Also included in its current 10-year, approximately $35-billion capital plan is a $10-billion new bus terminal and ongoing work on the $2-billion George Washington Bridge rehabilitation, while public-private partnerships fuel the ongoing $19-billion transformation of John F. Kennedy International Airport. One of the agency’s biggest recent accomplishments, an $8-billion transformation of LaGuardia Airport, has set the tone for aiming ever higher in engineering efforts.

“The past few years have been some of the busiest for construction and redevelopment in the Port Authority’s 103-year history, and we’re just getting started,” says executive director Rick Cotton. “If there’s anything we’ve learned, it’s that world-class results start with a world-class engineering department.”

With its colorful history that includes rebuilding after the 9/11 attack in 2001, a portfolio spanning five airports, two tunnels, four bridges, two bus terminals, four marine terminals, a 14-mile PATH transit system and the World Trade Center campus, the Port Authority’s unusually high autonomy as a public agency and its responsibility to two states makes it a unique entity that offers engineers opportunities for a variety of experiences as it strives to collaborate with communities and industries it serves.

“What many people don’t realize is that their engineers, architects, project managers and construction managers are not only responsible for designing and constructing world-class facilities—they also take on the roles of owning, operating and maintaining these facilities operating 24/7,” says Denise Berger, a former chief of operations, now chief strategy and innovation officer for AECOM's east region.

Around four years ago, Baig embarked on a department-wide transformation across the six divisions. “We began sitting down with all staff and asking them what’s working or not,” he says. “We solicited industry and regional partner feedback. We needed a digital transformation and more focus on innovation. We also started to challenge ourselves to look at alternative project delivery.”

The engineering department also strives to attract new talent through an associate program “where we bring new college graduates in and rotate them across six divisions. We also allow current staff to move within divisions,” Baig says. “You can work in design, then go to construction or alternative project delivery or asset management. If you’re passionate about one thing, you can just do that.”

Deputy Chief Engineer Amanda Rogers adds: “We’ve always been an agency of continuous improvement. We are a government agency with fiscal responsibilities, and we’re always looking to perform as a private entity. Our current leadership really challenges all staff here to look inward and ask, ‘how can we do better?’”

Lillian Borrone, who joined the agency in 1970 and retired as assistant executive director, attests to a history of striving for improvement. “The engineering department was always strong, but there also was tension with the staff in the line departments as they felt they should have final decision making,” she recalls. “In the ‘70s, [former executive director] Peter Goldmark  … took a look at how we were set up. By the mid-‘80s he had concluded we needed to restructure to better deliver on capital projects.”

Since then, every successive chief engineer “has introduced new technologies or strategies during their tenures,” such as better inter-agency collaboration, project management methods and diversity, she adds.

Thomas Groark, who served as authority deputy chief engineer until retiring in 2009 and is now an executive at Ferreira Construction, says the changes are notable. “Similar to many organizations, the Port Authority has greatly increased its reliance on computer-based correspondence, accelerated due to the pandemic,” he says. “From the outside contractor’s viewpoint, this is a great thing. The Port Authority now manages control of contracts, change orders and payments much more efficiently. Years ago, there was countless time utilized to bring many major authorization documents for signature. Now the turnaround time has been streamlined to a day.”

That example reflects the ethos of Port Authority leadership, which is “a passionate sense of urgency,” says Eric Reid, COO of the New York region for AECOM Tishman. His work with the agency includes the World Trade Center reconstruction and new PATH rail station, the current $9-billion New Terminal One at JFK Airport and construction management oversight for the planned new bus terminal. “They’re not easy on us. They’re a demanding client, because it’s about serving the public with life-changing projects,” he says. “It forces us to be the best we can be every single day, or even better.”

The Port Authority is planning redevelopment of Newark airport, including Terminal B, built in the 1970s.
Rendering courtesy of PANYNJ

Constructing Culture

Chief of Construction Andrew Frisvold had never expected to be employed at a public agency. After working for a bridge contractor in Las Vegas, he left to attend college in New York. At graduation in the early 2000s, Frisvold was drawn to the scope and symbolism of the World Trade Center redevelopment that was just breaking ground, which included geotechnical, slurry walls, the train system, tunnels and vertical construction. “It really had it all,” he says.

