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The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has a problem. It cannot figure out how to build an unnecessary Path train station without delaying by years the building of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center. Within that problem, the Port Authority has another, as an editorial in today’s New York Daily News reveals:

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 [emphasis added mine] in the next two years, 11 months and two weeks.

There’s the unspoken rub: those huge columns weren’t on the drawing board when they agreed with final plans for the memorial and museum. They would run through the agreed upon foundations of the memorial and museum that the Port Authority promised two years ago to build.

While the Port Authority is trying to force a new deal, building costs for everyone involved are going up by 2% every month; a new deal would cost everyone else at that table at least hundreds of millions of dollars.

By the way, the Port Authority has already built and is operating a Path station on the site. In addition, $2 billion dollars for that train station came from Congress. In other words, those commuters are already being served and building another train station is a waste of both time and money.

If what to do sounds like a no-brainer, tell that to the governor of New Jersey:

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, 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.

It has already been too long.

The Port Authority should honor the deal they made, dump the new train station, and build the memorial and museum on time.

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