Here's a creative way to attract city-dwellers to Long Island for a day.

The American Airpower Museum at Republic Airport in Farmingdale is partnering with the Long Island Rail Road to offer railroad passengers free trips via vintage Army truck. People who use the service over Labor Day Weekend will receive gate discounts to visit the museum's air show, featuring a squadron of World War II fighters, bombers and patrol planes flying throughout the weekend.

Posters, video ads and re-enactors dressed in WWII garb will distribute discount passes at Penn Station, Jamaica Station and stops throughout Brooklyn.

It's a good way to ease people's concerns about being stranded without public transit once they're on the Island.

American Airpower Museum Photo

Guard booths and barriers are needed around the World Trade Center site, the NYPD says. Police want to screen all vehicles entering the site, even though it is supposed to include public streets and retail shops. Assemb. Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan), who represents the district, opposes the idea. He is calling it a plan for a "war zone."

Yet at the same time, federal agents have arrested a Pakistani neuroscientistwith ties to al-Qaida who who made a list of potential terrorism targets: the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, the city subway system and the North Fork's Plum Island. Aafia Siddiqi was arrested last month in Afghanistan, but she is being held in New York without bail.

It seems creepy to cordon off the World Trade Center site, but maybe it's what we need to do to protect ourselves. Newsday will be editorializing about this over the next few days. Leave a comment if you want to voice an opinion.

On the day the Jets got Brett Favre in “one of the most stunning trades in their history”, Shaun Powell published a column a page away in the same sports section headlined, “Pedro no event anymore.”

It was about Pedro Martinez, how he’d given up a home run on the first pitch of the Mets’ game against San Diego, how it wasn’t the same anymore when Pedro pitches, how there’s no buzz, “no sense that something special is going to happen.”

There was plenty of buzz when Pedro first came to New York from the Red Sox in 2005, but as Powell points out, in a four-year deal, the Mets got one good season out of him. The Jets have to be hoping for more from Favre.

For a time, Pedro was the face of the new, heavier-weight Mets. At this moment Favre is the face of the new, seriously-contending Jets. Both these teams share the historical problem of playing second banana to an old, established franchise in the same town. The way they make news traditionally is to sign an established player with enough star power to steal headlines from the old, established franchise.

When the Mets started, they had Duke Snider in right field, a Hall of Famer from the Dodgers, and Warren Spahn, a Hall of Fame pitcher from the Braves, and Yogi Berra, from the Yankees. It was like watching one of those greatest hits of the Temptations concerts today on PBS. These guys were great—years ago and someplace else.

When the team finally got good and won a pennant in 1969, “The Franchise” was a 24-year-old named Tom Seaver, and the Mets were his first major league team. He played his Hall of Fame years as a Met. Brett Favre played his as a Packer.

Do I miss the days when all the Brooklyn Dodgers lived in the neighborhood and stayed for years? No, because I am too young to remember it. Players haven’t been our neighbors for a long time. I don't wish they were.

What's unsettling about Brett Favre’s arrival in New York (and Pedro's when he got here) is not that he's from someplace else, but that he became great someplace else.

The Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit think tank based in Manhattan, is only now recovering from a financial hit over the Jets stadium fight, which ostensibly ended three years ago. The RPA sided against the stadium with many West Side neighborhood groups and Cablevision (full disclosure: Cablevision is the new owner of Newsday). The anti-stadium coalition won, and the plan to build a Jets stadium died in 2005.

But one person in the know says the RPA has since been snubbed, financially, by the New York business community. IRS forms accessible online show the RPA's donations dipped 7 percent, or about $250,000, from 2004 to 2006. The pro-stadium contingent included New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, construction unions and the Partnership for New York City, the city's big business group.

Revenge, as they say, is best served cold.

Today's headlines affirm what most New Yorkers have known for a while: Ground Zero is still at zero. Nearly seven years after the World Trade Center collapsed, the barren tract continues to smolder in true New York style, with foundering reconstruction plans, budget troubles, lingering health questions, and plenty of blame to go around.

Christopher Ward, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, has acknowledged a vast gap between the reality at Ground Zero and the state's grand plans to revamp the site. An array of well-hyped projects, including a memorial, a transit hub, and new office towers, have been plagued by cost overruns and bureaucratic snags.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg seemed defensive of the glacial pace of progress, warning that it would be "very difficult to forecast in such a complex development project any kind of realistic date and cost." Underscoring the reality factor, U.S. Senator Charles Schumer noted that all the public has had until this point has been "seven years of Alice in Wonderland fantasy plans."

While the rebuilding lags, the controversy over the health impacts of the WTC disaster continues full throttle.

A biofuels boom, an exploding global food crisis. Those two simultaneous, not-so-coincidental phenomena are bursting the euphoric bubble of a major "green" energy sector.

Andy Kimbrell’s commentary on Friday about the food-versus-fuel dilemma raises troubling questions about the consequences of government-backed biofuel development. In recent months, ethanol’s green gloss has dulled in light of new research suggesting that farming our fuel does more harm than good.

To critics of the industry, the issue is fundamentally about displacement: fuel crops replace food crops and pristine land, while political and economic capital gravitate toward market hype at the expense of human needs.

Up until now, the Town of Babylon has been focusing heavily on making sure that new homes get built to use as little energy as possible -- through adapting a green building code, for example, and taking steps to build a demonstration "zero energy" home in Wyandanch.

Now Supervisor Steve Bellone wants the town to get into the business of helping residents of existing homes to make their dwellings more energy-efficient. This $2 million initiative can't get started until the town amends its code to allow the program to use the solid waste management fund for this purpose. Once that's done, Babylon will make low-interest, 12-year loans for energy-saving improvements.