Frisvold was impressed by the agency’s ability to cut through red tape, with “decision-making authority delegated to more mid-level people to keep things flowing faster.” Port Authority management was open to putting any business-as-usual practices “on trial” and empowering construction managers to think about how to progress work as if “it was your own company,” he says. “It really set a trend.”

With around 500 staff and consultants, the construction management division onboards the contractor, provides sequencing guidance and works through operational constraints at facilities that are often in active use during construction. Once a project is completed, the division negotiates change orders, resolves claims, performs inspections and ensures quality control. One key factor with projects is the agency’s ability to self-permit.

Frisvold manages a dozen engineers for construction, whom he describes as “top lieutenants,” divided among all facilities the Port Authority manages. “They are basically CEOs of their facility in terms of construction. Not a lot gets past them.”

The proactive approach plays a significant role in dispute resolution by “not tabling things and really trying to handle it in real time as you can, because otherwise they just fester and become big problems later,” Frisvold says. However, he cautions, “You can’t have the high ground if you’re not paying your bills.” Therefore, the Port Authority has a strict 30-day payment policy.

To diversify the pool of bidders and assist small businesses and historically disadvantaged firms, the construction division provides training via in-house coaches, along with paid contractors who help them with paperwork, site access and other tasks. As the firms gain more experience, Frisvold has seen more of them graduate to bid on larger jobs. “We’re seeing growth, which is very good,” he says.

Hanson James, founder of Creative Construction, was one of these mentees. “Bovis Lend Lease, Turner, Skanska, Tishman—a lot of executives from those companies taught us how to navigate doing work with the Port Authority as small businesses.”

Projects include substation work (top), low-carbon concrete placement (bottom, left) and maintaining major assets such as the Holland Tunnel (right).
Photos courtesy of PANYNJ

Big Assets

Robert Kumapley, chief of enterprise asset management, notes that strong communication throughout the agency is key to “developing solutions to ensure deliverables meet targeted critical needs.” He credits Enterprise Asset Management standards and policies aimed at streamlining communication. Using standards it has set, “we can inform asset life-cycle decisions consistently across the agency’s asset portfolio and lines of business,” Kumapley says. “Unilateral adoption is the biggest challenge because it involves both bottom-up and top-down change management and support.”

“Thus,” he adds, “the biggest challenge is the paradigm of value generation. Enterprise Asset Management must demonstrate the value of the program to get compliance, but compliance with the program is necessary to generate value.”

Kumapley says technologies such as AI are among the most exciting components of current and future projects. “For example, our Roof Management Program uses geospatial information, annual aerial mapping and modern survey capabilities. Coupled with artificial intelligence, we use the information gathered by these mapping activities to create health indexes and heatmaps for roofs and use machine learning to develop investment scenarios.”

The Right Stuff

Materials play an increasingly large role in the Port Authority’s efforts to reduce its environmental impact. The agency has committed to reducing its carbon emissions 50% by 2030 and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. It launched its Clean Construction Program in 2020, with the goal of diverting at least 75% of concrete, asphalt and steel construction waste from landfills.

The program uses environmental product declarations with data about a material’s impact. The agency plans to begin requiring them for concrete, and to eventually extend those requirements to asphalt and other materials, says Mark Wierciszewski, chief of materials in the authority's construction management division.

As part of efforts to enhance material performance, the authority specifies a minimum 30% cement substitution with supplementary cementitious materials. SCMs help reduce permeability and shrinkage, decreasing the risk of cracking and minimizing salt ingress that can lead to steel reinforcement corrosion, Wierciszewski says. And in 2018, the agency added a limit of 400 lb of cement content per cu yd for cast-in-place concrete.

Last year, the authority adopted revised concrete technical specifications with carbon limits for cast-in-place concrete. Wierciszewski says the agency evaluated more than 700 mixes approved between 2018 and 2021. It also worked with local concrete producers to determine limits that would be attainable but not sacrifice performance or come with imposing cost impacts.

The authority has its own lab, accredited by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, since 1998. It is certified to perform more than 200 tests on concrete, masonry, asphalt, soils, steel and fireproofing. The lab verified the viability of materials such as portland-limestone cement and ground glass pozzolan for inclusion in the agency’s concrete technical specifications. The authority identified 18 concrete recipes that can reduce embodied carbon by up to 37% over its already-low concrete mixes.

The engineering department’s design division provides technical advice to the sustainability office, including on the low-carbon concrete efforts.

