“New York City should always be number one. That’s why we should get out of the Port Authority.… The Yankees and the Mets are the most famous and the best teams in baseball. This year they’re going to prove that. Kennedy Airport is number 35th of 36 in a ranking of airports. In other words, it’s one of the worst in the country. La Guardia is number 31st of 36. That’s unacceptable to New York. That would be unacceptable to Los Angeles, it would be unacceptable to Boston, it would be unacceptable to any great City. Our transportation is the core of our ability to really survive and grow. We have got to get out of the Port Authority.”

— Mayor Giuliani, in his 1999 State of the City Address

That was Mayor Giuliani’s call, four years ago, for New York City to extricate itself from the arrangement that has, since 1947, left the management of our city’s two international airports in the hands of an unaccountable, bi-state government entity. Mayor Bloomberg has now extended the control of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey over La Guardia and John F. Kennedy international airports until 2050. Previously, the Port Authority’s lease to run those airports was set to expire in 2015. Given that the Port Authority is widely acknowledged to have managed these airports quite poorly, this deal is a giant step in the wrong direction, even with the $93.5 million rent the city has secured going forward.

Details of the plan have yet to emerge, but there are questions that need to be asked in public hearings. The first is why New York should leave control over the airports in the Port Authority’s hands given the history of the profits being used as a cash cow milked by New Jersey. As Mr. Giuliani said back in 1999,”This makes no sense to be partners with our friends in New Jersey because they extract more out of it than we do. I think that’s been proven over and over again.” Specifically, the Port Authority has taken about $200 million in profits a year from the airports and dumped them into the money-bleeding PATH train between New York and New Jersey and a modern monorail for Newark Airport. At least Mr. Giuliani was in good humor about the scam. “I respect the people in New Jersey. I think they’re doing a terrific job. In fact, in a certain grudging way I respect the way they’ve used the Port Authority for their benefit and not ours,” he said in the 1999 speech.

Mr. Giuliani’s idea was to refuse to renew the lease with the Port Authority, and instead find a private company for the city to deal with directly. As private airport operation has caught on more in Europe than in America, the firms in contention were from overseas: a British firm, BAA, and the German construction company which operated Düsseldorf’s airport, Hochtief. The deal never came to fruition, but this is the sort of tactic Mr. Bloomberg could be pursuing right now instead of giving away our city’s ownership of its airports until 2050 in order to relieve some budget pressure in the short term.

This deal might look smart now, but it is bound to look less so in 2040, 2030, or maybe even 2020, if this city’s airports have lagged behind in needed maintenance and modernization while New Jersey gloats. The president of New York Civic and former commissioner of the Parks Department, Henry Stern, has already called for a study of the possible benefits of privatization. Basic principles of openness in government mandate such thoroughness.