September 11th Memorial To Cost 60 million a year

[Sea Skimmer]

If they can ever finish building it that is.

NEW YORK — With its huge reflecting pools, ringed by waterfalls and skyscrapers, and a cavernous underground museum still under construction, the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center is an awesome spectacle that moved and inspired some 4.5 million visitors in its first year.
But all that eye-welling magnificence comes with a jaw-dropping price tag.
The foundation that runs the memorial estimates that once the roughly $700 million project is complete, it will cost $60 million a year to operate.
The anticipated cost has bothered some critics and raised concerns even among the memorial's allies that the budget may be unsustainable without a hefty government subsidy.
By comparison, the National Park Service budgeted $8.4 million this year to operate and maintain Gettysburg National Military Park and $3.6 million for the monument that includes the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. Running Arlington National Cemetery, which has more than 14,000 graves and receives 4 million visitors a year, costs $45 million annually.
Officials at the 9/11 memorial say they face unique challenges that make comparisons to other national memorials difficult.
The foundation plans to spend at least a fifth of its operating budget, or around $12 million per year, on private security because of terrorism fears. Visitors to the memorial plaza pass through airport-like security, and armed guards patrol the grounds.
"The fact of the matter is that this was a place that was attacked twice," said Joseph Daniels, the foundation's president and chief executive.
Just operating the two massive fountains that mark the spots where the twin towers once stood will cost another $4.5 million to $5 million annually, said the foundation's spokesman, Michael Frazier.
Foundation officials didn't respond to requests for information about other costs at the site, including the anticipated expense of running the museum, which is still unfinished and might not be anytime soon.
The museum was supposed to open this month, but construction all but ceased a year ago because of a funding squabble between the foundation and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the land the memorial sits on.
Daniels said it will take at least a year for the museum to open once construction resumes, meaning the site may not be fully complete until at least 2014.
The failure to open the museum on time has thrown off the foundation's financial planning. Officials had expected to use the museum, being built mostly with money from various government agencies, plus private donations, as its main source of revenue.
While visitors will be allowed into the above-ground portions of the memorial for free, the foundation plans to charge people to descend into the museum's exhibition space, where they will see portraits of the nearly 3,000 victims, hear oral histories of the tragedy and view artifacts such as the staircase World Trade Center workers used to flee on 9/11.
The admission price hasn't been set. But if the museum gets the 2 million visitors a year the foundation expects, a $12 fee, like the one charged at the memorial to the victims of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, would cover 40 percent of the operating costs. More money will be generated through fundraising and the sale of memorabilia.
In addition, the foundation and several elected officials have proposed that the American public pick up one-third of the operating costs.
So far, Congress has balked. A bill proposed by Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, that would have had the National Park Service contribute $20 million per year ran into opposition from Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who noted that the federal government had already spent $300 million on the project.
A National Park Service official, William Shaddox, testified at a hearing that $20 million is more than the agency can afford, and larger than the entire annual appropriation for nearly 99 percent of the parks in its system.

You can't make this stuff up. This will mean it costs actual billions of dollars to run this thing over a reasonable future time frame ~30 years, by which point its bound to start needing major refurbishment work. Add in the 700 million to build it and were looking at as much money spent on the memorial as is being given to the thousands and thousands of rescue workers who are coming down with all kinds of lung diseases from working at the site. What a great tribute.

[Darth Wong]

They should have just built two new towers at the site. Instead, someone basically planted a giant flag on the site saying "Insert Politicking Here".

[Sea Skimmer]

That would have been rational and something everyone could have agreed would look good years earlier then the existing plan, but thanks to the demand to make any new tower a heavily reinforced bunker with windows, building two new towers of comparable size was fiscally impossible. The damn Freedom Tower actually has 15,000psi concrete in the lower floors specifically so it can withstand several thousand pound bomb blasts without damage, and the largest steel beams ever so it can remain standing even if a couple completely fail. Nice features, but at that point it would have been far cheaper and more logical to put a Patriot battery on the roof and just never allow trucks near it.

Freedom Tower cost is now estimated at 3.8 billion dollars. Most expensive building ever. I wont be surprised either if all that high strength concrete causes cracking problems long term too, since as far as I can find nobody has ever used stuff that hard for such a large project.

[Thanas]

Those two things cost more than the entire new Government buildings in Berlin of my nation.

Jesus.

[Haruko]

Just imagining how many public parks that could revitalize and add across the States. Certainly would be swell to see people happily heading to the parks instead of the malls.

[Aaron MkII]

So this is a massively expensive shrine, well done.

[Mr Bean]

So this is a massively expensive shrine, well done.

That's what happens when you get two different states, six agencies and congress involved. Confusion, infighting and turf battles. Had GWB been willing to give it special attention I suspect the freedom tower would already been constructed and much less expensive. I mean private security? What the hell, it's supposed to be a monument! I'll bet you sixty million dollars putting a police station in the monument and hiring sixty new cops for the station would be much cheaper than the twelve million a year. Three million a year assuming 50k per cop salaries and I'm pretty sure they would stop all random attacks and be better than any private security company by being on location and directly overseeing the two blocks there. We do something similar for DC monuments, having offices hidden inside or near the monuments themselves.

