The Politics of Can’t-Possibly-Do
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This week the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey issued a stunning document to explain why Ground Zero has remained nothing but a hole for some seven years.
It is arguably the greatest political and bureaucratic fiasco in the history of the world. Remember the line about how if we don’t rebuild the towers “the terrorists will win”? The terrorists will be dead of old age before this project is finished.
Port Authority Executive Director Chris Ward, who did the remarkably frank report at the request of a frustrated Gov. David Paterson of New York, wrote that original estimates of time and cost (now at $15 billion) “did not reflect the unprecedented challenges associated with a project . . . involving so many different public and private stakeholders.” (Arguably the system began its decline when the vocabulary changed deadly “factions” into benevolent “stakeholders.”)
Ground Zero is a perfect storm of contemporary American politics. The report cites “19 different governmental entities from every level of government each laying claim to some component of the overall project.” And, “Each entity makes daily decisions about their individual projects, but no streamlined process or authority is in place to . . . ensure that each decision is in the best interest of the overall project.” This sounds eerily like the 9/11 Commission’s assessment of our dis-coordinated national security agencies.