Christie. (Getty)

From scrunchie-gate to bang-mageddon, American political figures have often had to contend with intense media scrutiny when it comes to their physical appearances. And while the country's female politicians usually take the brunt of the criticism, none has had it worse than poor Chris Christie.

The husky, spider-killing New Jersey Governor  has been followed since day one by the notion that he’s “too fat to be President" (because apparently the fattest country in the world doesn’t want a President molded in its own, McDonalds-guzzling image).

So it's hard to ignore the possible political motivations behind the news—revealed in The Post today—that Mr. Christie underwent secret stomach surgery in February in order to slim down. However, Mr. Christie claims that the move was not at all motivated by a possible Presidential run, but was done for his kids (and to prep for Jersey Shore bikini season, duh!)

According to The Post, Mr. Christie had the "lap-band"  surgery February under a fake name and has already lost nearly forty pounds.

The Post, content to leave nothing to the imagination, describes the surgery in some detail, which involves “placing a silicone tube around the top of his stomach, where it restricts the amount of food he can eat at one time and makes him feel fuller, faster.”

Based on emprical evidence, the surgery has been a success. “I went to a steakhouse and ordered a steak and ate about a third of it and I was full,” Mr. Christie told The Post. No word on what effects a slimmer Mr. Christie will have on New Jersey’s restaurant industry (maybe New Jersey could change its name to the 'Garden Salad State?' Just spitballing here).

The political world has been abuzz with the notion that the surgery indicates Mr. Christie’s intention to run for President in 2016. As one political donor told The Post, “This means he’s running for president. He’s showing people that he can get his weight in control. It was the one thing holding him back.”

Mr. Christie, however, is keeping mum on the possibility of a presidential run, claiming that the surgery was motivated by the desire to be around for his kids.

"I’ve struggled with this issue for 20 years,” said Mr. Christie. “For me, this is about turning 50 and looking at my children and wanting to be there for them. It’s so much more important than [running for president]."

That being said, if he does choose to run, we have a new surgery idea that's guaranteed to endear him to the electorate. Two words: Mobama arms.

Governor Christie takes aim at a spider on his desk.

Oh, Chris Christie, ever a man of the people. First he saved New Jerseyans from the ravages of Superstorm Sandy, and last Friday, he saved innocent schoolchildren … from a spider.

A video posted to YouTube last week shows an heroic scene from a group of schoolchildren’s visit to the N.J. Governor’s office: After somebody spots a spider on Gov. Christie’s desk, the governor nudges the students aside and throws himself in harm’s way, fatally squashing the spider before it gets the chance to unleash its arachnid wrath on the children.

Then, Gov. Christie casually wipes the spider’s remains onto the jacket draped over the back of his chair and then onto his pants—keepin’ it classy.

“That’s also one of the fun parts about being governor,” Gov. Christie is heard saying in the video, “Any bugs on your desk, you’re allowed to kill them and not get in trouble.”

At least, that’s what he thought. Predictably, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is upset over the spider’s demise, and has issued a statement on the event. “He probably did it without thinking,” said Ingrid Newkirk, PETA’s president, “Some people put the spider outside, but spiders are often scary to people, and that can prevent them from pondering their worth.”

Though we are certain the spider had plenty of worth to his or her spider community, we can't help but side with the governor on this one. Though the world lost one spider last Friday, it also gained the laughter of twenty children.

Anyways, Gov. Chrsitie may not win the arachnophiles’ votes come November’s gubernatorial elections, but there’s no doubt N.J.’s fearless governor has won himself a roomful of pint-sized supporters.

Tan Mom looking toasty.

Get ready to see a lot more pasty teenagers at the Jersey Shore this summer.

Yesterday, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie signed a bill into law that bans children under the age of 17 from using tanning beds in the Garden State.

The law comes from the case of Nutley, N.J. resident Patricia Krentcil, a.k.a. “Tan Mom,” who was arrested last year after being accused of taking her then five-year-old daughter Anna into a tanning bed with her.

"Governmental regulation of the private sector should always be carefully scrutinized, and sparingly adopted," Gov. Christie said in a statement. "The new restrictions imposed by this bill followed a single but breathlessly reported incident of a parent bringing a minor child into a tanning facility."

Under the new law, teens age 17 and older must have a parent or guardian give their consent before they can soak up the cancer-causing, artificial rays. The law also bans children under 14 from getting spray tans.

Ms. Krentcil herself felt the heat and has since gotten out from under the U.V. light. She denied the charges and her case was dropped, and, as of last summer, she actually looks like a reasonable person.

But seriously kids, skin cancer is no joke. When Gov. Christie signed the bill into law he noted that tanning and sunburn before age 35 can increase the risk of melanoma by 75 percent. Lather up, stay out of the sun and embrace your ghostly complexion.

(Photo credit: Time magazine.)

Time unveiled its new cover today and it features a stark, head-on portrait of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie with "The Boss" written below in red capitals.

Mr. Christie was on Today this morning to talk to Matt Lauer about gun control, Sandy relief and how the political gridlock in New Jersey is superior to that in Washington. Not surprisingly, the magazine cover story came up.

"Time magazine last night bumped someone off the cover of their magazine and they put this face of the cover of the issue with the headline 'The Boss,'" Mr. Lauer said. A Time spokesperson declined to comment on which cover was bumped.

