The Battle For Ground Zero, Part 142

Michelle Malkin notes Debra Burlingame's latest op-ed that chastizes the dearth of rebuilding at Ground Zero and the squandering of federal funds for the rebuilding process. Burlingame notes:

The public has heard plenty about the "empty pit of Ground Zero," but most do not know that the $2.8 billion allocated to Lower Manhattan in cash grants has virtually all been spent. It is difficult to trace where all the money went while being routed through the Department of Housing and Urban Development and six different city and state entities. Now, after four-and-a-half years of press conferences, ribbon-cuttings and groundbreakings (the Freedom Tower has had two), at which the lost 343 firefighters were invoked and the memorial and museum was touted as the "centerpiece" around which hundreds of millions of dollars in spending projects would turn, Gov. Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have teamed up to tell the public that it's time to "rethink" the project where the history of those valiant firefighters will be secured. Not only does this undermine Daniel Libeskind's master plan, which always included a museum of "memory and hope," it also manifests a standard of fiscal responsibility that the governor and the mayor have refrained from imposing anywhere else at Ground Zero.

The Port Authority's massive new transportation hub, designed by superstar architect Santiago Calatrava, will cost an estimated $2.2 billion. Some $2 billion of that is federal money, which means that the entire country is supporting the "awe-inspiring" makeover of a terminal that will serve a mere 40,000 commuters (a number so embarrassing the Port Authority upped it to 80,000 by including round trips). The chief executive of a construction firm involved in the building illustrates the absurdity of what insiders call a "vanity project" by pointing out that $2.2 billion is enough to build a metropolitan airport.

The governor has also handed out hundreds of millions in relief money to corporate powerhouses, ostensibly to get them to relocate to Lower Manhattan or to prevent them from leaving. He signed off on $25 million worth of recovery funds for American Express, which expressly announced it hadn't intended to leave Lower Manhattan and posted doubled profits less than a year after 9/11. Goldman Sachs, which made $4.55 billion dollars in net profits in 2004, received a $2 billion "assistance" package consisting of triple-tax-free Liberty Bonds, tax credits and cash the following year.

Mr. Bloomberg talks about a "sensible" approach to Ground Zero rebuilding, but has declined to fully explain his allocation of $650 million dollars worth of Liberty Bonds to construct the Bank of America tower in midtown, an allocation that competes with downtown redevelopment; or why he awarded $114 million in Liberty Bonds to the Ratner office tower--in Brooklyn.

The mayor has suggested locating the World Trade Center Museum in the controversial Freedom Tower, declaring it "a good use of that lobby." To put the story of that day in another commercial office tower is an insult to the memory of the 3,000 who died and to the thousands who barely escaped. Would the Holocaust Museum be treated as an afterthought and crammed into such a space?

Bloomberg had been silent about the Ground Zero fiasco for more than three years before finally staking a position in the run up to the 2005 mayoral election. He's been chiming in with his views ever since - and not all of them are helpful. In fact, he's actually pushing for a reworking of the Ground Zero master plan, which took several years and many revisions to get to a point where we can even begin talking about building structures within the bathtub.

That isn't leadership.

Of all the pieces of the puzzle at Ground Zero, the ones that are actually moving forward are the transit hub, and preliminary work is underway on the Freedom Tower after a series of fits and starts. Calatrava's transit hub has been widely praised for its design, and it is hoped that additional rail links (including ongoing proposals to links to JFK or the other airports), plus the Fulton Street terminal redesign will enhance the accessibility and transit options in Lower Manhattan.

The memorial construction is essentially nil because of the need to get costs under control. That Bloomberg would suggest putting the museum in the lobby of the Freedom Tower may be rightfully perceived as an affront to Burlingame because it suggests that the museum is an afterthought, but it also is a practical alternative if one wants to get the costs under control.

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