Port Authority Executive Director Christopher Ward confessed to the obvious yesterday: Six-plus years, two governors and hundreds of millions of dollars after 9/11, Ground Zero reconstruction has gone so far off the rails no one can say when – or even if – the project will be finished.
There are no working timetables.
There are no reliable cost estimates.
There is a hole in the ground that may someday morph into something resembling a finished product – but there is virtually no hope that it will look much like the grandiose scheme put forward in the wake of 9/11
Thank you, George Pataki.
Thank you, Eliot Spitzer.
And thanks also to the politicians nominally responsible for Ground Zero – Mayor Bloomberg, Rep. Jerrold Nadler and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver – who never once uttered a meaningful word about the mess.
It’s not like it was a secret: These pages first called attention to the developing debacle in 2002!
First we called it “Pataki’s Pit.”
Then it was “Eliot’s Abyss.”
Give Gov. Paterson credit for bringing the charade to a halt before he, too, was sucked into the hole in the ground.
He deputized Ward to get a handle on things – and it speaks to the magnitude of the calamity that Ward couldn’t even define its parameters yesterday.
He said that he not only had no answers, he wasn’t even sure he knew what all the proper questions might be.
“The schedule and cost estimates of the rebuilding effort that have been [made] public are not realistic,” Ward wrote. And budgets and timeframes “of each of the public projects on the site face significant delays and cost overruns.”
Check back in September, he said. Maybe then he’ll have a better idea.
Stunning. Simply stunning.
The Port Authority – which actually owns the site – is also a culprit here. Indeed, it still refuses to accept responsibility for paralysis prior to 2006, when it took control of the Freedom Tower.
And anyone even vaguely aware of the PA’s track record on such things can only look to the future and shudder.
Nor is there the faintest chance that anything remotely resembling the original plan can be built with the money available – not that there ever was.
Ward’s tacit admission of that yesterday is a refreshing contrast to what’s come before.
Maybe he can’t get the job done. Maybe nobody can. But he deserves a chance to try.
One thing’s for sure.
It can’t get much worse.