Jamming Up LaGuardia: Andrew Cuomo's Airport Meddling

“If I blindfolded you and took you to LaGuardia,” Vice President Joe Biden told a Philadelphia crowd a year ago, “you must think, ‘I must be in some Third World country.' ” He wasn't wrong.

Yet now Gov. Cuomo is introducing some Third World politics to something that's actually not that hard: fixing the airport.

In the process, he's proving that Chris Christie isn't the only thing that ails the Port Authority, the supposedly nonpolitical agency that runs New York and New Jersey airports, the George Washington Bridge and much else.

So, LaGuardia: The main terminal is 51 years old. The Port Authority designed it for DC-9s with 90 passengers, not A-320s with 150 and more.

The airport was meant to handle 8 million passengers a year; now it sees 13 million.

Traffic is up 9 percent in the past decade — but it's pretty much capped now by the lack of space. You already have to sit on the floor, if you can even find a seat there.

Luckily, building a new terminal in five years isn't that hard. Unlike most infrastructure, airports pay for themselves, no tax dollars needed.

In 2013, New York's three airports generated nearly half a billion in profit for the Port Authority. Even LaGuardia, with its reliance on cheaper domestic flights, kicked in $19 million.

Airlines, you see, can take money from their passengers to pay for terminals. That's how Delta and JetBlue built their own hubs at JFK over the past decade.

And American, United, JetBlue and other carriers that use LaGuardia's Central Terminal made it clear years ago that they're perfectly happy to do the same thing to build a new $3.6 billion Central Terminal — with some of the cash going to construction, and the rest to a private firm to run the terminal for 30 years.

In 2011, the Port Authority started a global search to find a company to build and run the terminal. Bids have been in for nearly two years; the environmental documents are all checked off. Everybody's ready to go.

Enter Cuomo — who has discovered belatedly that he wants to be boss of the airports. The Port Authority is simply . . . in the way.

So Cuomo invited Biden to Queens last fall to announce a worldwide design competition for both LaGuardia and JFK. Last month, the governor told a business group that he'd asked “the designers to be creative. The sky's the limit. Start with a blank piece of paper. Just give us a vision.”

Cuomo went on to say that “the proposals that came back” over the winter “were really breathtaking, an entirely redesigned terminal.”

Inconveniently, though, the Port Authority and the global contractors bidding on the project already spent years — and tens of millions of dollars — on their own designs.

And now they've got to wait.

After Cuomo interested himself in our “Third World” airport last year, the Port Authority board delayed picking a winning bid. Last week, it announced another three-month delay.

“We simply decided it would be prudent to see what the conceptual design is before proceeding,” PA Chairman John Degnan told The Wall Street Journal.

Bottom line: Cuomo's personal championing of a new terminal is . . . delaying the project.

When Biden slammed LaGuardia, he was referring to the Central Terminal, but he could've been talking about our crazy politics.

Delays aren't costless. Time means money, and not just because of inflation. And a redesign, wasting years of work, certainly means more money.

The governor's meddling also makes a mockery — if it's even possible to do that — of the Port Authority's post-Bridgegate “reform” efforts.

Since Christie's pals at the PA closed the GW Bridge 15 months ago, the Port Authority has made a big public spectacle of showing its “independence” from the governors.

Just last week, its board members refused the two governors' request that they all step down to start off with a clean slate after taking up some other “reform” ideas.

The choice, it seems, is having the same old people and the same old dysfunction — or new people and the same dysfunction.

We could, of course, privatize the airports — but both Cuomo and Christie need those airport profits to pay for all of that dysfunction.

This piece originally appeared in New York Post

This piece originally appeared in New York Post