How LaGuardia and NYC bus terminal became linked in PA deal
With officials touting a compromise, the dozen commissioners who govern the Port Authority voted Thursday to approve billions of dollars worth of airport renovations and committed the agency to a new bus terminal on Manhattan’s West Side.
But first came a five-hour public show that featured a charged debate between appointees of Govs. Andrew M. Cuomo and Chris Christie — who registered some interesting doubts about each other’s priority projects.
Cuomo appointee Scott Rechler, the board’s vice chairman and CEO of Uniondale-based RXR Realty, had been pushing to explore alternatives to rebuilding the bus terminal between Eighth and Ninth Avenues.
The PA’s executive director, Pat Foye, a Nassau County resident, tried to prod a relevant cost estimate into the conversation.
The terminal had become a political cause for the New Jerseyans who saw such alternative ideas as putting a bus facility in Secaucus as less convenient for commuters.
More than three hours into the commissioners’ meeting, New Jersey State Sen. Loretta Weinberg even invited Rechler to take the bus over to her Bergen County to hear from commuters and representatives in her district.
“I’ve always believed we need to rebuild the bus terminal,” Rechler said later. But with more bus traffic in the future expected to further crowd the Lincoln Tunnel, “all I was hoping for was studying ways we could shed some of that future congestion to public transportation on the other side of the Hudson.”
Port Authority Chairman John Degnan, a New Jersey resident, made clear it was horse-trading that led him to support a multibillion-dollar redevelopment at LaGuardia Airport championed by Cuomo.
“I still have my misgivings,” said Degnan, noting there is no formal agreement with Delta Air Lines “which commits to a rebuild of its terminals and defines the cost to the Port Authority of such a project.”
Rechler disagreed, saying: “I am very confident that Delta, the largest airline in New York, is going to actually build a terminal” with the advent of the PA’s planned improvements.
There also was a sharp exchange over whether the price tag for LaGuardia should be $4 billion, as described on the New York side, or more than $5 billion, as suggested by Degnan and others on the New Jersey side, who count past work in preparation of the project.
New York University professor Mitchell Moss, director of the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management, saw the move as a long time coming.
“For decades, the Port Authority has neglected the need to modernize LaGuardia,” Moss said. “Finally, the board is doing the right thing, largely because Andrew Cuomo put his foot on the neck of the board chairman from the Garden State.”
Not that all the sniping occurred across state borders. Cuomo appointee Ken Lipper at one point drew fire from Cuomo appointee Steven M. Cohen, for offering an amendment that would have assured that any change to the LaGuardia project would require board approval.
Cohen said Lipper’s insisting on this change for just one project was “somewhat curious” and seemed “designed to create headlines and a spectacle.” After a tangle of debate involving several commissioners, the matter was put off.
At least the public got a glimpse of the sausage being made.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
