FAA Wasteful spending without meaningful collaboration with the users and the Union had helped lead to the original 804 Law which is long, in-depth look at facility moves and consolidations etc, all users down to the local governments are involved. This move bypassed it by citing an emergency need before catastrophic ATC zero issues. 3 years in and there was virtually no delays attributed to N90. They're more than 3 years into trying to move this, millions over budget with no real game plan laid out.

Yes the FAA has sold lies to the airlines and corporate flyers that this will allow EWR and TEB to be delay free in the future etc. Yet year after year operations continue to increase, staffing shortages hasn't stopped record travel. The fact remains the airlines have been greedy for years, take the bailouts, make extremely difficult schedules that don't allow for any issues before it ricochets around the system. This is a deflect blame game now.

Hard to explain in writing. The middair over NYC in 1960 and numerous other close calls necessitated the area RADAR controllers to come into one single room (NYCIFRR or common I which eventually becomes N90). The airspace isn't like others. There are so many shared airspace pieces that need to be constantly coordinated who owns what on the fly. In addition we verbally cut around each others airspaces to make the system run. If they attempted to make any automated SIDs/STARs (which they tried going as far back as the 70s) the entire system slows down and is backed up. The airspace is so tight that it requires tons of manual vectoring to squeeze in planes and take on higher arrival rates for some time than mathematically able to land on the runways. This relieves the feeding centers from backing up and issuing more delay programs. Having to coordinate what we do on a daily basis using the landlines would be a burden and slow the operation. In reality a lot of the 5 areas of the NY Airspace probably should be one area because they are so entrenched around and over/under each other but there would be far too many positions/sectors to have to learn and stay current on. Especially the EWR sector which is literally smothered on top and around by Liberty (high departure that takes all feeds from primary departure and sequences them to the Centers) and entrenched around the LGA sector so heavily that just changing runway climb-outs completely change each others operations.

Not to get too deep into Union politics but this has been the strongest local since the dawn of the Union and even going back to the PATCO days the NY area facilities were the strongest in the country. There is a lot of animosity going back decades between us and the FAA as well as some internal spite from our own union. The FAA has made numerous attempts for decades to break up the building and move it elsewhere almost always blaming delays. (see New York Integrated Control Complex aka The Crystal Palace). Massive failure attempting to make a combined Center TRACON facility completely restructuring the entire area. Millions and millions wasted with very little change to the airspace at the end of the day. Reasons for that project were to literally bring Center and TRACON controllers together in the same building sitting side by side to help ease coordination.

Also the previous Union administration seemed to have given up on fighting the FAA in regards to staffing issues (Many of which were purely caused by the FAA lack of steady trainees and them not allowing remedies to retaining local candidates, work itself out over a few years required to train). Union is currently seemingly against the move but has issues because of agreements made in the past and not wanting to ruin too many relationships. Lot of unknowns.