"Now, with all due respect to the guy we both like, Bruce Springsteen, that's not what they are referring to," Mr. Lauer continued. "They are referring to the fact that this is your time to take control of the Republican party."

But being a Boss (capital B) in New Jersey does have some connotations besides rock ’n’ roll, thanks to a certain HBO show. And that connection wasn't lost on the governor, even if it was on Mr. Lauer.

“I’m reporting Time magazine to the, like, anti-Italian defamation league. I mean, look at that thing. It says ‘boss’ underneath. I mean come on,” Mr. Christie said on Imus in the Morning. Don Imus agreed. “It makes you look like Tony Soprano,” he said.

But really, would Tony Soprano really wear a flag pin, even if it is shaped like New Jersey?

Coming soon to a sea level near you: Iceland's melting glaciers. From Chasing Ice.

“Wow. We live in a horror movie,” my husband opined one morning not long ago. He was reading an article about the melting of the Arctic tundra releasing massive bubbles of methane gas into the atmosphere, which in turn causes more melting, which in turn causes global warming, which in turn creates monster storms that threaten to end civilization as we know it.

I love scary movies, the creepier the better. But this Halloween season, they’re bleeding off the screen and into real life.

Can we please turn it off now?

Actually, no, we cannot.

A week ago, I was invited to the premiere of a deeply alarming documentary called Chasing Ice. It follows the work and adventures of a National Geographic photographer named James Balog in his endeavor to document, with time-lapse photography, the epic melting of the Arctic glaciers, a melting that is filling the world’s seas and atmosphere with water that has nowhere to go but onto land. 

Mr. Balog became an ice aficionado in 2005, when The New Yorker sent him to document the frozen landscape in Iceland. A year later, National Geographic sent him to document melt. He was stunned by the speed of the changes he witnessed and began documenting the retreating ice on three continents.

With the help of National Geographic and other funders, he created the Extreme Ice Survey, which he calls an “art meets science” project that also involved some serious adventure travel. With a small team of graduate students, he rappelled and hiked up ice walls from Greenland to Everest to Alaska, installing 27 time lapse cameras that are still recording images every half hour.

The cameras, currently at 18 locations, yield up to 8,000 images a year.

Arranged as time-lapse video, the shrinking of the mountains of ice in the northern hemisphere and the higher altitudes of our planet is plain to see, and absolutely alarming.

One of the most shocking images in the film was captured by two young members of Mr. Balog’s team who were flown in and dropped on the edge of an unstable Greenland glacier. After two weeks freezing their asses off in a lonely tent in the middle of a windy, white landscape, they were rewarded, first with a thunderous noise, and then by witnessing and videotaping the epic collapse of an edge of an Arctic glacier bigger that the island of Manhattan.

That’s a lot of water, flowing into the world’s oceans, and it’s bad news for cities like New York.

It also is not news. In 1995, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report predicting that by the year 2100, the sea will rise 20 inches both from “thermal expansion” (warming) of the ocean and from melting glaciers and ice sheets. That rise has huge implications for coastal cities.

To view this movie is to witness epic amounts of ice turning into billions of gallons of water, in real time. It is impossible to watch it and not wonder how islands on the edge of the ocean, like Manhattan, are not already underwater.

The issue of climate change has been utterly ignored by the candidates, both of whom won’t challenge the status quo on it.

Because it’s happening so slowly, mostly out of sight and with no apparent solution, it’s been almost impossible to get emotional about global warming. Until Sandy.

The moment it hit me was a few months back, reading a Times article that (again) predicted that the city of New York will be mostly underwater in 100 years. I was sitting in an airport, and suddenly I burst into tears. Our city will be either gone or utterly transformed by the time my grandchildren are adults. My kids will be among the last generation to remember this great city.

How is it that everyone isn’t crying over this?

Chasing Ice humanizes an enormous and incomprehensible geological phenomenon with time-lapse images, putting unusually rapid geological change on breathtaking display. It also personalizes the story by focusing on one man, the photographer whose commitment to the project involved repeated knee surgery so he could keep scrabbling up icy inclines to check his cameras, and the technological difficulties of building and maintaining photo gear in the harshest conditions on the planet.

The film also has an emotional component, insofar as Mr. Balog, who attended the premiere, is shown with tears in his eyes talking about what his findings mean for his—and everyone’s—children.

“This is the memory of the landscape,” he said of the film. “That landscape is gone; it may never be seen again in the history of civilization.”

Mr. Balog and the filmmakers are among the vast majority of world scientists who are convinced that the sudden warming of the world is caused by human burning of fossil fuels. Their graphs are pretty hard to argue with. Average world temperatures have risen in a parallel line with tonnage of burned fossil fuels since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

There are still a small number of scientists–hacks on the Koch brothers’ payroll or simply contrarian cranks—who argue that the historic melt underway is unrelated to fossil fuel burning. They’ve managed to portray climate change “believers” as tree-hugging outliers.

These so called “deniers” give just enough cover to the drill baby drill crowd on the right, but also allow our own progressive president to remain silent and to promote the continued extraction of these fuels from American soil.

