The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey will waive its airport and seaport fees for shipments of humanitarian aid to Ukraine, officials at the bi-state agency announced Thursday.
Goods such as food, medicine, blankets, and clothes will be able to pass free of the charges through the facilities of the Port Authority, which oversees the largest port on the East Coast and five airports across both states.
“I just think as an agency sometimes you have a moral, social responsibility,” said Kevin O’Toole, the chairperson of the Port Authority’s board, during its monthly meeting on March 17.
A resolution approved by the board waives the fees and also says that Port Authority facilities will be a “magnet” for collecting and shipping relief, and that agency will help solicit the goods and set aside warehouse space.
The Port Authority also resolved to offer its expertise to help rebuild Ukraine’s transportation infrastructure, similar to a measure the agency adopted to support Puerto Rico reconstruct its harbors and airports in the wake of Hurricane Maria in 2017.
“The Port Authority does not typically involve itself in such matters, that will remain the case,” so the resolution, read by an agency lawyer during the meeting. “But the situation in Ukraine is simply unprecedented in terms of the ferocity and unprovoked nature of Russia’s invasion, and in terms of the near unanimity of both the United States and world opinion on this subject.”
O’Toole noted the connections the agency shares with the war-torn nation, including the country’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who twice visited its 9/11 memorial site in Lower Manhattan, laying a wreath at the Survivor Tree and planting flowers at the name of a fallen Port Authority police officer who was of Ukrainian descent.
On a recent tour of the agency’s PATH train facilities, a mechanic apparently told O’Toole and agency Executive Director Rick Cotton that some of the wheel parts came from the country too.
But what spurred O’Toole and his fellow commissioners into action, he said, were Zelenskyy’s pleas before Congress Wednesday for the United States to “do more” to help the country besieged by Russian forces for the past weeks.
“And it just struck me we should really say something and do something — I just think we have to, we just have to say and do something,” he said.
“I think [the resolution] speaks for itself and it’s powerful,” O’Toole said. “It’s not political, I think we have to be heard sometimes.”
