Politics Across the Hudson

Philip Mark Plotch

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780813599786
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política pública de planificación local y regional

Winner of the 2015 American Planning Association New York Metro Chapter Journalism Award The State of New York is now building one of the world’s longest, widest, and most expensive bridges—the new Tappan Zee Bridge—stretching more than three miles across the Hudson River, approximately thirteen miles north of New York City. In Politics Across the Hudson, urban planner Philip Plotch offers a behind-the-scenes look at three decades of contentious planning and politics centered around this bridge, recently renamed for Governor Mario M. Cuomo, the state's governor from 1983 to 1994. He reveals valuable lessons for those trying to tackle complex public policies while also confirming our worst fears about government dysfunction.   Drawing on his extensive experience planning megaprojects, interviews with more than a hundred key figures—including governors, agency heads, engineers, civic advocates, and business leaders—and extraordinary access to internal government records, Plotch tells a compelling story of high-stakes battles between powerful players in the public, private, and civic sectors. He reveals how state officials abandoned viable options, squandered hundreds of millions of dollars, forfeited more than three billion dollars in federal funds, and missed out on important opportunities. Faced with the public’s unrealistic expectations, no one could identify a practical solution to a vexing problem, a dilemma that led three governors to study various alternatives rather than disappoint key constituencies.    This revised and updated edition includes a new epilogue and more photographs, and continues where Robert Caro’s The Power Broker left off and illuminates the power struggles involved in building New York’s first major new bridge since the Robert Moses era. Plotch describes how one governor, Andrew Cuomo, shrewdly overcame the seemingly insurmountable obstacles of onerous environmental regulations, vehement community opposition, insufficient funding, interagency battles, and overly optimistic expectations.     

1

The I-287 Corridor

From Conception to Congestion

New York City has one of the world’s greatest natural harbors. The water is deep, the currents are mild, and it sits at the mouth of the 315-mile-long Hudson River. In the nation’s early years, three other well-sited cities—Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston—had busier ports.¹ The fact that New York’s population and economy far surpass every other American city today is a result of one of the most successful economic development initiatives ever—the $7 million 363-mile-long Erie Canal, which connected the Great Lakes and the Hudson River.

In the early nineteenth century, New York governor DeWitt Clinton predicted that after the Erie Canal opened, New York City would “become the granary of the world, the emporium of commerce, the seat of manufactures, the focus of great moneyed operations.” A few years after the canal opened in 1825, the governor’s predictions came true. New York’s port was handling more goods than the next three cities combined.² Its rise as a global trading center spawned the city’s prominence as the nation’s manufacturing, financial, corporate, and media center.

The canal also transformed the rest of the state. With the exception of Binghamton and Elmira, every major city in New York falls along the trade route established by the Erie Canal, from New York City to Albany, through Schenectady, Utica, and Syracuse, to Rochester and Buffalo.³

After the Erie Canal opened, New York’s transportation investments continued to feed its growth. Beginning in the 1840s, railroad lines to New York City were built along Westchester County’s Hudson River, Saw Mill River, Bronx River, and Long Island Sound. The railroad attracted industry and residents to new communities around Westchester’s rail stations. By the late nineteenth century, Westchester had become the first large-scale suburban area in the world, with upper-middle-class communities in Scarsdale, Mount Vernon, New Rochelle, Bronxville, and Rye.⁴ Its residents relied on the railroads as well as extensive trolley systems in many of its cities.

Westchester had another growth spurt after three parkways opened in the late 1920s and early 1930s. These meandering scenic highways were designed to connect New York City with its countryside and state parks, and like the railroad and the rivers, were oriented in a north-south direction. The parkways also opened up tracts for residential development and led to a population increase of more than 50 percent during the 1920s.

Rockland County, across the river from Westchester, did not experience the same type of growth. It had no direct rail connections to New York City and it did not get a parkway until after World War II. In 1940, Westchester had over 573,000 residents while Rockland had less than 75,000. Rockland was still a semirural countryside with compact villages and hamlets separated by forests, meadows, and farms.⁵

In the late 1940s, New York’s governor Thomas E. Dewey predicted that another transportation improvement would transform the state’s economy as the canals and railroads had in previous generations. He wanted to build “the greatest highway in the world.”⁶

Years before the development of the nation’s interstate highway system, Dewey envisioned a five-hundred-mile long superhighway that would connect nearly all of the state’s population centers. Running relatively parallel to the Erie Canal and the southern portion of the Hudson River, the highway would have no stoplights, no crossings, and no grades exceeding 3 percent. At the Thruway’s groundbreaking in 1946, Dewey said that it would “create a growing society, happier travel, greater safety and access for every New Yorker to the other parts of the state.”⁷

Building a new highway was a much easier proposition in Dewey’s time than it is today. The New York metropolitan area still had wide-open spaces with relatively inexpensive land. The federal government had only a limited oversight role, the public was not environmentally sensitive, and little public outreach was required. However, the highway’s construction was delayed because of a lack of funding. In early 1950, Dewey broke the financial logjam when he decided that the Thruway would be a toll road, financed and operated by an independent authority.

That spring Dewey signed legislation to set up the New York State Thruway Authority, a quasi-independent state organization that would finance construction by issuing bonds to be paid back with toll revenues.⁸ Dewey liked public authorities because they could finance costly projects, allowing the state to avoid raising taxes or waiting for voters to pass a referendum to increase the state’s debt ceiling. For elected officials, public authorities provide an effective way to gain short-term political benefits with minimal short-term costs.

