[NYguy]

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion...Ff6EE2TMbyONjP

World Trade money-suck

By STEVE CUOZZO
January 6, 2012

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.

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?

...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.