The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency at the heart of the scandal threatening Governor Chris Christie's political future, proposed a $27.6 billion 10-year capital plan to pay for projects including a new central terminal at LaGuardia Airport.
The authority's capital planning committee said today it wants to allocate $2.2 billion as part of a $3.6 billion redesign of LaGuardia's 50-year-old terminal, voted America's dirtiest and most poorly designed by readers of Travel & Leisure magazine. Officials also proposed spending $4.9 billion to complete rebuilding of the World Trade Center site in Manhattan and $1.2 billion to replace all of the George Washington Bridge's 592 suspender ropes.
Last month, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who shares oversight of the agency with Christie, the Republican New Jersey governor, said he would take over management of construction at New York City's airports to extricate the projects from what he called the bureaucracy endemic to the 93-year-old Port Authority.
People familiar with plans by Cuomo, a Democrat, said he made the decision before the scandal that has dogged Christie since disclosures that his aides may have engineered a George Washington Bridge traffic jam as political payback.
