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http://www.nynewsday.com/nyc-wtc0301,0,373...pheadlines-left

March 1, 2003, 7:47 PM EST


The selection last week of architect Daniel Libeskind’s design for the World Trade Center site capped an intensely public process, marked by large meetings, passionate debates by everyone from scholars to schoolchildren, and thousands of comments from ordinary New Yorkers.

Despite that civic outpouring, many key decisions about the site’s future are being made with little public input at the Port Authority and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, critics say.

Projects are already under way at the site and beyond. A $224 million temporary PATH station is scheduled to be completed by year end, with tracks crossing over the south tower footprint. The permanent PATH station will be built on the same spot. Meanwhile, the MTA already has begun engineering studies for three downtown subway projects.

Officials at the MTA and the Port Authority, which owns the trade center site, have maintained a public face of cooperation with the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. and other groups with a stake in the trade center site.

Officials of the two agencies often appear at LMDC hearings, community board meetings and civic forums, listening to public comments about their presentations for a trade center site railroad station and a new Fulton Street transit center.

Port Authority and MTA officials say they are counting on LMDC’s public input effort to suffice.

“We’re working very closely with LMDC, which is the lead on the public outreach portion,” said an MTA spokeswoman.

The Port Authority has yet to establish its own formal public input process because agency officials were sorting through requirements under federal law for collecting public comment, said one Port Authority official. With the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Thursday announcement that lower Manhattan projects will receive priority, those projects will fall under the public input requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act.

"It is the Port Authority’s understanding that the National Environmental Policy Act includes provisions for public hearings,” said Port Authority spokesman Greg Trevor. “It is our expectation that we will have hearings. This has been an open public process since the beginning and it will continue to be one.”

When the LMDC collects public opinion about Ground Zero’s redevelopment — via its Web site, public comment cards at exhibits and regular mail — it issues public reports detailing the range of comments and its own responses. Comments pour in: The LMDC received 12,000 of them just at the recent exhibit of architectural plans at the Winter Garden.

Privately, however, some LMDC officials admit their agency has failed to take a serious role in making decisions about transit, although they promise they are getting more involved now.

“The Port Authority transportation plan just got adopted, lock stock and barrel,” said one LMDC official. “Maybe the plan is perfect, but now we’re going to get into it” and help make transit decisions.

At the news conference Thursday to announce the winning design, the LMDC said it would release a transportation study soon but didn’t name a date.

Still, when high-ranking officials from the Port Authority and other transportation agencies attend community meetings, their computerized presentations and poster boards make some people in the audience feel that their transit hub design is a done deal. Looking like an airport concourse, the transit hub at the trade center site would connect PATH and subway stations underground, leading to an above-ground “grand point of arrival.”

The transit decisions irritate some victims’ family members and civic leaders, who complain the transit agencies have ignored their concerns — even after meetings with agency officials.

“The families asked if it wasn’t possible to move the transit hub to Fulton Street and to reroute the [PATH] tracks so they didn’t pierce the [southern] footprint below grade,” said one family member, who wants the transit plan released to the public for comment. “It didn’t happen. Three stories below grade the tracks do pierce the footprint.”

Late last year, after months of calling the PATH project temporary, Port Authority executive director Joseph Seymour admitted that the permanent station — with more amenities — would likely remain in the same place.

And last month, even as architecture critics and the public applauded the creative designs and beautiful pictures displayed by the LMDC’s seven design teams, Seymour would say only that the winning design would “provide an inspiration” for the site’s development.

“There hasn’t been the kind of open and candor, particularly at the Port Authority, that we need,” said Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association. “It’s impossible to make intelligent decisions.”

At public meetings, MTA officials promise to collect public opinion — but also appear to be presenting their three transit projects as projects already under way, in the preliminary engineering study stages. The projects are the renovation of the Fulton/Broadway subway station, the South Ferry subway station extension and the Rector Connector to link the N/R line with the 1/9, both at Rector Street.

The LMDC’s failure to insert itself into the discussions over transportation may change with the January appointment of LMDC board member Madelyn Wils as head of the LMDC’s transportation committee, said one LMDC official.

Wils, who is also chair of Manhattan’s Community Board 1, declined to comment on LMDC’s record on transportation, but said her meetings with Port Authority and MTA officials to coordinate transportation projects downtown were going well.

The LMDC will define the projects better, “prioritize them in terms of need, and work them into the design,” said Wils. “We’re working on a public book of all the possibilities of any project that could be done to improve the area. From that list, we will listen to the public, and work with MTA, the Port Authority and state and city DOT [Department of Transportation].”

The Port Authority or other transit agencies should not be blamed for failing to collect public input, said another LMDC source, blaming congressional pressure to develop a list of transportation priorities quickly.

“In exchange for getting money quickly, we didn’t have outreach,” said the source, insisting the Port Authority is focusing strictly on infrastructure. “They are not designing the [above ground] grand point of arrival, just the infrastructure and other necessary construction. It’s not the equivalent of some bureaucrat deciding the design.”