Public authorities dishing out ridiculous salaries

From the Daily News:

It's nice work if you can get it.

Nearly 5,500 employees spanning more than three dozen state public authorities raked in six-figure salaries last year, the Daily News has learned.

That amounts to 6% of the 90,237 state authority employees on the payroll, according to a recent review by the Authorities Budget Office.

Overall, the budget office found that the average total compensation package for a state authority worker is $70,600.

Long considered a "shadow government," public authorities serve as patronage mills that operate in secret and ring up hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, critics charge.

Former Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, who pushed for the creation of a body to oversee public authorities, said the new numbers shed light on the previously "secretive, Soviet-style bureaucracies."

"To finally have a light on the salary practices will require people to justify salaries which strike the average citizens as strange - and unusually high," Brodsky said.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority topped the charts by employing the most staffers pulling in six figures.

WTC costs a lot more than expected

From the NY Post:

Developer Larry Silverstein has exercised an option negotiated five years ago requiring the city to rent 582,000 square feet in the second tower going up at the World Trade Center site, The Post has learned.

That's put the Bloomberg Administration in a funny position.

It's now got to make plans to occupy what will be some of the priciest real estate in Lower Manhattan, while it downsizes the government and gets rid of 400,000 square feet of unused office space elsewhere.

Under the deal struck in 2006, the city will pay Silverstein $56.50 a square foot when the building known as Tower 4 is ready for occupancy in late 2013.

From the NY Post:

The chronically over-budget transportation hub that's part of the massive Ground Zero rebuild will eat into even more taxpayer dollars than expected -- for the second time.

Port Authority officials yesterday hiked the cost of the ornate transit center -- which will house stations for PATH trains, 13 MTA subway lines, and a proposed JFK rail link -- by a staggering $180 million.

The change will bring the overall cost to $3.44 billion.

In 2006, officials put an estimate for the Santiago Calatrava-designed site, which would be the third-largest transportation hub in the city, at about $2.2 billion.

In 2008, that price tag went up to $3.26 billion.