You call this security? Looks like Swiss cheese

Friday, May 13, 2005

By JEFFREY PAGE

The dance band of the 21st century is playing up-tempo rock and the people who would mount another Sept. 11 could be bouncing to the beat.

At the Port Authority they're waltzing.
Case in point. Only last summer - almost three years after Sept. 11 - did the PA get around to posting signs on the George Washington Bridge that photographing the span was unlawful. And it did so only after press accounts of a man who, by chance, spotted someone videotaping the lower deck.

Even then, it took the Port Authority about three weeks to get a couple of signs installed.

And only now, as we approach the fourth anniversary of the Worst Day, has the agency decided to check the backgrounds of the people who work for its contractors. And it's only doing so because it discovered that a man with valid credentials to work for a painting contractor on the GWB had an expired visa - and has been under a federal deportation order for the last three years.

Wait, that's not right. The PA discovered no such thing.

It was a Bergen County traffic cop on patrol on Route 46 in Ridgefield Park who made the discovery when he stopped the man for tailgating and found he was driving with suspended insurance - and that he had been ordered deported to Brazil in 2001.

So you call the PA to ask why it has taken so long for it to decide to conduct personnel background checks and a pleasant spokesman tells you, "Safety and security remain the Port Authority's top priorities."

He said, "We're at the forefront of working to ensure that contractors undergo the proper background checks. We continue to work closely with contracting firms."

Yes, yes, but today happens to be the 1,340th day after the World Trade Center was destroyed, the Pentagon was severely damaged, the four airplanes were hijacked and crashed and 3,000 people were murdered. And now the PA is to start screening its contractors?

The spokesman noted that 84 PA employees were killed on Sept. 11, and added, "We understand the importance of security."

He said the PA has conducted background checks on all its own employees.

Some reasonable questions:

How many contractors do business with the Port Authority? This information was not readily available.

How many individuals work for those contractors at the GWB and other PA properties? Nor this.

How much will it cost for the PA to screen its contractors' employees? Nor this.

How long will it take to do these checks? Nor this.

And once again, what took so long to institute this policy? Shouldn't such checking have begun on Sept. 12, 2001? Or even on Feb. 27, 1993, the day after the first attack on the World Trade Center?

Somehow these questions don't seem especially complicated, but over the course of three days this week, no answers were forthcoming.

The Port Authority spokesman did say that "a majority" of the agency's contractors are employed at the three airports. Because of federal aviation and homeland security regulations, their employees have already undergone background checks.

Put all these questions and non-answers together and you wind up with an unsettling fact.

The Port Authority may not even know the number of contractors working for it.

NorthJersey.com

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