The more our towns work on changing their ordinances to make homes and workplaces greener, the better we'll be able to afford rising energy costs.

Photo: asaphouse.com

Assemb. Peter Rivera (D-Bronx), chairman of the Mental Health Committee, has e-mailed a Newsday editorial supporting his position to his fellow members. The editorial explains that financing for nonprofit agencies is being held hostage to industrial development agency (IDA) reform in Albany.

A union coalition is also running radio ads on IDA reform and sending direct mail. More on that below.

Assemb. Sam Hoyt (D-Buffalo), admits that he is holding the nonprofit side hostage in order to force reform of the for-profit IDA loans and tax breaks. Almost everyone agrees that IDAs operate with too little oversight, conflicts of interest and deals with companies that turn out to be bad for the public till. Companies are often not held to their job-creation promises, simply because no one is checking back.

Hoyt said in an interview that he is willing to negotiate with the Senate and governor, if only they would come to the table. "This may hurt my position to say this," he said. "But there is no single provision of my bill that I am not open to discussing."

Robert Wilmers, chief executive of the M&T Bank Corp. and a big Spitzer-Paterson campaign donor, has been nominated by the governor to lead the state's economic development agency. If Wilmers is approved by the State Senate, his appointment will relocate the headquarters of the Empire State Development Corp. from Manhattan to Buffalo -- a move heavy with symbolism.

Wilmers spent money for years electing Republican George Pataki to the governor's office -- $25,000 since 1999. Pataki named him to the board overseeing Buffalo's financial recovery, the Buffalo Fiscal Stability Authority.

Again in the 2006 election, Wilmers supported the GOP, at least initially. He gave $10,000 early on to candidate John Faso. But Wilmers quickly switched allegiances, spending $40,000 to elect former Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

Betsy McCaughey, New York's lieutenant governor between 1995 and 1998, writes an important op-ed in today's New York Sun about why few people are willing to take on the leadership of the Empire State Development Corporation. She makes the case that the agency is a nest of political cronyism:

The ESDC selectively dispenses tax relief and other financial benefits to companies in regions that need economic development under its Empire Zone program. It also gives grants of between several hundred thousands of dollars and several millions of dollars to companies for plant expansions, capital equipment, and other projects, all for the nominal purpose of keeping and creating jobs.

Here's the hitch: Only 2% of businesses in the state are beneficiaries. Which businesses? Too often, those with political connections. In 2003, the Buffalo News reported that Empire Zones were failing because the program was tainted by political favoritism. The next year, the New York State Assembly held hearings on these abuses. In 2007, the consulting firm A.T. Kearney documented how the Empire Zone program had been distorted by political patronage.

The absence of a state development "czar," since Pat Foye resigned in March, has created a void that is causing a lot of political trouble for Gov. David Paterson.

First, there is the upstate cry-out against Paterson's decision to eliminate the two-chairman system -- one each for upstate and downstate. Paterson wants to put just one person in charge of the Empire State Development Corp, but upstate advocates and editorial writers fret that he will re-create the Manhattan-centric agency that Charles Gargano chaired for the Pataki administration.

Paterson is undoubtedly right in wanting a single person in charge. Downstate co-chairman Foye, who resigned after Gov. Eliot Spitzer blew himself up, was a solid leader, but he had to compete for the agency staff's attention with Dan Gundersen, the upstate co-chairman, and Avi Schick, who has many titles -- downstate chief operating officer, president of ESDC, chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., acting downstate chair. The titles are a symptom of the strange organizational structure -- Schick, who is close to Spitzer, never accepted the role of Foye's second-in-command.

People who are following the negotiations over Hudson Yards on Manhattan's West Side say the $1 billion deal can still be salvaged, despite reports that it has fallen apart. Six weeks ago, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority chose developer Tishman Speyer to build a complex of office towers, apartment buildings and parks over the Penn Station railyards. Until yesterday, the parties were working out the details.

Then the MTA issued a press release yesterday afternoon saying the deal was at an impasse. Tishman Speyer is asking that its construction plan be contingent on a successful rezoning, and let's face it, the western yards rezoning will meet a lot of neighborhood opposition because of the large scale of the commercial construction. Tishman Speyer wants to transfer the risk of a failure to the MTA, which the agency apparently finds unacceptable.

However, the MTA spoke yesterday before alerting City Hall, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg today hinted that the developer's request is reasonable. The result may be just what company chief Jerry Speyer wants -- for the mayor and Gov. David Paterson to step in and keep the MTA bureaucrats in line. Whether this ultimately happens remains to be seen. Stay tuned.

One of Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi’s most significant achievements has been the “No Wrong Door” approach to helping human services clients. The idea is to put those services all under one roof, to make them more compassionate for those who receive the services and smarter for those who pay the bills: Nassau taxpayers.

One of the concerns was how much the county’s employees would buy into the new way of doing business. Here’s one recent clue that the workers are accepting the spirit of the enterprise. To help clients whose primary language is not English, the county asked for volunteers to take classes in conversational Spanish.

“Since staff were taking classes on their own time, we weren’t sure we would get a full class of 20,” says Mary Curtis, deputy county executive for health and human services. “The response was overwhelming. Over 200 people responded that they wanted to take the class.” That demand far exceeded the supply, but BOCES was able to offer a second class. The county chose 40 people by lottery to take those first two classes.

From the start, No Wrong Door looked like the right idea. So it’s encouraging to see evidence that it’s moving along well.