The near-total silence from our leaders on this vital issue in the wake of the storm is truly scary. Gov. Cuomo mentioned climate change on WNYC Tuesday, but Chris Christie has so far only given it lip service without acting on his convictions. Last year, he said that “climate change is real” and “impacting our state” while pulling New Jersey out of a regional greenhouse gas initiative.

The fate of the planet is a political football. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 85 percent of Democrats believe there is evidence of global warming, while 48 percent of Republicans say the same. Some of them might be waking up. Monday night, while tidal storm surges were inundating the streets of America’s greatest city, Meghan McCain was tweeting, “So are we still going to go with climate change not being real, fellow Republicans?”

I hate to sound like a torture-loving W. administration lawyer, but maybe the “deniers” should be forced to watch Chasing Ice with their eyelids held open, like Alex in Clockwork Orange, until they get it. And then maybe someone can invent some spine juice for our leaders, so that they begin talking about making some hard changes in our habits.

In the meantime, what to tell the kids about the real-life geological bogeyman scientists are crediting with this awful storm?

Our own little darlings watched Sandy blow past with interest but strangely little alarm as lashes of wind, water and eerie electrical transformer explosions filled the night sky. They laughingly went along with packing the go-bag. This is their world: they’ve been waiting for the zombie apocalypse since they learned to read.

The dawn after the howling black night, we found ourselves among the fortunate high-ground survivors. But we’re still shell-shocked.

Halloween night, we’ll be hunkered down with the candy corn and a stiff drink, freaking ourselves out while watching the scariest movie ever, the original Swedish version of Let the Right One In, about a child vampire.

The great thing about it: it’s probably not real.

editorial@observer.com

Probably the only train Chris Christie ever liked. (Wikimedia Commons)

It was the shot heard 'round the Hudson, the anti-spending measure that arguably made New Jersey Governor Chris Christie a national conservative star: Killing the ARC Tunnel.

The move was unprecedented, reversing decades of Robert Moses-inspired shovels-in-the-ground unstoppability for public works. And now it appears to have been little more than a political gambit. The Times has gotten a copy of a new Government Accountability Office report showing that Governor Christie grossly exaggerated the costs his state would bear if it went ahead with the multi-billion project to create a new rail connection between Manhattan and Secaucus.

The report by the Government Accountability Office, to be released this week, found that while Mr. Christie said that state transportation officials had revised cost estimates for the tunnel to at least $11 billion and potentially more than $14 billion, the range of estimates had in fact remained unchanged in the two years before he announced in 2010 that he was shutting down the project. And state transportation officials, the report says, had said the cost would be no more than $10 billion.

Mr. Christie also misstated New Jersey’s share of the costs: he said the state would pay 70 percent of the project; the report found that New Jersey was paying 14.4 percent. And while the governor said that an agreement with the federal government would require the state to pay all cost overruns, the report found that there was no final agreement, and that the federal government had made several offers to share those costs.

The governor's office said the report supports its case for cancelling what was once the largest public infrastructure project in the country, even now as it admits for the first time that its calculations included work done by the Port Authority, the bi-state agency whose primary job it is to undertake exactly these sorts of projects. Supporters of the project were less sanguine, of course.

“The bottom line is that the G.A.O. report simply bears out what we said in the fall of 2010 and say to this day: the ARC project was a very, very bad deal for New Jersey,” he added, using the acronym for the project, known as Access to the Region’s Core.

Martin E. Robins, the founding director of the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers University and an early director of the ARC project, criticized the governor. “In hindsight, it’s apparent that he had a highly important political objective: to cannibalize the project so he could find an alternate way of keeping the transportation trust fund program moving, and he went ahead and did it,” he said.

Options for creating a new connection are dwindling. Last week, MTA chief Joe Lhota shot down a proposal to connect the 7-Train with Secaucus that had been floated by the Bloomberg administration. That leaves only a proposal from Amtrak, part of a high-speed rail program, that is still decades away. It will not even begin before ARC was expected to be completed.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Ms. Guadagno, New Jersey’s lieutenant governor and secretary of state, had been walking months earlier with Dawn Zimmer, the mayor of Hoboken, along that city’s waterfront.

Waterfront Corporate Center.

The pair gazed at Waterfront Corporate Center, the two-building complex that has been developed in recent years by the real estate firm SJP Properties. Their eyes fixed on the empty parcel next to the twin properties, the final spot on the site where SJP can erect a planned third office building.

“She told me she wanted to fill that hole in the skyline,” Ms. Guadagno remembered. “I told her I would do what I could to help her.”

Ms. Guadagno knew immediately that Pearson was the perfect candidate for the property. SJP needed an anchor tenant to break ground on the property. But as Ms. Guadagno was about to find out, government officials aren’t always the first ones to be invited into a company’s prospective real estate decision making. By the time she caught wind of Pearson’s decision to move, rumors were already swirling that the company was planning to leave the state for Manhattan.

That scenario was credible. Pearson, which owns the Penguin Group, the world’s largest book publisher, and the Financial Times, has hundreds of thousands of square feet of space in the increasingly trendy Manhattan office neighborhood Hudson Square.

“There was talk that they had a lot of empty space there that they could backfill, moving 1,300 jobs based in New Jersey,” she said. “It was concerning because the operational efficiency they could get by consolidating is something that I knew is always going to be hard to fight with.”

