The Sept. 11 Museum (credit: 9/11 Memorial)
The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, as well as the Sept. 11 Museum at the World Trade Center, will pay subcontractors working on the museum and memorial a total of $50 million, Crain’s reported. The Port Authority will send out a $15 million payment starting today to the subcontractors, though Crain’s did not mention how many of them there were. [more]
Red Hook terminal
The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey has reversed course and is now fighting to keep a shipping terminal in Red Hook, the Brooklyn Paper reported.
Previous Port Authority Executive Director Chris Ward, was ready to move the locus of shipping in the borough to Sunset Park, the paper said, but the agency now wants to keep the shipping terminal open. If the terminal were to lose the inspectors required for international shipping facilities, many jobs could disappear, the paper said. The terminal handles container ships and bulk cargo. [more]
New Port Authority Chief Patrick Foye
The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey should stay out of real estate development and stick to airports, ports, bridges and tunnels, Patrick Foye, the new executive director of the agency, suggested to the New York Times in a sit-down interview.
“When the World Trade Center nears completion there will be a peace dividend — in the sense that Port Authority has borrowed about $7 billion to put into the World Trade Center, and total spending is more than that,” he said. “As One World Trade Center is completed at the end of 2013, we’ll be able to stop investing at that level. That will enable us to return to our core mission — airports, ports, bridges and tunnels — not real estate development. Government is not good at real estate development.” [more]
A rendering of the World Trade Center towers
An interim report released by the board of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey says the entire agency needs an “overhaul,” Bloomberg News and the New York Post reported.
The auditors called the agency “a challenged and dysfunctional organization suffering from a lack of consistent leadership, a siloed underlying bureaucracy, poorly coordinated capital planning process, insufficient cost controls and a lack of transparent and effective oversight,” according to their report, which was released yesterday. The Port Authority was not able to produce any documents showing reasons for the cost overruns of approximately $4 billion, the Post said. [more]
Patrick Foye, head of the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey
The new head of the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey said he will streamline the construction oversight process in New York City at the Building Congress yesterday, Crain’s reported.
Port Authority Executive Director Patrick Foye, who was appointed last October, called the environmental review process currently in place “too long and uncertain, and unmoored from the social goals it was intended to advance.” He also said inefficiencies in the system created “huge and growing” costs. [more]
Construction at the World Trade Center site
The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey has been advancing money to DCM Erectors, the company that’s erecting the steel skeletons of two towers at the World Trade Center site and the agency’s $3.4 billion transportation hub, the Wall Street Journal reported, in an effort to keep the construction on track.
The agency has even been paying some of DCM’s subcontractors directly, the Journal said, since DCM, which has $700 million worth of steel contracts at the site, began to struggle financially as a result of the project’s complexity and unexpected extra costs. [more]
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey spent $2.7 million of taxpayer money for a site in Jamaica, Queens where a corporate park was supposed to rise before the recession. Alas, the site is still an abandoned lot, and no money has been returned, the New York Post reported.
The authority gave the money to the Greater Jamaica Development Corp. in 2004 to buy the 6,000-square-foot building as part of a bid to revitalize the area, with hopes that a large tenant such as JetBlue Airlines would move into a corporate complex Greater Jamaica Development Corp. planned. The site was promoted as JFK Corporate Square by the non-profit, but no development was ever built. The airline opted to move its offices to Long Island City last year. [more]
The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey has taken its most concrete step yet towards replacing the aging Central Terminal Building at LaGuardia International Airport, according to the Wall Street Journal, as it quietly issued a request for proposals last month with an eye on starting construction in 2014. [more]
In addition to easing travelers rides to the airport, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey’s AirTrain to Kennedy International Airport has played a big role in reviving downtown Jamaica (note: correction appended).
According to the New York Times, before the suburban exodus of the 1950s and 1960s, Jamaica was the city’s third largest shopping district, but rapidly deteriorated in the years since. While most AirTrain passengers use Jamaica only as a transfer point, enough of the 3.9 million people that pass through the terminal stay in the area to support at least three new hotels and a growing number of brand-name stores and restaurants. [more]
A $300 million dispute has nearly ceased construction at the Sept. 11 Memorial Museum, DNAinfo.com reported, and might need to be resolved in court. Now, it seems all but certain that the museum won’t open by its September 2012 target.
After initially making claims of being owed $156 million, the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey recently updated the figure, saying the National September 11 Memorial & Museum Foundation actually owes it $300 million for cost overruns at the site. But Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is chair of the foundation, said the foundation believes the Port Authority is the indebted party at the site. [more]