[Saxtonite]

There's then the irony of a building called "Freedom Tower" with Orwellian surveillance and security, something I remember people saying since 2006.

[Broomstick]

Contrast this with the Pentagon repair, which had reoccupation of the damaged sections starting only 11 months after the attack. And the memorial park for the Pentagon victims took less than two years to build.

Then again, it was under the umbrella of the military, not multiple civilian entities with all sorts of bullshit politics involved.

Me, I think they should have rebuilt the twin towers to look the same as before (modern upgrades and improvements on the interior, though). And done it much quicker. With a modest memorial. But no one asked me.

[Flagg]

Alot of people wanted that, unfortunately no one gives a fuck what the people want.

[Simon_Jester]

Contrast this with the Pentagon repair, which had reoccupation of the damaged sections starting only 11 months after the attack. And the memorial park for the Pentagon victims took less than two years to build.

Then again, it was under the umbrella of the military, not multiple civilian entities with all sorts of bullshit politics involved.

Also, the Pentagon is not a skyscraper. This makes bits of it easier to rebuild.

Originally, granted under wartime conditions, the Pentagon was built over a period of something like a year, at least to where people could start moving into its offices in a big way. By contrast, the World Trade Center took more like three years.

[Gandalf]

One of the legacies of 11/9 was pointless and unaffordable spending on feelgood defense spending fueled by politics. It's fitting that the memorial should be like that too.

That way it doesn't just memorialise the day, but the decade following.

[Zaune]

One of the legacies of 11/9 was pointless and unaffordable spending on feelgood defense spending fueled by politics. It's fitting that the memorial should be like that too.

That way it doesn't just memorialise the day, but the decade following.

That's either the dumbest or the most profound thing I've heard all day. Possibly both.

[hongi]

Freedom Tower cost is now estimated at 3.8 billion dollars. Most expensive building ever.

Freedom...comes at a price.

[Slacker]

Well, part of the problem, which people don't really talk about, is that it took four or five years to actually decontaminate and clean up the site, as well as replace and repair the transit lines underneath before they could even think about putting back in a new foundation. That was a fair part of the delay, and proceeded regardless of the bickering and shenanigans that went on over the design for the new tower. Honestly, once the new construction actually got started, it proceeded pretty quickly. The first tower is almost done, at least it looked that way when I was last down there a couple of months ago.

As for the cost of the memorial...yeah, I've got nothing. For all they have crazy security there, it's not like there aren't about fifty cops within a block of the place already. I get why they want to be cautious, but, still. At a certain point most of that security really should be subsumed into the normal security cost for the area as an aggregate whole.

[Sea Skimmer]

Well, part of the problem, which people don't really talk about, is that it took four or five years to actually decontaminate and clean up the site, as well as replace and repair the transit lines underneath before they could even think about putting back in a new foundation. That was a fair part of the delay, and proceeded regardless of the bickering and shenanigans that went on over the design for the new tower. Honestly, once the new construction actually got started, it proceeded pretty quickly. The first tower is almost done, at least it looked that way when I was last down there a couple of months ago.

Actually a lot of rehab work was deliberately slowed down by uncertainty as to which areas were going to have to support massive buildings, and which just needed to hold up streets and parks. In fact reconstruction was supposed to, and could have started in 2004, they even had a ceremony, but was then delayed for years by disputes over what and how to build. The transit lines are physically separate now and would not have impeded progress.

Keep in mind, they built the original twin towers in three years flat, the first was done in little over two, and that included first demolishing what was already on the site and digging the giant hole in the first place and installing its waterproofing slurry wall. So no, cleaning up the site was not the reason for this massive delay. The reason lies squarely in New York City politics.

[Aaron MkII]

Who owns the land anyways?

[Soontir C'boath]

Who owns the land anyways?

Port Authority of New York and New Jersey which are headed by the governors of those states.

[Marko Dash]

will it still have a subway station in the lower floors? possible use as a bomb/storm shelter?

[Soontir C'boath]

will it still have a subway station in the lower floors? possible use as a bomb/storm shelter?

There are subway stations and the PATH which services Newark, Jersey City, and Hoboken of New Jersey already. The plan calls for an underground retail center that will connect all the stations once its completed.

[Slacker]

The reason lies squarely in New York City politics.

Oh, no argument the herpaderping in City Hall exacerbated the situation, I was just under the impression that there was a fair amount of legitimate no-shit clean up and construction going on. I know a bunch of first responders and guys who worked the clean up and that was the impression they gave me.

[chitoryu12]

Once the site is finished, we just have to wait for a news article reminiscent of the TSA bullshittery over provocative t-shirts and people being spotted with nail files and getting arrested in a place called Freedom Tower.