Richard Berzine, Pearson’s real estate broker and consultant, who operates his own real estate services company, confirmed that Pearson hadn’t initially been thinking about the Hoboken site and had been evaluating scenarios that would cut New Jersey out of its real estate equation.

Ms. Guadagno and other New Jersey economic development officials, however, had a potent tool for just such a situation. In 2009, before Gov. Chris Christie was elected and Ms. Guadagno, who was Governor Christie’s running mate, took office, New Jersey passed a package of alluring tax benefits called the Urban

Transit Hub Tax Credit Program, which allows developers to deduct the cost of a large real estate development from their income taxes over a period of time. SJP Properties qualified and had used the benefit for the other two buildings it built at the site. The incentive was what almost lured the online grocery service Fresh Direct to relocate from Queens across the Hudson River earlier this month (eventually the company settled on a move to the Bronx after the city dangled its package of incentives to retain the grocer).

The tax credits would allow SJP the leeway to charge far cheaper rents for the Hoboken building than Pearson could get in Manhattan. Mr. Berzine declined to specify rents in the deal but a source familiar with the terms said that SJP offered the space to Pearson for rates in the $30s per square foot, a bargain for new construction.

“Some other states write a check up front,” Ms. Guadagno said, defending the incentives, which prompted scrutiny in New York in the deal the city made with Fresh Direct. “They don’t get any of the benefit until they actually hire the first person (or bring the first employee to the building). It spurs a $157 million investment in Hoboken.”

But Pearson appeared to step closer to departing New Jersey last summer when it completed a 271,000-square-foot deal at 330 Hudson Street, an office building being developed near its existing locations at 345 and 375 Hudson Street. The lease appeared to hand a setback to Ms. Guadagno’s hopes to retain the company. It soon came to light that Pearson planned to move only a portion of the 475,000 square feet it had in Upper Saddle River to that space, because it also had to serve as a location for employees relocating from Midtown. The company is facing expiring leases at a number of buildings in Manhattan, including 1330 Avenue of the Americas, where it has more than 100,000 square feet of space.
In fact, New Jersey’s incentive package had quietly resonated with the firm.

Mr. Berzine and another broker who worked on the deal with him, Daniel Loughlin, an executive at the real estate services company Jones Lang LaSalle, realized that maintaining a New Jersey outpost would benefit Pearson, and the company was impressed with the economics of the deal.

“We reached a decision that a bifurcated operation would be great because it would continue to provide a convenient location for Pearson employees who were used to commuting to the Upper Saddle River location,” Mr. Loughlin said.

Earlier this month, Pearson signed a 206,000-square-foot deal to anchor Waterfront Corporate Center III, the final, 500,000-square-foot piece in SJP’s development plan on the waterfront. The building is slated to be complete and ready for occupancy in 2014.

About 500 Pearson jobs are still leaving Upper Saddle River to go to Manhattan, but Ms. Guadagno praised the lease that will keep most of the company’s New Jersey operations in state.

“I’m disappointed we’re losing any of the jobs,” she said. “But considering the fact that we faced 1,300 jobs out the door, this is not a bad outcome.”

dgeiger@observer.com

Coming off of more than three years as its top New York executive, Mr. Ward has no illusions how the bi-state agency is run.

The audit last week cited mismanagement at the Port Authority and spiraling costs at the World Trade Center site, findings that aren’t exactly revelatory. Swelling budgets have been a long-running problem at the complex site and criticisms have been lobbed before at the sprawling agency’s byzantine structure.

Chris Ward.

To the politically cynical, the findings were a way for governors Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie to distance themselves from the inevitable overruns at the World Trade Center site as well as the unpopular toll and fare hike last year by the agency early in their tenures.

One thing is immediately clear: It won’t impact the consensus on Mr. Ward’s time at the Port Authority, which is widely hailed as one of the key reasons behind the progress at the WTC site.

“Government has to reinvent itself all the time,” Mr. Ward said. “Good for them for raising questions about the Port Authority. All I can say is, imagine what the audit would be, what the conclusions would be if the world looked at the site on the 10th year anniversary and it wasn’t complete and President Obama was working his way through an incomplete site and the families were there and it’s been 10 years and the memorial was not done.”

Such is the contradictory and sometimes absurd nature of public service, where memory of the overwhelming mandates Mr. Ward and his colleagues at the authority faced when he stepped in as executive director in 2008 can give way to scrutiny over the evasive actions they were forced to take. Building in the expeditious manner that was required to get the memorial done in time for its big moment in the national eye was more expensive. But in the pressured years leading up to anniversary, who among both the government and public would have been willing to accept failure to meet the deadline in exchange for cost savings?

“The alternative was incredibly worse,” Mr. Ward said. “From 2008 to 2011 we completed the memorial, we solved the Larry Silverstein issues, we signed Condé and did a deal to have the Dursts invest $100 million into the building. And the site now has all of this progressive momentum. In 2008 people thought the project would never get built. Now it’s a done deal.

“I think you have to be a little perverse to enjoy major league public service,” Mr. Ward added with a smile.

And yet one can sense that Mr. Ward also misses the thrill of being one of the top transit and infrastructure officials in the country. During his time at the authority, Mr. Ward, wearing his trademark designer eyeglasses, excelled as a public speaker and face for the agency, always at ease in the limelight and a forceful presence during the authority’s tough talks at the WTC site that reassured the public its stake in the rebuilding effort would not be subjugated to Mr. Silverstein’s.