The 2017 rehabilitation of the Bayonne Bridge that connects New Jersey and Staten Island. N.Y., included raising its deck to 215 ft so larger ships can use marine terminals also owned by the Port Authority.
Photo courtesy of PANYNJ

Diverse Designs

With 10 subject areas and a staff of 235, including 100 engineers, 11 architects and two landscape architects, the Port Authority boasts one of the largest design departments of any state or federal authority. Within the engineering division’s subject areas—civil, geotechnical, structural, environmental, traffic, architecture, resilience and sustainable engineering, contracts, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering—are some 60 subspecialties. The division recently created a multidisciplinary coordination group responsible for the administrative aspects of delivering projects.

“We have air, land, sea, rail and the World Trade Center,” says Simona Shapiro, design division chief, noting that the diverse portfolio offers attractive career opportunities for young engineers. She says more than half of the work in-house is state-of-good-repair projects. “Those are the challenging projects, the retrofit jobs, the rehab jobs, the ones you have to keep operational and be creative,” she says.

Shapiro is pushing her division toward more in-house design to improve project control and efficiency. “We have deep technical knowledge of all our facilities,” Shapiro says. “We’ve shifted the needle on getting our subject matter experts to do more in-house design as part of their jobs more readily than we did before.”

As part of the design department’s quest to improve, “we sat down with different levels separately and asked what their pain points were,” says Bobby Kuriakose, design deputy chief since 2023. “There was a lot of buy-in that we need to get in from our staff.” Shapiro adds: “We’re still growing the different teams for the different functions that are required based on this organizational change.”

At the same time, the division is designing flexibility into projects to accommodate sustainability efforts above and beyond 2050. Shapiro says: “On the net zero stuff, it’s a little bit of a moving target. We also have to be reactive to the needs of the region. What happens today is not necessarily what happens tomorrow.”

The agency is doing a comprehensive climate risk assessment of all of its facilities. “The outputs of those are not yet available,” Shapiro says, “but it’s a very comprehensive look at every single asset that we have, and it’s going to inform how we move forward, and it will be stitched into the capital program as appropriate.” The division recently issued a new Green Public Procurement, which is the first in the country, adds Kuriakose.

“That includes a price preference for lower greenhouse gas commitments,” Shapiro says. “It will probably be an iterative process to get to the sweet spot of what works.”

Kuriakose says one of the biggest environmental challenges is the transition to electrification. In 2023 the agency established a net-zero roadmap that includes electrifying buildings, vehicles and equipment such as cranes. The agency is working closely with utilities to provide extra capacity, installing solar panels on many of its facilities and battery barges, he says..

At JFK airport, “We are telling our terminal builders to build 10 MW to 15 MW of onsite generation,” Kuriakose says. Also at the airport, the agency recently completed the Bergen Substation Replacement Project, which replaces the existing Bergen and Van Wyck 5-KV electrical substations with a single 5-KV substation that assists in supplying power to airside-landside facilities and associated infrastructure.

The substation work was delivered through the design-build process as the agency continues to explore alternative project delivery.

The Port Authority not only oversees transportation assets but also the World Trade Center campus (above and below).
Photo courtesy of PANYNJ

Delivering Results

Lindsay Degueldre, chief of the project delivery division, joined the authority in 2023 after working for the New York City Dept. of Environmental Protection. “When I was at DEP, I reached out to the Port Authority [and other agencies] to learn about design-build,” she says.

While public-private partnerships for the massive airport terminal projects tend to get the attention, “we’ve done two smaller scale $100-million design-build jobs to build the substations and we have folks presenting to the Design-Build Institute of America on lessons learned from that,” she adds. “We’re using this opportunity to train our staff on design-build.” More than 40 engineering staff have taken a three-day training course, Degueldre says, adding that “any project we initiate, we look at alternative delivery. Can we do smaller stuff, say in the $10-million range? We have pilot projects right now for structural repairs or rehabilitation.” The division is looking at some 150 projects, ranging from pavement repairs and taxiway sections to mechanical and equipment projects.

