By Sara Kugler
The Associated Press
NEW YORK — A plan to move this year’s Sept. 11 commemoration from the World Trade Center site may be just one of several concerns victims’ relatives raise with Mayor Michael Bloomberg when they meet next week.
While the meeting was scheduled to address families’ dismay over the relocation of the anniversary ceremony, victims’ relatives also have been upset with the mayor about a number of other issues, such as the city’s use of an old landfill as a place to sift trade center debris during the cleanup in 2002. Some victims’ families believe there are still traces of human remains in the leftover dust, which is now buried at the landfill.
They also have questions about the city’s renewed search for human remains around the trade center site, which began last fall after utility workers discovered an abandoned manhole full of bone fragments along the site’s western edge. More than 600 bone pieces have been recovered in the new excavation of overlooked subterranean areas.
But the most immediate issue is next month’s sixth anniversary ceremony, which is to be moved to a plaza off the southeast corner of the trade center site. Bloomberg and the bistate agency that controls the site, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, said this week that the space can no longer accommodate the large public gathering because of all the construction going on there.
A coalition of family groups asked Thursday for a face-to-face discussion with the mayor, saying in a statement that they want to “work together to find a mutually agreeable plan to honor our loved ones in a meaningful and respectful way.”
Bloomberg spokesman Stu Loeser said the mayor agreed to meet with them next week.
The families asked for the meeting a day after they applied for a permit that would give them special access to the lower Manhattan site on the anniversary. Each year, the victims’ names are read aloud at the ceremony, and the families want that to take place where it always has, on the ground where they feel an emotional connection to their loved ones.
The family groups also are asking to be allowed down into the seven-story pit that once was the twin towers’ basement. Every Sept. 11 since the 2001 attacks, those who lost loved ones have spent much of the day in that subterranean area, placing flowers on the ground.
So far, their requests have not been granted, but the city partly relented this week and said families would be able to lay flowers on the street-level southern border of the trade center site on Sept. 11.
In one compromise being floated, the name-reading would still take place in the offsite plaza, but the families would be allowed to descend the ramp into the pit.