While perhaps out of the public eye, Mr. Ward’s new role places him closer to a pipeline of transit and infrastructure that is potentially bigger than the Port Authority’s. Last month, Mr. Ward took an executive level position in the U.S. operations of the large international construction company Dragados, and he has grand ambitions for the firm.

“It’s a big change,” said Mr. Ward. “Being executive director of the Port Authority is making 50 different public policy decisions every day; here the focus is bottom-line business development.”

In recent years, a pattern of ballooning construction costs has plagued more than just the Port Authority. The situation has transpired in so many instances, it has come to seem like an endemic outcome for public transit and infrastructure projects. It’s a story that Mr. Ward can tell more compellingly by virtue not only of his tenure at the Port Authority but, before that, his time at the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, where, as that agency’s commissioner, he presided over the planning and construction of a water filtration plant in Westchester County’s Croton, which also busted through preliminary cost estimates.

According to Mr. Ward, a new era could be dawning in the U.S. where government seeks to off load large civic construction projects onto private partners who take on not only oversight of the work but responsibility for its costs, guaranteeing that government is not on the hook for overruns. These public-private partnerships (PPP) have become popular in Europe but slower to catch on here. Mr. Ward has ambitious plans for Dragados. The company, he says, will be in contention for billions of dollars of construction work and has a war chest of billions more to invest alongside government partners who embrace the PPP concept.

“My job is to identify and then win some of these large public works projects that are on the planning boards or ready to go around the country,” Mr. Ward said, citing plans to replace the Tappan Zee Bridge as one among many potential jobs that will be up for bid in the coming years. “There are major highway projects down in Texas that we’re keen on, some tunnel projects out West that we’re looking at.

Hydro plants in Canada. There’s a good $35 billion of major public infrastructure that will need to get built in the next five years and we’d like to get a significant part of it.”

When Mr. Ward left the Port Authority late last year, he didn’t have his new position lined up yet. He said he went to the gym and caught up on reading. More than anything else, he said, he walked. As a high official, Mr. Ward said he was cloistered.

“Three and a half years at the Port Authority, you don’t have a lot of time to yourself,” Mr. Ward said. “I walked the Hudson River Park, which is so beautiful. I walked new neighborhoods that I hadn’t been to. I hadn’t really been over to Williamsburg and so I saw that part of the city, just walked the whole thing. I walked Madison Avenue one day, which is such an eye opener. With everything that is going on in the world there’s this one little place that remains protected from the economic recession.”

Mr. Ward went to Macalester College in Minnesota and when he graduated in the late 1970s, he said he went to work as a ranch hand in NewMexico, leaving to then do a stint on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

“We were about 150 miles offshore, out there for seven days on and then off for seven days,” Mr. Ward said. “There was every walk of life,

South Houston blacks, West Texas cowboys, Chicanos. At the time I had to be a working-class hero, I wanted to live the authentic life. I came to work for the city after graduate school at Harvard.”

One point that always stands out in his résumé is the focus of his studies. Mr. Ward has spent much of his career in public service roles involved with transit, infrastructure and construction, but in college he primarily studied theology.

“I always get questions about that,” Mr. Ward said. “All I can say is, it equipped me to ask critical questions and try to find answers to hard questions. Whether it’s an answer for a construction project or economics, it’s just a useful skill for problem solving.”

dgeiger@observer.com

Going up, regardless. (Getty)

The latest bad news at ground zero is that costs continue to mount for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. A report that found costs rose 85 percent since the project began in 2006, to $14.8 billion, placed a great deal of responsibility for these cost overruns on prior leadership at the Port.

Yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg defended the Port's leadership and the importance of rebuilding, according to DNAinfo.

"I don’t know where those numbers come from," Bloomberg said, adding that the costs were not significantly higher than what had originally been envisioned.

"I'm sure there are some things that they could have done differently, in retrospect. [It's] easy to play Monday morning quarterback."

Regardless of the cost, the mayor insisted that finishing the memorial in time for the anniversary was critical.

"Can you imagine? If America couldn’t have come up with a memorial by the 10th anniversary, I would suggest that the press would have had a field day," he said. "It would have been an embarrassment around the world.

"New York had to deliver. The Port Authority had to deliver. The donors had to deliver."

The mayor also reminded reporters of the complexity that helped create these costs in the first place.

"The bottom line is the whole site is perhaps the most complex construction project in the history of the world — legally, politically, engineering-wise," he said. "Keep in mind there's a railroad that runs through it. Two railroads. And they never stopped. Nobody else could do that. Every building is dependent on every other one. Who could build all these things at the same time? Only the people we had."

Meanwhile, Capital New York's Dana Rubinstein (our former colleague) has the best analysis of all the audit coverage. She points out that Governor Chris Christie, who has been slamming the Port, and particularly its old maestro Chris Ward, was nowhere when the report was announced, and she has a theory why:

With New Jersey governor Chris Christie under scrutiny for what appear to be dozens of patronage appointments to the Port Authority, his and Governor Cuomo's long-anticipated audit of the agency was released quietly on Tuesday at 4:30 pm, following a briefing with reporters a half hour earlier.

At 5:34 p.m., the governors released a joint statement saying, "This record of historic failure must be reversed."

