Two Governors" Sucker Punches at the Port Authority Poor management! Reform is long overdue. Our gubernatorial bruise brothers, Chris Christie of New Jersey and Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, howled denunciation of the Port Authority this week, describing it as encrusted with dysfunction. They took the narrative heard on the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 - that the authority's director, Christopher O. Ward, had found a 16-acre site lost in a swamp of political infighting and set memorial waterfalls to flowing and towers to rising - and forcibly upended it. The governors had ordered an audit of the authority, released this week, which found that the cost of construction had grown, in the governors" words, "a staggering" $3.8 billion. "Poor management obscured full awareness of the billions of dollars in exposure," the audit said. All of which sounded spectacular on the evening news: two tough-talking governors take on the region's vast transportation agency, slash costs and budgets, and attribute problems and fallout to past management. But little about this political bill of indictment seemed properly hinged to reality. Let's consider the cost. Mr. Ward, who left the agency in the fall, took the helm of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in 2008, after years of rule by the inert Gov. George E. Pataki. Mr. Ward sent a long memo to Gov. David A. Paterson. "The schedule and cost estimates of the rebuilding effort that have been communicated to the public are not realistic," he wrote, adding that the site "faces significant delays and cost overruns." The Port Authority could keep costs down and preside over a gaping wound in the heart of Manhattan. Or it could blast through deadlocks and accept the costs that go with that. Mr. Ward noted the immense logistical challenges, not least building five skyscrapers with as much Class A office space as in all of Atlanta, all while keeping subways and traffic running. As the auditors acknowledge, the $3.8 billion rise in costs does not owe to Tammany Hall-style cost overruns. The authority's portion of those increased costs is $1.7 billion, and much of that reflects money owed by other agencies. The authority's officials last week appeared to stray from the message put down by their gubernatorial patrons. Vice Chairman Scott Rechler, a Cuomo appointee, noted that you cannot accurately compare the earlier estimate with the current one, which is larded with questionable costs. "The $11 billion in 2008 is an apple and $14.8 billion is an orange," Mr. Rechler said. The authority chairman, David Samson, a Christie appointee, also declined to plant a tomahawk in Mr. Ward's forehead. "The costs were inevitable," he said, "once the decision was made in 2008 that we'd be open for the 10th anniversary." In fact, there has been for some time a scandal-foreordained feel to this audit. Mr. Ward is widely hailed as a public infrastructure visionary with an independent mind. That trait can be a character failing in politics. So in October, a Cuomo official appeared to whisper to the New York Post columnist Fredric U. Dicker that the audit had found that Mr. Ward engaged in "extravagant overspending." This was curious, as the auditing firm had only just commenced its work. Mr. Christie's timing, too, was not ideal. Nine days earlier, The Record of Bergen reported that the governor had larded the authority with 50 patronage appointees, including former state Republican committeemen and the author of a self-help weight loss book who happened to be a childhood buddy of Bill Baroni, Mr. Christie's appointee as the No. 2 at the authority. So it goes. Amid the political bellowing, only one fellow remained steadfast in support of Mr. Ward: Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. He had watched as Mr. Ward transformed ground zero into an elegant memorial site that draws millions of tourists. And the grand tower, improbably for anyone whose memory stretches back even a half-decade, will house an array of upscale tenants. With characteristic impatience, the mayor more or less shrugged off the audit. "The bottom line is, this whole site is perhaps the most complex construction project in the history of the world, legally, politically, engineering-wise," he said. Every politician wanted to get involved. We had, I think, five different governors of New Jersey, four different governors for New York. Or put another way: Who are they kidding? Charles V. Bagli contributed reporting.