Tomorrow some 5,000 New Yorkers are expected to gather for a town hall meeting, where they will have a chance to comment electronically on the first plans for redevelopment of the World Trade Center site. The meeting follows a spectacle that has seen the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation almost apologetically putting forth six plans, then being hammered in the press and by the city’s politicians for a lack of imagination. To understand this spectacle one has to go back to decisions that were made years before September 11 — back to 1991 and 1992, when an assemblyman named George Pataki was an enthusiast of privatization.

After Mr. Pataki was elected governor, he appointed a commission to study the privatization of state assets. Its wiser heads argued for selling off the World Trade Center. The charter and history of the Port Authority, after all, emphasize the authority’s role as a port and transportation agency, not as the owner of an enormous office building that competes for tenants with private real estate developers. In the event, the idea was met with opposition from the New Jersey members of the Port Authority board. While New York has some 61 independent entities with bonding authority, in New Jersey, the Port Authority is the only game in town, and the Garden State board members were reluctant to sell off their prize goose.

What ensued was passed off as a privatization — and was an improvement over the existing situation. But in truth, it wasn’t a privatization at all. When the Port Authority’s $3.2 billion World Trade Center deal with Silverstein Properties, Inc., and Westfield America, Inc. was announced in April of 2001, it was not for a sale, but for a 99-year lease. Mr. Pataki, in good political form, declared victory. “When I became Governor,” he said, “one of my first goals was privatization of this world-famous symbol of the vitality and economic might of the New York region. I am proud to announce that my administration has delivered. This is the largest real estate transaction in New York City history, and one of the largest privatizations ever of a government asset.”

This declaration of “privatization” has fooled a lot of people who should know better. As recently as March 28, Michael Tomasky wrote in the New York Review of Books, “The Port Authority still owns the land, but the question of what to develop there is largely Silverstein’s headache.” Watching the politicians and editorial writers and the LMDC — itself largely a creature of Governor Pataki and the Port Authority — trying to design a commercial real estate development over the past few weeks should make crystal clear to everyone that the World Trade Center site has been “privatized” about as much as much as the Washington Monument.

Certainly dealing with the site where thousands died is a collective responsibility to be dealt with through our democratic institutions. The architects and planners and consultants for the site are being hired with public money. But we are not comforted that Mr. Silverstein has issued hardly a peep. When he tried to hire his own architects, the politicians put up a hue and cry. Nor are we convinced that this is going to result in an outcome of greater solemnity or dignity. On the contrary, as the political appointees scramble like socialist central planners to decide whether there should be more housing or more retail or more office space on the site, all in the name of preserving a revenue stream for the Port Authority, we have the feeling that things would have gone better had Mr. Pataki followed through on the promises he made to the voters a decade ago.