Despite this month’s long overdue resignation of Tony Sartor from the Port Authority board, there still must be a close examination of what the conflict-ridden commissioner did during his 15 years representing New Jersey.
As Greg Smith reported in Sunday’s Daily News, Sartor wielded his influence on the PA’s governing board to benefit a client of his engineering firm — and, in the process, quite possibly endangered public safety.
Sartor’s blatant conflict of interest is being exposed just days after the PA board held a special session on ways to reform and open up its chronically opaque proceedings following the Bridgegate fiasco. The manipulation is the perfect example of how keeping Port business in the dark enables waste, abuse and other bureaucratic infections to spread.
The tale begins when two different TG model tower cranes failed at the World Trade Center in 2011 and 2012, each time dropping tons of steel (fortunately, no lives were lost). Doing what any responsible overseer would do, the city Department of Buildings moved to phase out the models, last year banning their use in the five boroughs.
In October, when PA engineers realized that the same TG model crane was working on a Port Authority site in Hoboken, they told developer SJP Properties to stop.
Enter Sartor. The commissioner, who had chaired the PA’s WTC Redevelopment Subcommittee since 2002 and would know about the problems of the TG crane, put on his other hat — as chairman and CEO of Paulus, Sokolowski & Sartor, consulting engineers.
He then went to bat for SJP as his client, calling PA engineers and demanding they relent and let the firm deploy a crane that his own agency had such problems with. Despite Executive Director Pat Foye’s objections, Sartor got his way — as he always did — and the crane deemed too dangerous for New York City remains in use across the river.
God forbid it fails again.
And God forbid the Port, which is haltingly reforming after decades of self-service and secret dealing, fails to learn the lesson.
Sartor’s crane intervention was his typical M.O. during a decade and half on the Port board.
This is the same man who forced through the overbuilt, vastly over-priced and years late WTC PATH train station designed by architect Santiago Calatrava, even as Sartor was angling to sell his company to the concern overseeing the project, which was in partnership with Calatrava.
Ignoring billions in cost overruns and never-ending lateness, Sartor protected the man in day-to-day charge of the WTC project, Steve Plate, a politically-connected former Glen Ridge, N.J., mayor . And despite Plate’s chronic mismanagement, Sartor tried to make his pal chief engineer of the authority. Thankfully, that was blocked.
The U.S. attorney in New Jersey and the Manhattan district attorney both have PA probes open. If they are not already on it, they need to start a file on the case of Sartor and the crane.
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via Great Local News: New York http://ift.tt/1iZiLP1
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