With just one year remaining until the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, a date originally predicted to see the end of construction at the World Trade Center site, optimism has rebounded for completion of the complex web of projects planned for the site.

"We have a plan, we have a budget, we have the partners and we have the construction team that can get it done," Port Authority Executive Director Christopher Ward said during a press conference Tuesday.

The conference, with top-level city and state elected officials and developers of the Trade Center site, was called in anticipation of the ninth anniversary of Sept. 11, which the city will mark on Saturday.

"We have, in the last two and half years, brought this site to a point that very few thought we would," said Ward.

Port Authority officials predict that One World Trade Center will have taken its place as Lower Manhattan's tallest building by the tenth anniversary of the attacks. Silverstein's Tower 4 won't be far behind, and both towers are expected to top out by the end of 2011 and open in 2013.

Perhaps most importantly, World Trade Center rebuilding officials earlier this week reaffirmed their promise to open the Sept. 11 Memorial Plaza, with its two signature reflecting pools marking the footprints of the original Twin Towers, on Sept. 11, 2011, making it the first project at the site accessible to the public.

However, Ward said, "we must acknowledge that there is long and difficult work ahead of us."

In a year's time, construction of the 1,776-foot tower at One World Trade Center will have climbed as high as 90 stories, a spokesman for the agency said, and Port Authority crews will be well underway installing the soaring arched steel columns for the mezzanine levels of Santiago Calatrava's $3.2 billion transit station. On the eastern half of the site, Silverstein's Tower 4 will have reached as many as 45 stories, and the foundations for Towers 2 and 3 will be nearing street level by the beginning of Sept. 2011

"The rebuilding is going forward a tremendous pace," Silverstein said. "It's extremely exciting to watch that."

Speaking before a packed crowd of reporters and photographers in a conference room overlooking the site Tuesday afternoon, officials spent much of the hour-long address celebrating the finalized financing deal between the Port Authority, which owns the site, and Silverstein. The group, which included Silverstein, Gov. David Paterson, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, touted the agreement and recent progress as evidence that the infighting and construction delays that once bedeviled the site have finally subsided.

"Today, it's full steam ahead," Mayor Bloomberg said.  "New Yorkers deserve to see this hole in the heart of our city healed at last, and America expects us to do what's right."

Indeed, much progress has been made at the 16-acre site since 2008, when it was revealed that none of the original construction deadlines would be met. In the intervening years, the 2.9 million square-foot One World Trade Center has risen more than 35 stories, and the Authority has pre-leased a third of the tower's space to the Conde Nast publishing company. More than 1,500 tons of steel has been placed for the transportation hub. Silverstein's Tower 4, at the corner of Church and Liberty Streets, has reached its seventh story.

And at the emotional heart of the site, the Memorial Plaza and Museum, the first dozen or so trees-out of more than 400-that will populate the 350,000-square-foot plaza were planted late last month. Workers have nearly finished lining the reflecting pools in granite. On Tuesday, camera crews watched as the first of two 70-foot tridents from the fallen World Trade Center towers was installed in what will become the entry pavilion for the Sept. 11 Museum. The twin tridents are the third artifact of the former Trade Center to return to the site, joining the Last Column, now encased in a hermetic seal, and the Survivors' Staircase.

"What you see out the window today is concrete evidence of the absolute unity of priority that has been achieved," said Joe Daniels, president of the Sept. 11 Memorial & Museum Foundation. "We sit just 369 days from the opening of the memorial. There is much work to be done between now and then and, as I often tell my staff, the success of this project is not built in."