I was so taken by this slightly-belated obituary of Port Authority of New York/New Jersey Chief Operating Officer Ernest Butcher, appearing in Friday’s NYT, I thought I'd share it with you...
Ernesto Butcher, Who Managed Port Authority After 9/11,
Dies at 69
By PAUL VITELLO
NEW YORK TIMES
MAY 22, 2014
Ernesto Butcher, a soft-spoken Panamanian immigrant who effectively took over management of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as its most experienced surviving operations officer, died on May 15 in Maplewood, N.J. He was 69…
…
…Among the more than 2,700 people killed that day at the World Trade Center, where the authority had its headquarters, 84 were agency employees. One, Neil Levin, the executive director, was Mr. Butcher’s boss.
As chief operating officer, Mr. Butcher marshaled thousands of managers and employees scattered throughout the region, took charge of closing the gateways to the city and established a temporary headquarters for the agency in Jersey City on Sept. 11.
Two days later, while taking phone calls from frantic relatives of 150 authority employees initially reported missing, and with a go-ahead from the police, Mr. Butcher gave the signal to reopen the system: resuming operations at Kennedy, La Guardia and Newark International airports; the George Washington Bridge; two Hudson River tunnels; the shipping terminals of Brooklyn, Newark and Jersey City; and a dozen other facilities run by his agency.
“I’m here today to assure the people of New York and New Jersey — and throughout the world — that the Port Authority is open for business,” he said at a news conference on Sept. 13…
Just a few of the many other accomplishments of Mr. Butcher at PANY/NJ, he…
• delivered eulogies at 84 funerals and memorial services for Port Authority employees that died on 9/11
• his primary job was to “keep everything running” in the days, weeks, and months following that tragedy
• was named Chief Operating Officer of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in 1999; but in 2010, his job—along with PANY/NJ Executive Director Christopher Ward–became much more difficult; and much more politicized.
During that year, “two appointees of Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey — Bill Baroni, the deputy executive director, and his lieutenant, David Wildstein — had excluded Mr. Butcher from meetings as they undertook to trim the agency’s roughly $8 billion annual budget.”
“Coincidentally,” (those are diarist’s quotation marks) the article informs readers that both Butcher and Executive Director Ward were, essentially, scapegoated “by unidentified Port Authority officials, quoted by newspapers, for cost overruns in the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, employee overtime expenses, and hefty 2011 bridge and tunnel toll increases.”
Today’s NYT story notes that Ward, “who was widely credited with jump-starting development of the stalled World Trade Center site after being appointed in 2008, resigned in 2011. Mr. Butcher, who had planned to retire at the end of 2012, retired instead in April that year, ending a 41-year career at the authority.”
Standing up for him in the article, Ward notes that Butcher “had nothing to do with those budgets…It is unconscionable for a man of Ernesto’s integrity to be forced to end his distinguished career under a cloud.”
NYT reporter Paul Vitello reminds readers how both Baroni and Wildstein “resigned from the Port Authority last year over their involvement in the controversy over the George Washington Bridge lane closings.” Interestingly, Vitello also informs readers that “neither responded..to [his] requests for comment.”
Vitello then quotes Ward in one of the most poignant lines of the entire piece...
“ ‘Bridgegate’ would not have happened if Ernesto had still been there,” Mr. Ward said.
(
Bold type is diarist’s emphasis.)
The Times reports that Mr. Butcher was manager of the George Washington Bridge, director of bridges and tunnels, and head of several other departments. Under his tenure, the E-Z Pass system and electronic highway signage were introduced. He also managed the development and introduction of light rail AirTrains to J.F.K. and Newark Liberty; and, he supervised the decade-long makeover of the George Washington Bridge.
But it’s not until the final two paragraphs of the story, where readers are hit head-on with, perhaps, the most emotional reminder of Butcher’s deep-rooted humanity…
…When Mr. Butcher was manager of the Port Authority bus terminal in the mid-1980s, he rid it of drug addicts and prostitutes by persuading state officials to send him social workers; they helped place most of the bus terminal’s vagrant population in rehabilitation programs and halfway houses.
“We wanted to provide an alternative, not compound the problem,” he said.
A full-read of the
Times’ piece will provide those perusing this post with numerous other reasons as to why I’m referring to Ernesto Butcher as a truly humble and unsung American hero.
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