(“I think this patronage thing hamstrung them,” said one lobbyist who was involved with the World Trade Center redevelopment, referring to the muted announcement.)

While the politicians squabble, the towers keep rising, as The Journal goes inside Tower 4. The overruns are unfortunate, surely, but also to be expected. Anyone who pretends otherwise is fooling themselves. Someday, someday soon, even, New Yorkers will look up at their new downtown skyline and they will have forgotten all this.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

The ARC. (Bergen Record)

Robert Moses built as often with expressions and syllogism as with stone and steel. “The important thing is to get things done.” “If the end doesn’t justify the means, what does?” “Either you want it or you don’t want it, and either you want it now or you don’t get it at all.”

They peppered his conversations and correspondence and were bellowed at rooms full of subservient staff, intransigent politicians and hostile citizens. The most influential and enduring of his maxims is undoubtedly: “Once you sink that first stake, they’ll never make you pull it up.”

More than the thousands of miles of roads and bridges and tunnels, the grand parks and parkways, the exhibition centers and fairs, more than the innumerable demolished homes and displaced families, the congestion and pollution, the social unrest—more than anything that Moses built or destroyed, this idea, get the shovels in the ground and there will be no stopping us, shaped the country’s public works ethos.

While his projects were largely confined to New York, his ideas about how, and why, to build persisted across the country. Sure, there were the acolytes who parroted Moses' ideas of urban renewal in cities across America, but they fell out of favor not long after their patron fell from power. His ideas, on how to build, and more importantly how to keep building, persisted for decades after Moses was deposed. For almost 30 years after he was laid to rest in 1981, Moses’ spirit lived on in infrastructure.

Sink those stakes, and the money will follow for more. It always does.

Then, almost over night, we gave up the ghost. It did not start with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and his decision to cancel the ARC Tunnel—recall the Congressional fight over much-maligned stimulus spending—but that was certainly the clarion call.

So what if the motivations were more political than practical? So what if Mr. Christie listened to the complaints of his wife about the 10 flights of stairs up from the new 34th Street station that she dreaded, rather than the counsel of transportation experts? Whatever the outcome of Mr. Christie’s decision to nix the tunnel—longer commutes, an abortive presidential run (twice!), more money for highways—the simple fact remains that he pulled up the stakes, and once he did, others began to follow suit.

During his election run in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker launched NoTrain.com. An open letter, aimed at the president and his gubernatorial predecessor, declares, “I am drawing a line in the sand Mr. President: No matter how much money you and Governor Doyle try to spend before the end of the year, I will put a stop to this boondoggle the day I take office.” He returned the $800 million his state had been promised.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott went even further, turning down a $2 billion grant—almost as much as Mr. Christie gave up—that would have helped fund high-speed rail between Tampa and Orlando. This was the Obama administration’s signature stimulus project, bullet trains some day running from coast to coast, the kind our rivals in Europe and Asia are building with frustrating regularity, and here were some of the nation’s top political leaders turning their noses up at this free money.

What has gone missing is “the civic state,” as the great Moses biographer Robert Caro put it in an interview. “When you talk about building these things, it’s about improving the overall environment we live in,” Mr. Caro said. “It’s worth paying to do that.”

People have been declaring the death of Robert Moses while he was still alive and even while in power. However, America may be witnessing the true twilight of his influence, the final stake, this one through his heart. At a time when we need to be building, not only to repair our aging infrastructure, but to dig ourselves out of a recession, we are doing anything but.

The Tappen Zee. (Getty Images)

New York has always had a strong tradition of public works, one that long predates Moses. The Erie Canal, the New York Street Grid, all the parks of Olmstead and Vaux, the subways, the bridges, the tunnels. Party lines, then, did not matter, and in fact some of our greatest builders were Republicans: Rockefeller, Pataki, Bloomberg. That is what makes the current gubernatorial administrations so vexing.

It may be too early to judge New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s public works legacy, of course, but the past 10 months do tell a story.

Governor Cuomo was swept into office with a mandate, the kind President Obama had, the kind that tends to lead to visionary thinking. And indeed, the governor has achieved much, in terms of property tax reform, an on-time budget, and his marquee victory, marriage equality. But all of these issues have been addressed in an environment of austerity. It is something the Governor Cuomo has preached from the start.

For much of that time, the administration kept the two master builders, former MTA head Jay Walder and former Port Authority head Chris Ward, in place, if at arm’s length. Infrastructure issues, most general investments, were barely mentioned. Only last week did the administration begin accepting applications for a Race-to-the-Top-style economic competition. The priority was fixing the budget before expanding it again, if ever.

However, in the past month, all of that has changed. Joe Lhota, a Giuliani budget boss, was placed atop the M.T.A., and Pat Foye, Eliot Spitzer’s downstate economics czar, was named his counterpart at the Port Authority. Both come from the state’s conservative firmament, though their loyalties are to efficient bureaucracies above all else. They are numbers guys. Even critics speak highly of them, and this is not to doubt their capabilities or the possibility of success, but the question remains exactly what sort of transportation system they will shepherd, one of expansion and vision or cuts and moderation.

