Christie’s piggy bank

Scott Raab at Esquire on the real reason Christie turned down the new commuter tunnel:

Which brings us to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is the agency that built and owns and runs the George Washington Bridge, which is the world’s busiest, with two decks, 29 toll lanes (cars $13, trucks $17/axle) — and more than 100 million vehicles per year. It’s a tasty bit of business.

Toss in the take from the Lincoln Tunnel and the Holland Tunnel, plus Newark, LaGuardia, and JFK airports, plus one of the eastern seaboard’s busiest seaports — the list goes on and on. By statute, the PA sells its own bonds and wields the power of eminent domain — the PA seized 16 acres of downtown Manhattan to create the World Trade Center in the 1960s — and it operates mostly in secret.

If you’re Chris Christie, that’s a corner candy store pleading to be plundered. Early in his first term, Christie “borrowed” $2 billion by killing a crucial tunnel project jointly funded by New Jersey, New York, and the federal government, and he used that dough for New Jersey road work that the New Jersey budget couldn’t cover without raising the state’s gas tax — second-lowest in the U.S. — a solution Christie refused to consider. That tunnel project, billed at $9 billion, would’ve been a godsend to New Jersey rail commuters — not to mention the thousands of jobs committed to its construction.

Chris Christie not only killed the tunnel, but lied about doing so to save the state from paying for imaginary cost overruns, even after the U.S Department of Transportation, trying to save the tunnel, said it would cover New Jersey’s share of any such costs. That was late 2010; Christie’s men — including David Wildstein and Bill Baroni, both of whom resigned in the wake of the Great Ft. Lee Clusterfk — were beginning to take over the PA. That process accelerated when David Samson, another Christie crony, became Chairman of the Port Authority Board of Commissioners early in 2011.

Oh, and here’s the New Republic story.