Above all, WTC memorial

NY Daily News 9/24/2008

The high-powered committee guiding the redevelopment of Ground Zero will decide Thursday whether to hold the Port Authority to its highest obligation: finishing the permanent 9/11 memorial by the 10th anniversary of the terror attack. And not a day later.

The panel will meet for one of the final times before the PA releases a revamped plan for finishing the project - with commitments on completion dates and price tags.

At the top of the agenda must be a rock-solid determination to meet the 9/11/11 deadline.

As was requested by Gov. Paterson. As was requested by Mayor Bloomberg. As is fervently desired by the families of the 2,751 people murdered in the carnage in lower Manhattan.

And, outrageously, as appears unlikely to happen because, sources say, the PA is balking at scaling back the overpriced PATH station that has become a drag on the entire development. The biggest problem: its overly grandiose design, which will thwart the 10-year-anniversary goal.

Newly installed authority Executive Director Chris Ward has only two choices.

Either 1) significantly revamp the bombastically, unnecessarily gigantic PATH station (which should have happened long ago) in order for the memorial, which sits above it, to be finished on time, or

2) somehow come up with a heretofore-unknown magical way to build a never-attempted, gravity-defying, vast underground column-free PATH hall in the next two years, 11 months and two weeks.

Good luck on No. 2.

Around the table Thursday will be the Port Authority, the state, the city, developer Larry Silverstein, the memorial foundation, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and all the interested parties involved in the complex engineering and construction project that is the Trade Center site.

By all accounts, the Port is reluctant to give up on its monument to itself, the PATH station.

The man who must rise to the challenge is Tony Sartor (left), a New Jersey appointee on the PA's board of commissioners who chairs the WTC development subcommittee.

Ten years is long enough to wait for the 9/11 memorial. Indeed, it has already been too long.