THE Port Authority’s bungling at Ground Zero has already wasted billions of dollars and years, if not decades. It is, in the words of Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger, perhaps “the greatest political and bureaucratic fiasco in the history of the world.”
Yet the New York political establishment has reacted with a giant ho-hum.
Sure, state pols have expressed perfunctory outrage – but then moved on to campaigning to keep their jobs.
Why so lackadaisical? Well, neither party can exploit the mess for partisan advantage: Republican and Democratic administrations share blame for the fiasco, leavened by Port Authority incompetence.
Yet the amount of taxpayer money and time wasted, and the project’s national importance, both argue for a serious, independent probe. The US attorney for the Southern District should empanel a grand jury to investigate what happened and why.
Start with the massive lies. Just three months ago, then-PA Executive Director Anthony Shorris was still saying that by 2012 the project would be all over but for the shouting. Well, there will be shouting – but largely due to the waste of billions of public money.
Indeed, new Executive Director Chris Ward has revealed so many problems on so many parts of the project, that it is almost inconceivable that malfeasance didn’t occur somewhere along the line.
The PA has had to sign off on countless legal documents to qualify the project for a myriad of financing streams – federal transportation, homeland-security and housing funds, plus a host of state and Port Authority sources. Surely some of those documents included representations that were untrue when made.
Throw in the involvement in the project of politically connected hacks in the last two administrations, and there’s a clear need for a grand jury to determine whether laws were broken.
Then, too, an outside review is likely needed if the project’s ever to finish.
The Port Authority is vastly overcommitted. The latest limit on its financial options came last week, with New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine’s announcement he won’t let previously authorized PA capital funds be diverted to fixing the Ground Zero fiasco.
Even after the most absurd boondoggles – such as the multibillion-dollar PATH station – get scaled way back, the PA will still be billions short of what’s needed to finish all the Ground Zero projects.
And the agency has taken on other commitments, too – to rebuild Stewart Airport, complete the trans-Hudson ARC tunnel, rehab LaGuardia and JFK airports and more. (Those, too, are all sure to be late and far over budget.)
Gov. Paterson has charged new PA chief Ward with reporting on the status of Ground Zero work by September. Ward is an honorable fellow, but the 8,000-strong PA army is working full time to defend each of its decisions taken to date. The bistate bureaucracy that created this debacle is the wrong group to trust for determining how this world-class fiasco developed.
The credulous may believe that the problem was a failure to hold enough meetings and that the solution is to have more meetings (and meetings between the scheduled ones). But the PA’s dysfunction thrives in meetings.
What Ground Zero needs instead is a credible third party to dig out exactly what things went wrong, what happened to the wasted billions and whether there’s legal liability for the falsehoods told.
At the very least, someone has to assure the public that graft and theft on a grand scale didn’t occur – or that any malfeasance that did occur will be punished.
The Legislature is the right place for a political review of this scandal. Assemblyman Richard Brodsky and state Sen. John Flanagan, who chair the relevant committees, should convene joint hearings this fall.
But determining whether some of the waste and abuse was the result of criminal wrongdoing is a job for Michael Garcia, the US attorney for the Southern District. He should start by reviewing whether some now-discredited statements about progress at Ground Zero violated the PA’s obligations to report honestly to the holders of its billions in debt.
Only an independent, thorough review can give the public confidence that the hallowed ground of Ground Zero, in addition to being the victim of unimaginable official incompetence, hasn’t also been defiled by corruption.
Bring on the feds.
George J. Marlin, a former Port Authority executive director, wrote “Squandered Opportunities: New York’s Pataki Years.”