Updated World Trade Center Timetable May Have No Dates at All
Freedom Tower, memorial, PATH hub likely years behind schedule
The Port Authority is expected to deliver its report about World Trade Center timetables and budgets Monday, and the situation looks so grim that the agency appears as though it will throw out the existing dates without setting a new timetable, at least for now, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
The Port Authority’s initial analysis found that the projects under the agency's control—the PATH hub, the memorial, the Freedom Tower—stand to be delivered years behind schedule and substantially over budget. The agency wants more time to do further analysis, and could set dates at a later time, people briefed on the matter said.
Multiple previous studies and reports showed that the memorial could be years behind schedule, with the chances of opening in full by the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, all but an impossibility (more detail on this topic in our article from a couple of weeks back).
With a newly installed executive director at the Port Authority, Chris Ward, Governor Paterson is seeking to mark a clean break with the Pataki-era timetables. Governor Spitzer declined to readjust them despite knowing that they were unrealistic so as to not further delay the overall complex. This tactic, pushed by some in the governor’s circle, including former executive director Tony Shorris, met resistance from others in the administration, and was a subject of dispute between Mr. Shorris and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which advocated for new timetables.
A Port Authority spokeswoman declined to comment.
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This is how developers and politicians fulfill their promises nowadays: they promise to undertake a project, but so short-staff and undercapitalize it to save costs that it takes forever. This is going on all over the city - e.g. the east side Greenway is year, even decades, behind schedule. New parks are being built by 4, 3, even as few as 2 people on any given day, with frequent unexplained periods when there is no one working on them at all. In contrast, in China or India, hundreds of workers work - often 24/7 - on equivilent-sized projects. I know, I just came back from India and it the total opposite of here. Where here we have a couple of guys discussing how to plant some shrubs, in India they will be building not just the park, but a dozen high rise residential towers around it as well. At the same time, an 8 lane highway will be expanding to 12 lanes (not that I don't think India has to seriously reconsider Mass Transit). It's not even that workers don't work here - though it IS true they lack the desparate energy found in developing countries where the moto is "Work or Starve." The other thing we do too much of is have cheap charettes and community meetings that are basdically desgined to wear down community resistence instead of allowing for constructive criticism. The developing world isn't called the developing world without reason.
What a valuable waste of land, memorials, etc... Just rebuild some office, cemetery's are the place for memorials.
10 years? We put a man on the moon in 8. Disgraceful. Fire everybody.
Scott, I fully understand your frustration over the painfully long timetables involved in American development. Trust me, I'm in the industry. I live it everyday. But there's no point comparing the U.S. to China and India. First off, as an affluent, semi-welfare state with strong labor organization, the U.S. can't possibly match the armies of workers China and India can put together. Over in China, it's often cheaper to hire 25 guys and give them shovels than it is to rent one backhoe and pay the higher wage for a competent operator. Second, the U.S. has strict - very strict - land use controls. New developments, projects of such vast size and symbolic importance as the WTC, have to pass through layer upon layer of regulation and bureaucracy. How many different agencies does Larry Silverstein have to deal with? I couldn't list them all if my life depended on it. American developers have to be more akin to politicians than developers. Any old schmuck can manage the finance and A&E, the legal and regulatory battles is what separates the men from the boys. Navigating the political waters is by far the most difficult part of the process. That's why many of the most savvy and successful have law degrees rather than business or engineering degrees. China's centralized party system, on the other hand, means that one man's stamp of approval is all a developer needs - no community meetings, no design review, no litigation hold ups, no eminent domain proceedings, nothing. And you know what? This being America, we like it that way. Sclerotic developments is nothing compared to the firestorm that would arise if we threw all these land-use regulations out the window. It's simply the cost of doing business in the U.S. For a good overview of the difference between development in China and the U.S., read Thomas Campanella's new book "Concrete Dragon".