Getting Things Done

Part Six: Rick Cotton at the Port Authority

There have been famous and notorious public figures in twenty-first-century New York.

Rudy Giuliani went from heroic to cringe. Mike Bloomberg was a formidable technocratic (and in my view underappreciated) three-term mayor. There was blustering Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams, dapper and deficient when it came to integrity.

We are just getting to know Zohran Mamdani, whose meteoric ascent from obscurity has brought him to the city’s highest office.

Raise your hand if you knew that for the past eight years Rick Cotton has been the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a longer tenure than any executive director in more than fifty years. He is retiring, and his departure should be worthy of more than routine notice.

Along the way, he oversaw the rebuilding of LaGuardia Airport, which went from an embarrassment to a paragon of travel convenience and style.

For that alone, Rick deserved accolades, but there was much more. Appointed to a key position in the governor’s office by Andrew Cuomo who had an ambitious infrastructure agenda, he played an instrumental role in completing the first phase of the Second Avenue subway in time for its opening on New Year’s Day 2017. He got an unruly bunch of four public agencies and two of the city’s real estate “masters of the universe” to finally come to terms, enabling Moynihan Train Hall to move forward. He helped push the new Tappan Zee bridge (now the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge) across the finish line.

Then Andrew Cuomo named Rick to the Port Authority in August 2017.

When Kathy Hochul became governor in 2021, she maintained Rick’s role at the Port Authority, renewing the mandate to finish the LaGuardia work, launching the JFK and Newark airport revamps, and finally embarking on the long-delayed $10 billion rebuild of the scandalously dilapidated Port Authority Midtown Bus Terminal.

In his last days at the helm, Rick was immersed in handling the largest winter storm in the metropolitan area in years.

As Rick departs, the Port Authority is committed to rebuilding JFK and Newark airports, with JFK headed this year to finish the roadway rebuild and open the first new gates of two brand new international terminals.

Considering it all, with the benefit of a full record of his tenure, the Port Authority defied the overriding belief that regulations, corruption, and inertia are the metropolitan area norm.

I know Rick as a friend and demographic contemporary. He launched in the 1960s, was educated at Harvard College and Yale Law School, clerked for distinguished jurists at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and the Supreme Court and was executive secretary to Joseph Califano, the rambunctious secretary of health, education and welfare during the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

He was then recruited to what was in its heyday the leading corporate legal department in the country at General Electric and spent twenty years as general counsel and executive vice president of NBC Universal.

Rick could easily have coasted. His wife is Betsy Smith, whose own illustrious resume in city government was followed by her role as president and CEO of the Central Park Conservancy, responsible for that beloved asset of urban living. But instead, when Andrew Cuomo called on Rick (then in his seventies) to join his administration and later to run the Port Authority, he stepped up.

Here is where I make the point of this tribute. Rick took on arguably one of the most onerous roles imaginable, willingly and then brilliantly.

Why did he do it and how?

I would like to answer those questions by revealing valuable detail to anyone else who might consider rounding out his or her career with a seemingly impossible job.

But I can’t.

When I solicited Rick to explain his choices and evident mastery, he was consistently elusive. He exhibited none of the self-effacing humility behind which I often detect the irritating aura of “humblebrag.”

So, I will resort to surmise instead.

Success in corporate and government work is attributed to ability, and dexterity in managing your bosses, employees, and colleagues, who may watch you with a less than charitable perspective. And to some extent luck, being in the right place on the upswing and getting out of the way of downturns.

I asked Rick if he had ever lost his temper with a boss. Once, he said, with Joe Califano. Reason not disclosed. I know (and admire) Califano and have published several of his good books over the years. But his reputation for achievement has been matched by his known capacity to be difficult and demanding. President Carter fired him, at his first opportunity to do so.

Equanimity and inner confidence are personality traits. These are what I think Rick has. The closest I was able to get to an understanding of what it means was in a conversation about Cuomo and the subway project.

By the time Rick took it on, the Second Avenue subway was billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule, and almost certain to miss its promised opening date.

Cuomo was known to be especially tough with his staff, especially if things were not going well. But Rick told me, when I pressed him, that Cuomo and he had a consistently smooth and productive working relationship. Why? My conclusion is that the governor knew that Rick did not need the job, and he didn’t want to risk losing him.

The idea of writing this series of pieces about people who get hard things done came to me as I wandered through the concourses of the reinvented LaGuardia Airport. I asked Rick to tell me how he did it. Eventually, I concluded Rick had more important matters to attend to than providing me a self-portrait.

Rick’s tenure at the Port Authority has finally ended. There was recently a four-hundred-person reception at the World Trade Center Performing Arts Center in his honor, hosted by the Association for a Better New York, a prominent business group, where Rick delivered his valedictory.

Betsy sent the text of Rick’s speech to me, and I want to finish this piece by urging you to read it, at its full length. Here it is.