The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is seeking investors to bid on a partnership interest in 1 World Trade Center, the office building now under construction at Ground Zero that used to called Freedom Tower, according to an article in The New York Times yesterday by Charles V. Bagli.

The article said that the offering "would allow the authority to raise what it hopes would be at least $100 million for the project" and the authority wants the "new" partner "to take on the difficult task of marketing the skyscraper's space and negotiating leases."

The article said that "Stephen Sigmund, a spokesman for the authority, acknowledged that a potential sale was in the offing," adding that he said that "the timing is right to determine whether there is a strategic partnership that can add long-term success to the building."

The controversial tower is now about five floors above the street and will rise 1,776 feet when it is expected to be completed in 2013.

"According to executives briefed on the Port Authority's strategy," the article continued, "it has hired two real estate advisers, Cushman & Wakefield and Jones Lang LaSalle, to handle the negotiations with the prospective partners. The authority has identified a half-dozen companies with the financial wherewithal and the commercial expertise for the job, including Boston Properties, the Related Companies, the Durst real estate family, Hines, Vornado Realty Trust and Brookfield Properties, which owns the adjacent World Financial Center."

The office market has weakened since the financial crisis began and the authority is involved in arbitration over a dispute with Larry A. Silverstein, the developer, over financing three major office towers at Ground Zero.

In a separate development, New York City is demanding that Mr. Silverstein pay almost $35 million in commercial rent taxes on the demolished World Trade Center towers and two other buildings that no longer exist, according to an article by David Seifman in yesterday's edition of The New York Post.

"One of the weirdest developments in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack is being played out in an astounding tax court battle," the article maintained, noting that "The city's reasoning is that Silverstein continued to pay rent to the Port Authority after 9/11" and "that, city officials claim, subjects his transactions to the 3.9 percent commercial-rent tax through 2005, when the state Legislature ended the tax for all properties below Canal Street."

On May 27, 2007,the city's Finance Department sent Mr. Silverstein a bill including penalties and interest for $34,866,549 on his four trade center buildings, claiming that "the airspace that had been surrounded by the buildings still existed," and, the article continued, since Silverstein had the right to rebuild, he had to pay up.

Silverstein responded that the government seized control of the entire site after 9/11, so he could hardly rebuild, and Administrative Law Judge Marlene Schwartz agreed in a December 2009 decision, and chided the city for its "error," according to the article, which quoted Rita Dumain, the chief of the Tax and Bankruptcy Litigation Division of the city's Law Department, that "we are disappointed with the ruling and are considering all legal options."