“I think it’s a far greater priority to make sure those projects are tightly controlled, on time and on budget, and that the rest of the system is made more efficient and cost-friendly,” a former Giuliani aide who worked closely with Mr. Lhota told The Observer following his appointment. Consider his stiffest competition for the job, Neil Peterson, a competitive dancer and serial entrepreneur who started a car-sharing company later purchased by ZipCar. He also ran three transit agencies out West.

This is not a question of the capabilities or capacity of the people appointed by Governor Cuomo. It is a question of vision, of operating principals, the bean counters versus the visionaries.

Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association—its predecessor organization thought up the W.P.A.—said he thinks Mr. Lhota and especially Mr. Foye will endeavor to reshape the region. The old projects will finally be finished, but what about the ones coming after? "There are some big projects moving ahead," Mr. Yaro said. "Does this mean we shouldn't be thinking about the next generation of projects? What about high-speed rail? What about trans-Hudson mobility?"

Consider the Tappen Zee Bridge—just do not drive across it. The span is 56 years old, but for almost a decade it has been one of the states worst, in terms of structural safety. It handles 140,000 drivers a day, almost five times the amount for which it was originally designed. (This is at the heart of the nation's infrastructure challenge—more users on older spans with less money to pay for them.)

If Andrew Cuomo had been indifferent to infrastructure, this is one major exception, and arguably the best indication of his approach. For the past nine years, the fate of the aging Hudson River viaduct has been debated. There were over 300 public meetings. Even before he took office, Governor-elect Cuomo came and visited the bridge, promising to come up with a solution before it collapsed. On Nov. 10, the administration announced it had reached a deal with the federal government to rebuild the bridge, even going so far as to expedite the onerous environmental reviews so construction can begin sooner.

The new bridge will cost $5.2 billion in total. But it will be lacking in a rail connector or even a pedestrian walkway, as had long been lobbied for, a decision that cuts the cost of the project in half but limits its capacity.

"I’m the cheapest guy around in government," Westchester County Executive Robert Astorino recently told WNYC. "We’re cutting costs left and right. But if you’re going to spend money, spend it efficiently. And right now you’re going to replace this outdated bridge with another outdated bridge the day you cut the ribbon."

The Cuomo administration argues that it is building a bridge capable of adding the popular features in the future, when there is money available, while keeping the structure from falling down now. His approach is as valid as Moses', but it lacks the desire to tackle the whole problem, not just the 20th Century piece of it. The entire reason advocates wanted mass transit on the bridge was to reduce the number of cars already clogging it.

There is no question the Tappen Zee needs to be fixed, but there remains the issue of what should replace it—not to mention the other infrastructure in the state. The World Trade Center still has a far way to go, and Mr. Foye has promised to revive projects from his previous portfolio, such as Moynihan Station. What sort of compromises might be made there?

The World Trade Center. (Port Authority)

“Even if we weren’t in this enormous recession, we wouldn’t be seeing the gas tax go up or other measures because there’s no trust in the federal government, and that they’ll do something right with the money,” said Brian Deery, senior director of the highway and transportation division at the American Association of General Contractors.

It is not fair to place all the blame on the current generation of politicians. The world today is obviously a very different one from the one in which Robert Moses and his cohort were building. The nation is highly developed, with little room for new projects. We are building on top of ourselves. Robert Moses was simply content to bulldoze those who got in his way. America cannot, and should not, pursue such means, and by and large it does not.

This is something people often forget when they point to China and wring their hands. Columbia real estate dean and former Manhattan City Planning director Vishaan Chakrabarti likes to compare the booming dragon to its neighbor, the cantankerous tiger. “India has a big vibrant democracy, and it is struggling to build a competitive infrastructure. China does not worry about such problems, it just builds,” he said.

Robert Caro said this has been the case since before Moses, and it was part of the reason a singular planner was needed to produce the change in New York and beyond that he did. "For better or worse, the city would be a very different place if it were not for him," Mr. Caro said.

"It’s a problem that democracy hasn’t solved, and democracy still hasn’t solved it," he added.

But there is a desparate need to do so—the nation's infrastructure deficit stands somewhere between $1 trillion and $3 trillion, depending on who is doing the estimating.

On the high end, that is one-fifth the annual GDP. It would cause massive expenditures to fix this problem, but it is also an opportunity for an even larger investment in the country. Most advocates point out that construction spending creates a 50 percent return on investment, not to mention the hidden costs of driving on potholed roads, suffering delays at airports, rebuilding bridges at 20-times the cost after they collapse.

Part of the challenge for politicians is that if they expend political capital on capital construction, they may not live to see it through. Many of these big projects now take decades, surpassing the typical four- to eight-year political cycles most elected officials are limited to in this country. George Pataki was a champion of the World Trade Center, Atlantic Yards, the Second Avenue Subway, Moynihan Station, a new Javits Convention Center. It has been five years since Mr. Pataki left his third term in office and still none are finished. Had Mayor Bloomberg not taken a third term, dozens of projects, from Willets Point to Governors Island to the transformation of Broadway might never have been realized.

Financing is also a big part of the challenges facing infrastructure investment. Projects are not simply more expensive because of the maturity of society or the complexity of environmental reviews or the cost of labor and materials, but also more nuanced factors like inflation, global competition—even government itself—which as it grew over the past century began to serve more constituencies.

“When Robert Moses was building in the 1930s and '40s, the social safety net was just beginning,” said Richard Anderson, president of the New York Building Congress. “Now there is a lot more competition for spending.”

