The Battle for Ground Zero, Part 79

The permanent replacement for the PATH station is about to get underway as four developers have been selected to work on Santiago Calatrava's design:

Far from the ribbon cuttings and saber rattling - and behind closed doors because negotiations are not finished - the board of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey voted Thursday to authorize the award of the construction management and general contractor post to a joint venture called Phoenix Constructors.

Almost certainly a reference to the new trade center rising from the ashes, and perhaps a nod to the birdlike form given to the transportation hub by the architect Santiago Calatrava, the Phoenix group is composed of:

¶Fluor Enterprises, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Fluor Corporation, which drew criticism recently as one of the winners of $100 million no-bid contracts awarded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for recovery from Hurricane Katrina. (The head of the agency told a Senate panel in October that new bids would be sought.)

¶Bovis Lend Lease, which holds the $75 million contract to dismantle the former Deutsche Bank building opposite ground zero and was the lead contractor in clearing the trade center site after 9/11.

¶Slattery Skanska, which led the consortium building the $1.9 billion, eight-mile AirTrain system, with 10 stations in and around Kennedy International Airport.

¶Granite Halmar Construction Company, a major contractor for the Port Authority and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Because negotiations are still under way, no Port Authority executive would comment on the contract. Neither would the companies.

Once again, we see that there are relatively few companies that have the technical and practical experience to manage a project of this size, so they continue to win bids on high profile projects.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg is still playing hardball over the Liberty Bonds with Silverstein.

Also, there's a story about how two workers at the NYC Medical Examiner's Office took millions of dollars through self-dealing contracts that arose out of the 9/11 attacks. They should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

The employees, Natarajan R. Venkataram and Rosa Abreu, who both worked at the medical examiner's office, were arrested late Wednesday.

In a criminal complaint, they were accused of running a scheme of shadow companies and fake contract bids to steal funds sent by the Federal Emergency Management Agency soon after the attacks, when the medical examiner was overwhelmed by the huge and delicate task of identifying nearly 3,000 victims.

Mr. Venkataram worked from March 1992 until last September as the director of the Management Information Systems department in the medical examiner's office, the complaint says. He was in charge of buying computer equipment and software for the office.

The complaint says Mr. Venkataram set up a network of front companies that he controlled, then steered computer contracts from the medical examiner's office to them. In some cases, the complaint says, the companies provided some services, but in others they were paid for doing nothing.

Technorati: World Trade Center, WTC, Pataki, LMDC, urban policy, Freedom Tower, IFC, International Freedom Center.