The American Council of Engineering Companies has been working with the Port Authority on alternative project delivery. “Right now, they’re looking to industry for ideas and thoughts on various models like progressive design-build,” says David Weiss, WSP senior vice president and chair of ACEC’s New York-New Jersey committee. He notes that the agency asked the group to weigh in on the design-build guidebook it is developing. “At the end of the day, they want to advance their capital program, and we’re looking to partner with them for mutual benefit. Sometimes we have ideas and thoughts they find difficult, but they’re one of the most open and transparent, easy-to-work-with agencies.”

The authority engages with ACEC on other topics as well in its quest to improve. “I’m on a consultant engagement working group committee,” says Warren Michelsen, vice president of transportation at Enovate Consulting, noting that the Port Authority “wants to be the premier agency that consultants want to work with.”

Jorge Chavez, the division’s deputy chief, originally worked in the agency’s aviation department, recalling media description of its three major airports as among “the worst.” Authority leadership, along with alternative project delivery, were key to the turnaround of now, with LaGuardia now cited as one of the world’s best facilities. “We became more accountable; the airlines as well,” he says. “We started to shift the way we look at terminals.”

Smooth Operators

Business Operations division chief Jaspal Kaller says its primary role is to support the engineering department in doing “what it does best—putting the tools and the process together” so engineers can “deliver innovative, cost-effective design and construction management solutions.” One example is the focus on identification and delivery of 21st-century technologies and methodologies with teams working on application development and a “digital first model” that increases efficiency.

Condition assessments have been made paperless by using mobile data collection. The data is collected in the field during inspections and then entered into a centralized data environment with a cell phone or tablet. The data can immediately be used to optimize capital spending, risk prioritization and other decision-making.

Such initiatives can be challenging to implement on a large scale. One key to doing so is by creating realistic goals for the achievement of certain milestones, says Kaller, so progress can be tracked “as opposed to leaving it open ended.”

One key goal of the authority operations division is “promotion of intra- and cross-departmental collaboration,” Kaller adds. “A great example of [adaptation] was what happened with COVID.” Because of the ongoing digitization and development work, the division “had the collaborative platforms available, not only internally, but also for leveraging our consultants … so that work didn’t stop.”

State-of-good-repair projects, such as on the Hackensack Bridge, an aging New Jersey rail span. are a major emphasis.
Photo courtesy of PANYNJ

High Quality

One of the key agency characteristics that James—the mentoring program graduate—learned was that “the Port Authority has one of the most vigorous quality control programs” he ever encountered. “They will scrutinize everything you do. If you’ve never worked on a Port Authority job before, do your homework,” he says. “If you follow the rules, everything will be okay.”

The agency's Quality Assurance division, also known as the Building division, is divided into three sections, explains its chief Csaba Kertesz: design standards, construction standards and the structural integrity unit. Design and construction standards “work hand-in-hand,” Kertesz says, evaluating designs for code conformance and monitoring the permitting process. The structural integrity unit performs inspections of existing structures based on a schedule that varies based on asset type, following with a report detailing necessary repairs.

The division is responsible for ensuring the “high-level” safety of a project—architectural life-safety systems, fire protection systems and vertical transportation, including elevators and escalators. “We in a lot of respects do act like a building department. However, we also own the assets, so it’s a little bit of a different relationship,” Kertesz adds. “We’re fully aware that the sooner an asset has opened up, the better off it is for the public. However, we do have the role to make sure that life safety issues are addressed.”

In addition to engineers of record, there is communication with line departments, construction management, facilities and engineering and architectural design. On construction sites, the authority construction standards team is a constant presence.

“You always want to make sure in any aspect of a construction project—be that conceptual design, the design of it, completion of the design to get an approval memo, the kickoff of construction, the actual construction—you want to make sure the entities are all collaborating and communicating,” says Kertesz.

To ease that process, the team has worked over the past several years to digitize its condition survey reports, so they can be accessed in a user-friendly manner. The division has digitized vertical transportation systems and has almost completed the process for fire protection systems. This allows field staff to work off iPhones or iPads to add comments quickly through a drop-down menu. “Then you can send [reports] to your supervisor to review, and ... to other departments, construction and facilities accordingly,” says Kertesz.

The team also reviews and presents lessons learned from challenges encountered during general construction, design reviews and in vertical transportation and fire protection, alerting internal and external teams of issues to be aware of. “We want to make sure that we’re poised for the next time to avoid it.”

With Scott Blair, Justin Rice, James Leggate, Alisa Zevin, Corinne Grinapol and Jack McMackin