Bloomberg Wants Action at Ground Zero, Not Excuses

Mayor Bloomberg takes his no-nonsense approach on what to do with the World Trade Center site to the Opinion page of the Wall Street Journal. In editorial titled, "There Should Be No More Excuses At Ground Zero," he outlines how the city has helped speed up development--and how some other things need to be done in order for progress to continue.

The big thing Bloomberg suggests is that Governor Paterson should break up the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and give its "development responsibilities to the city," which would "eliminate one redundant layer of bureaucracy." That way the city and state's Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center could also take over the Deutsche Bank building demolition as well. The Observer noted how Spitzer once called the LMDC a "farce"--until he put his own appointees in place.

More notably, Bloomberg says the current proposal for the PATH transit hub "must scaled back," calling it "too complicated to build and threatens to delay the memorial and the entire project." The NY Times' David Dunlap writes on CityRoom that the mayor "all but declared the death" for the Santiago-Calatrava project.

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By Jen Chung in News on September 10, 2008 1:32 PM

Comments [rss]

NannyState

#4, The Shanghai World Financial Center finally opened this month. It was proposed, designed, and approved 15 years ago. And this is a single 101 story tower, not a complex mix of high towers, museums and rail stations. What galls is that once the plans were finalized and the last barriers were removed from this project, it was allowed to languish for two years anyway. The Mayor is wrong: only a single entity with the full backing and powers of these interests could pull this off. Removing one "layer of bureaucracy" only helps just so.

Kevin Walsh

Throw Calatrava's fish skeleton back. A $2B PATH terminal is obscene in the concept.

Fill in the hole, build some condos, office buildings and a memorial and let's go.

www.forgotten-ny.com

PathToWisdom

China can build a fake Twin Tower in 2 years.

Hell, maybe 6 months.

This is America at its worst.

7 years and still a hole in the ground ?

7 years and still a 9-11 tourist attraction ?

nicemarmot

Yeah, the terrorists already won, with that giant hole still in the ground seven years later. I mean seriously, what would have been a better outcome for them? Unless we'd already built something there, and they had knocked it down again.

Also, I bet the city would be even slower.

moocowtoo

shit can't go any slower then it has; its a freakin dissappointment and black eye for the city that people couldn't get their shit together and build something on that site by now.

7 freakin years and nothing there, what an absolute disappointment; I'm sure the terrorist are happy about that.