloomberg doesn’t spend the PA’s money, and Ward was simply trying to un-stall all Ground Zero rebuilding.
When first set in motion in 2005 by then-Govs. George Pataki and Jersey’s Jim McGreevey, the Hub’s supposed $2.2 billion budget was to be covered by a $1.92 billion grant from the Federal Transit Administration and $300 million the PA had in 9/11-related insurance proceeds. (An FTA reserve of $280 million was also available to fund the project up to $2.5 billion.)
Yet official cost estimates soon soared beyond $2.5 billion, even after major cutbacks stripped the Hub of signature design features — including elimination of glass panels between the “wings” and a roof that would open in good weather.
Warnings in this newspaper and elsewhere went unheeded. In May 2008, a prominent New Jersey PA commissioner, Anthony Sartor, then as now the chairman of the agency’s World Trade Center Redevelopment Subcommittee, wrote to then-PA Chairman Anthony Coscia that minor changes made to the design would “help to ensure that this project will be built within the available budget of $2.5 billion.”
Ha. Just a few months later, newly appointed Ward estimated the Hub’s cost at a “probabilistic” $3.2 billion.
In 2009, the PA and then-Gov. David Paterson persuaded the feds to transfer to the Hub $663 million that Washington had set aside for other Ground Zero uses — mostly for a different WTC project, the PA’s Vehicle Security Center.
That money shuffle allowed new PA Executive Director Patrick Foye to honestly tell The Post that the feds are contributing about $2.6 billion, not $1.92 billion, for the Hub. Some press accounts have swallowed that line.
If it were only that simple, the PA’s hit for the Hub would fall to just $260 million. But of the $663 million, the PA had to put $533 million right back into the vehicle center. It also had to give $70 million to the MTA to help the latter build a new Cortlandt Street No. 1 line station. The only portion of the fund that actually went to the Hub was $47 million that the feds had available for various downtown projects.
An audit of the PA is under way, but it doesn’t take an army of accountants to spot a scandal hiding in plain sight.
A “free” terminal that costs the PA nearly $1 billion should have had its wings clipped before it started. It’s too late for that, but time at least to call the catastrophe what it is — and place the blame where it belongs.