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Christopher O. Ward, the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, gets high praise in the New York Times today for knowing how to make tough decisions.
We worked with Chris on two projects three or four years ago, when he was the commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, and while we don't know how tough the decisions he made for us were, we do know he was decisive - and that his decisiveness lead to the protection of more than a thousand acres.
The projects were the Angle Fly Preserve in Somers and the Leon Levy Preserve, in Lewisboro.
For the Levy Preserve project, Chris Ward made a decision to have the DEP contribute $1 million toward the $8.3 million purchase price, because a substantial part of the property is in the watershed of the Cross River Reservoir (the Jerome Levy Foundation contributed $5 million, and the Dextra Baldwin McGonagle Foundation and the town of Lewisboro each contributed $500,000.
For the Angle Fly, the stakes were bigger - we needed to raise $20.5 million. Chris Ward won our ever-lasting gratitude at a meeting in the DEP's Kingston office when he told us the DEP would out in $9.3 million. With $4 million each from the town of Somers and Westchester County, and $3.2 from New York State, we were able to close the deal.
Now Chris is in charge of redeveloping Ground Zero, among many other things. You can read the Times story here.