The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation might like to include all of the above, but as a practical matter, choices will have to be made among these approaches as the pot of federal money grows smaller, reports the New York Times. With the board's decision this week to authorize $44.5 million to acquire an additional parcel for the trade center site, there is now roughly $825 million to allocate, from the original $2.783 billion.
Because competing demands far exceed the available grants, there is a growing sense that each decision to finance one project effectively starves another. But the corporation has not articulated an overall spending plan beyond saying that it seeks the most effect for the dollars it invests. Allocations are made as needed.
Now on the horizon is the prospect that the corporation will be asked by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the trade center site, to pick up part of what might be a $1 billion price tag for underground infrastructure: the vehicle screening area, ramps, roadways and loading docks for the office towers, the memorial, the PATH station and the cultural buildings.
Yesterday, in an unusual address to the board by an outsider, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver laid out his own priorities for the remaining money, while bemoaning what he called the competition between commercial development downtown and development on the far West Side.
Silver, a Democrat whose Assembly district includes much of Lower Manhattan, said his first priority is a seamless rail link between downtown and Long Island to help attract and keep the jobs needed to fill the towers that are planned in and around the trade center site.
He asked the board to consider the need for schools, a community center and libraries; economic development incentives for Chinatown; and $70 million to finish the Hudson River Park in TriBeCa. And he called for more local representatives on the 12-member corporation board than the two who currently play that role.
Silver also said he opposed giving any money to the Port Authority until it accounted for what it had already received from the federal government, from its insurers and from Silverstein Properties, the commercial leaseholder.
In response, the Port Authority said that federal money and insurance proceeds related to the World Trade Center complex were either reinvested in the site or used to pay the agency's relocation costs. The $109 million annual rent from Silverstein supports general operations and capital spending.