Advocates for authorities claimed they could build projects faster and more efficiently. With their own operating procedures and sources of revenue, they could also avoid bureaucratic civil service requirements and the vagaries of the state’s annual budget process.⁹ By the 1950s, New York had set up authorities to build parkways, bridges, tunnels, parking structures, dormitories, sewers, and other infrastructure. In fact, the New York State Thruway Authority was New York’s forty-fifth such entity.¹⁰ The state’s first authority, the Port of New York Authority (popularly called the Port Authority), was established with New Jersey in 1921.

Once the Thruway Authority was established, the project proceeded expeditiously, but there was still one major outstanding issue: if and how it would connect with New York City.

The Birth of the Tappan Zee Bridge

Initial plans for the New York State Thruway called for a superhighway from Buffalo to western Rockland County along the southern border of the state, where it then would connect with New Jersey highways.¹¹ Drivers headed to New York City would have to cross the George Washington Bridge from New Jersey.

However, in February 1950, Governor Dewey announced a change of plans. The proposed Thruway would be built from Buffalo all the way to New York City. This meant that the state would need to build a new bridge over the Hudson River.¹² (Figure 1.1 shows the main line of the Thruway.)

By early 1950, engineers had suggested sites for a new bridge where the river is less than a mile wide between New Jersey and New York. However, Dewey rejected these locations because they fell within the jurisdiction of the bistate Port Authority, which had the exclusive right to build and operate all bridges and tunnels across the Hudson River within twenty-five miles of the Statue of Liberty.¹³ The state needed the bridge’s toll revenues to help support the rest of the Thruway system.¹⁴ If a new bridge were built in the Port Authority’s jurisdiction, New York would have to share its toll revenues with New Jersey.

Port Authority officials told the Thruway Authority that they could not waive the jurisdiction because it was part of its covenants with bondholders,¹⁵ which assured that no one could build a bridge that would compete with the Port Authority’s crossings and threaten the authority’s ability to pay off its bonds. (Ironically, years later the Thruway Authority would point to its own bond covenants as a reason it could not accommodate requests from a New York State agency that wanted to improve transportation conditions.)

FIGURE 1.1 This map shows the route of the New York State Thruway’s main line from Buffalo to New York City.

Dewey decided to build a new bridge just north of the twenty-five-mile jurisdiction, even though it was the second-widest portion of the 315-mile long river—a wide inland bay known as the Tappan Zee.¹⁶ (Figure 1.2 shows the bridge in the context of the jurisdictional line.)

The governor, who appointed half the Port Authority’s commissioners, would not even allow the authority to evaluate the feasibility of building a new bridge within its jurisdiction. New York State officials did not want any reports that would make them look foolish, since they knew it was more practical to build a bridge where the river was narrower.¹⁷

In April 1950, Westchester and Rockland residents were surprised to learn that the area near Nyack in Rockland County and Tarrytown in Westchester County was the Thruway Authority’s first choice for a new bridge, since recent public discussions had suggested narrower sections of the river. While Thruway Authority engineers were conducting test borings in May to assess soil conditions near Nyack, the governor said that if the location was not suitable, they would keep going north until the engineers found one that was.¹⁸ However, state officials preferred to avoid sites farther north, in part because that would require purchasing more land in affluent and densely populated Westchester County.¹⁹

The idea of building a bridge near Nyack was not new. In 1935, the state legislature established a Rockland-Westchester Hudson River Crossing Authority, but that body did not get very far in planning a bridge south of Nyack once members found out about the Port Authority’s jurisdiction.²⁰ The Rockland-Westchester Bridge Authority, created later that year, considered building a span between Nyack and Tarrytown, but after conducting test borings as far as 180 feet below the water’s surface, its engineers were unable to find rock that would provide adequate foundations. The authority realized that going any deeper would make the cost of a bridge too expensive, and in 1936 it reported that such a crossing would not be built. Instead, it stated that a location within the Port Authority’s jurisdiction would be more feasible.²¹

In the 1930s, New York governor Herbert H. Lehman did not try to overcome the formidable financial and logistical obstacles involved in building a bridge between Nyack and Tarrytown. In 1950, however, the state had a governor who cared deeply about the new highway and bridge, so much so that the state’s superintendent of public works referred to the Thruway as Dewey’s “pet project.”²²

FIGURE 1.2 The dotted line below the Tappan Zee Bridge shows the northern limit of the Port Authority’s twenty-five-mile jurisdiction.

During his 1950 reelection campaign, Dewey did not divulge the exact location of the new bridge. For months, Rockland County officials tried to obtain information about the proposed Thruway route, but the governor told the Thruway Authority to put off any announcement because it would jeopardize his reelection bid.²³ However, the governor did promise that the state would hold a public meeting to obtain community input.

Three week...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Guides to This Book
• Introduction
• 1. The I-287 Corridor: From Conception to Congestion
• 2. Searching for Congestion Solutions (1980–​1988)
• 3. Finalizing Plans for the HOV Lane (1988–​1995)
• 4. Killing the HOV Lane (1994–​1997)
• 5. Permut’s Rail Line and Platt’s Bridge
• 6. Pataki’s Task Force: Raising Expectations Sky-High (1998–​2000)
• 7. The Thruway Authority versus Metro-North (2000–​2006)
• 8. Eliot Spitzer Doesn’t Have Enough Steam (2007–​2008)
• 9. David Paterson: The Overwhelmed Governor (2008–​2010)
• 10. Andrew Cuomo Takes Charge in 2011
• 11. Public Reaction and Cuomo’s Campaign (2011–​2012)
• 12. Lost Opportunities and Wasted Resources
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author