There is also just less money to go around. A good portion of capital for infrastructure investments comes from the gas tax, which has not been raised since Bill Clinton’s first year in office. Because the tax is set at an exact amount (currently 18.4 cents) and not on a proportional basis, as gas prices have risen, cars have become more efficient and people generally drive less, it has meant falling revenues. It is also a terribly unpalatable tax. Critics contend Christie killed ARC to pay for road repairs rather than raise his state’s gas tax, the lowest in the nation.

"We have always built fabulously in this country, from the Erie Canal to the intercontinental railroad to the Interstate Highway System," construction attorney and author Barry Lapatner said. "But we have stopped investing, so we are no longer building. If we don’t put this money into our roads and bridges now, it will cost us even more down the road."

The Big Dig. (ArchPaper

But ultimately the biggest issue hamstringing infrastructure at the moment is politics. Public investments, especially large ones, have been lumped in with the general sense of government malfeasance sweeping the country. Political distrust is at such high levels, elected officials cannot be counted on to build the country back up.

And yet the public should come in for their fair share of the blame as well. “Infrastructure is just not sexy anymore,” Mr. Deery said. “These things used to be brand new and shiny and cause a spurt of national pride. But rebuilding a bridge, repaving a road—that is vital but hardly inspiring business.”

The turning point that may well have soured the country on public investment may also have been the moment at which it was saved. The Surface Transportation Act of 2005 contained more than 6,000 earmarks, among them the reviled Bridge to Nowhere, serving 50 residents on Alaska’s Gravina Island at a cost of $398 million.

“There was a real backlash to that bill,” said Robert Puentes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “But in response, I think there is an understanding that the peanut butter approach, where we spread a thin layer of money across the entire nation, is not working.”

President Obama also comes in for a good deal of blame on this count. While the 2009 stimulus bill may have saved jobs, it did little to transform the nation’s infrastructure, because the projects supporting the jobs were shovel-ready. In other words, just another road-widening beside a strip mall. Yes, the Brooklyn Bridge was repaired, along with other critical pieces of infrastructure, but Havermayer’s grand invention has not changed travel patterns in the city since it was built.

"You have to view the whole picture, the good, the bad and the ugly, but what we don’t need anymore of is the token investments done just for the photo op ribbon cutting," Mr. Lapatner said.

Mr. Chakrabarti of Columbia faults the president’s high-speed rail plan, which dedicated only $8 billion, spread across a few states (some of which rejected it). He argues there was an opportunity to do something truly bold, propose a $250 billion to $300 billion nationwide network that could have started a year ago. And don’t build Washington-to-New-York-to-Boston. “Do we really need a faster train to Harvard?” he said, arguing it was a city in decline. He prefers Charlotte-to-Washington-to-New-York, maybe a spur to Atlanta. The rights of way are cheaper and clearer. “And it would cross blue to purple to red states, maybe help knit this country back together,” Mr. Chakrabarti said.

“Some people just can’t be bothered to wait around,” Mr. Yaro said. He cites Denver, Chicago and of course New York as cities where local officials have all taken up the cause of public investment. Just this past election day, Texas and Arkansas voted to approve new taxes to invest in water and road infrastructure, respectively. The American Road and Transportation Builders Association tracks such ballot measures and has found between 60 and 70 percent success rates, which strongly suggests Americans want to invest in their infrastructure. It is the politicians who most often stand in their way, whether they are building the wrong projects or simply not building them at all.

It seems there are little Robert Moseses running around the country.

Brookings' Mr. Puentes champions these efforts but says the biggest deficiency is a lack of a national approach to building. Rejecting peanut butter, America needs cookie dough ice cream—a lot of vanilla with chunks of goodness concentrated in the mix. Starting from the position that the nation's wants to double exports, Mr. Puentes points to ports, rail freight and roadways as critical investments, which politicians should focus on, and wrest some control from states and municipalities when it comes to investments.

"Take the Bayonne Bridge in New York, it's too low, and when they widen the Panama Canal, and the huge ships start floating up the East Coast, they won't be able to fit under it," Mr. Puentes said. "That's not Bayonne's problem, that's the nation's problem. Same thing in Detroit, there's a bridge they want to build between there and Windsor, Ontario. It's the largest bi-national trading corridor on the planet, critical to any conversation around exports and global trade. It's Detroit's bridge, it's not a national bridge, but it's still a critical piece of infrastructure. I'm not saying the federal government has to step up and make money rain down, but we have to figure out ways to address these critical problems."

Environmental reviews could be streamlined and labor contracts modified, public-private partnerships may someday abound, but the fact remains, sometimes you have to just build.

Look at Boston, where the Big Dig is consistently held up as model of government overreaching and fecklessness. Initially estimated to cost $2.8 billion when it began in 1982, the project took a decade longer than expected to complete, and when adjusted for inflation, cost almost four times as much as planned. But it got built, Boston was stitched back together, with a nice park running through it and new development springing up on both sides.

The same thing goes for the pit formerly known as Ground Zero. It took five years longer than expected just to complete the memorial, costs are soaring for the PATH terminal, two of the towers may be decades away from completion. And yet when visitors began streaming onto the site on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, almost no one complained.

Sometimes you just have to sink that first stake.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC