Gov. David A. Paterson lamented the slow progress of reconstruction at the World Trade Center site, saying on Monday afternoon that he was determined to try to get the construction of the 9/11 memorial back on schedule after what he described as years of lost opportunity.

During a lunch meeting with members of The New York Times’s editorial and news staffs at the paper’s Midtown headquarters, when Mr. Paterson was asked what had particularly surprised him in his six months since becoming governor, he said bluntly, “What surprised me the most was how little people who have authority want to exercise it.”

In the 90-minute meeting, in which a wide number of issues facing the state were discussed, Mr. Paterson made several other points.

• He called for expanded state oversight over credit default swaps, financial instruments that are intended to cover losses to banks and bondholders.

• He said that the economic meltdown confronting Wall Street echoed historic crises — going back to the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 and of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 1933 — that pitted expanded federal oversight against a desire by private interests to practice centralized banking with little transparency.

• He said he was open to convening a special session of the Legislature before the November election to confront what is expected to be a widening state budget shortfall.

• He reiterated his interest in seeing Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg seek a third term — but said that the mayor would be most likely to succeed if a public referendum were held to revise or abolish term limits, which voters had approved twice at the polls.

• He said it was “amazing” that virtually every Long Island Rail Road career employee applies for and gets disability payments soon after retirement, as The Times reported on Sunday. “Clearly, there’s fraud, because clearly, a lot of these people could not have passed real scrutiny in terms of whether or not they were disabled,” he said.

• He said that although race remains a real issue in American politics, he believed that there were enough votes to make Senator Barack Obama president and that he believed Mr. Obama’s economic message would resonate with voters.

It was on the topic of ground zero that Mr. Paterson spoke most expansively.

He said that the pace of rebuilding at ground zero was “more of a mess than you know,” and that more details would arrive in a report expected within days from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Mr. Paterson reiterated the frustration he expressed on June 30, when officials disclosed that the 9/11 memorial will not be open to the public in time for the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attack; that the $2.5 billion PATH station and transit hub nearby are not only behind schedule but also over budget, with the final design unfinished; and that the demolition of the Deutsche Bank tower, on the south of the 16-acre site, will not be completed until sometime next year, at least 14 months behind schedule.

Asked about Mayor Bloomberg’s suggestion that the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation be dismantled, the governor said, “Legally, the state loses as lot of money if L.M.D.C. is shut down,” but added that he wanted to hear from the mayor directly about the idea.

Mr. Paterson said he had tried to bring “direction, decisiveness and the willingness, perhaps, to make a mistake” to the rebuilding process.