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There’s a new call to expose exactly what is going on with the redevelopment at the World Trade Center site. It seems that Anthony Shorri, former executive director of the Port Authority, may have violated federal securities rules when he touted overly-optimistic construction timelines and budgets for WTC redevelopment and in effect misled investors who purchased Port Authority bonds. Shorri’s successor, Christopher Ward, recently announced that the project is significantly behind schedule in almost all areas and over budget.
In a letter obtained yesterday, George Marlin, a former Port Authority executive director, asks the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York for an investigation and asserts, “Given the recently disclosed fiasco led by the Port Authority, the question of whether there was fraud, waste and abuse on a mammoth scale must be addressed by an independent party.” This call for an investigation comes a day after a Republican state senator from Long Island called for a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into the matter.
In other reassuring news, it seems that the new head of the Port Authority feels that running the agency charged with reconstruction at the WTC site is not really a full-time job. He’s decided to split his time between the Authority and another paid position on the board of the New York Independent System Operator (the nonprofit that manages the state’s power grid). Oh, and speaking of reassuring, the Port Authority just hired as an engineering adviser a former MTA executive who was fined $10,000 for taking bribes from a contractor doing business with the transit agency–and guess what–the same contractor who did the bribing is also working with the Port Authority on the new transit hub project.
