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faced questions Monday over the project's expected $60 million-a-year operating budget and an agreement paving the way for the museum's completion was reached.
• The number comes on top of the $700 million construction cost of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. A report Sunday by The Associated Press noted that $12 million a year would be spent on security, more than the entire operating budgets of Gettysburg National Military Park and the monument that includes the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor.
• Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who leads the board of the nonprofit foundation that controls the museum and memorial, on Monday called the memorial's operating cost a necessity for security and other costs unique to hosting millions of visitors a year on the reborn site of two terror attacks, in 1993 and 2001.
• Some congressional Democrats underscored their efforts to help get federal money to cover some of the operating cost, while a Republican senator reiterated his opposition. Even some victims' family members are divided over whether the annual price tag represents the price of paying tribute to the nearly 3,000 lives lost or the cost of unnecessary grandeur.
• At ground zero, several visitors Monday to the memorial plaza were surprised but not put off by the $60 million-a-year figure.
• "Really?" said Pat Lee, a Walmart manager from Atlanta. But, she said, "I don't think the money is too much. Because it's important to keep alive the memory of what happened."
• The memorial, the centerpiece of the rebuilt World Trade Center site, includes a serene, solemn memorial plaza, where waterfalls fill the fallen towers' footprints, and a mostly underground museum that is to house such artifacts as the staircase workers used to escape the attacks.
• The plaza opened last year and has drawn 4.5 million visitors. The museum was to have been finished by Tuesday, but progress stopped amid a construction costs fight between the memorial foundation and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency that owns the trade center site. The Port Authority claimed the memorial foundation owed it $300 million for infrastructure and revised project costs; the foundation argued it was owed money because of project delays.
• The parties involved in the dispute said Monday they had reached an agreement. Their memorandum of understanding addresses issues including coordination of the site and general financial terms but doesn't go into detail on specific levels of financing. The agreement outlines that the memorial will have six months' operating expenses on hand as net working capital and that it will give the Port Authority a secu

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