The Battle For Ground Zero, Part 113

I saw this coming from a mile away. The delays at Ground Zero are all about political payback.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver accused Gov. Pataki, Mayor Bloomberg and the Port Authority of trying to use builder Larry Silverstein as a "scapegoat" for their failures to get the rebuilding of Ground Zero under way.
"They're using Larry Silverstein as a scapegoat. This isn't about Larry Silverstein. The Port Authority has 18 months of infrastructure work to do there, and they haven't done it," Silver, whose district includes the World Trade Center site, told The Post.

Silver, who has been critical of Pataki and Bloomberg in the past, insisted, "There hasn't been a vision or leadership [for Ground Zero] for 41/2 years."

How do I know this? Simple. By siding with Silverstein, Silver is playing coy without revealing all his cards.

We're hearing from Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who represents the district including Ground Zero. The last time he spoke about development in Manhattan it was to denounce the Mayor's pet project, the West Side Stadium/Hudson Yards project. In fact, Silver did more than denounce it, he killed the project in its entirety.

Make no doubt about it, Silver seriously angered Bloomberg that day, and Bloomberg has been angling for payback ever since. Ground Zero is the sandbox they chose to play this particularly nasty game. There are billions of dollars in development that were spiked at the West Side Stadium project, and there are billions more at Ground Zero. This isn't some minor disagreement, but one that affects redevelopment of huge swaths of Manhattan for decades to come.

UPDATE:
NY lawmakers are hitting back at Gov. Corzine of New Jersey who has interjected himself into the Ground Zero debate.

In a letter signed by New York state's entire congressional delegation, the lawmakers called on Corzine to give up his "desire to maximize the fiscal benefits" to his state and get out of the way of rebuilding Ground Zero.

"This is an important decision that first and foremost should be made by New Yorkers," the letter read.

The warning came as the Port Authority, controlled jointly by Gov. Pataki and Corzine, failed to reach an agreement with Ground Zero developer Larry Silverstein in time for yesterday's meeting of the agency's board.

And the New York Post blasts both Gov. Corzine and the memorial plan in separate statements. The Post proposes scrapping the memorial plan and coming up with something simpler, which would have the benefit of being cheaper and may even provide more consensus over the design.

Money aside, wouldn't it simply be better to turn to a smaller, less confusing, more dignified monument that recalls what happened on that terrible day, pays appropriate respect to those who perished - but looks to the future with optimism and resolve?

Something that could actually be built?

And the Post believes that the holdup at Ground Zero is over $100 million that the Port Authority is trying to extract from Silverstein that would go to the infrastructure/memorial. The Post wants to call Corzine on his bluff. And since Corzine is using his influence in the Port Authority to press his case, the stalemate is not between the Port Authority and Silverstein, but between the Port Authority's New Jersey and New York factions.

UPDATE:
As you may have been reading elsewhere, the City of New York has released a bunch of 911 emergency telephone calls from people stuck in the Twin Towers on 9/11. The tapes are a stark reminder of the horror and terror felt by those trapped in the buildings and holding out hope that the firefighters and police would be able to rescue them.

The city had been withholding the tapes because they were concerned about the privacy of the families of victims.

Only the 911 operators and fire department dispatchers can be heard on the recordings, their words mapping the calamity in rough, faint echoes of the men and women in the towers who had called them for help.

They describe crowded islands of fleeting survival, on floors far from the crash and even on those that were directly hit: Hallways are blocked on 104. Send help to 84. It is hard to breathe on 97.

Be calm, the operators implore. God is there. Sit tight.

The recordings, contained on 11 compact discs, also document a broken link in the chain of emergency communications.

The voices captured on those discs track the callers as they are passed by telephone from one agency to another, moving through a confederacy of municipal fiefdoms — police, fire, ambulance — but almost never receiving vital instructions to get out of the buildings.

Until 9/11 the conventional wisdom in a high rise fire was to remain in place until rescuers could get to you. That's the advice dispensed from the 911 operators handling the calls that day, despite the fact that fire chiefs and police commanders gave the order to evacuate the towers.

No more than 2 of the 130 callers were told to leave, the tapes reveal, even though unequivocal orders to evacuate the trade center had been given by fire chiefs and police commanders moments after the first plane struck. The city had no procedure for field commanders to share information with the 911 system, a flaw identified by the 9/11 Commission that city officials say has since been fixed.

The tapes show that many callers were not told to leave, but to stay put, the standard advice for high-rise fires. In the north tower, all three of the building's stairways were destroyed at the 92nd floor. But in the south tower, where one stairway remained passable, the recordings include references to perhaps a few hundred people huddled in offices, unaware of the order to leave.

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