Gov. Christie's tunnel blunder

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The governor’s decision to kill the Hudson River tunnel project will go down as a blunder of historic proportions. It will stunt the state’s job market, depress home values, and leave us with nightmarish traffic jams and dirtier air.

He is leaving $3 billion in federal money on the table. And he’s putting at risk another $3 billion in Port Authority money that had been set aside for this project. Those are collosal sums.

So why did he do it? Why would he kill a project that even he concedes is critical to the state’s future?

He wants you to believe he had little choice because the costs were skyrocketing.

Don’t buy it. The evidence makes it clear that he wanted to kill this tunnel project so he could grab the money New Jersey had set aside for it. That is the only way he can avoid raising the gas tax to finance transit projects within the state’s borders.

If he wanted to build this tunnel, why did he refuse to even ask the Port Authority for more help? And yesterday, when federal Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood called and asked to discuss new ways to keep the project alive, why did the governor turn him down?

The governor quit on this project before he had to. He seized on inflated cost-estimates from mid-level bureaucrats who were asked to examine worst-case scenarios under a tight deadline, and he ran with it. Instead of finding a way to make this project work, he killed it so he could grab the money.

The kindest explanation is that he is a true anti-tax ideologue who can’t bring himself to make drivers pay a few more pennies for a gallon of gas, even in a state where the gas tax is among the nation’s lowest. Maybe.

The darker possibility is that his motive was purely political. He knows that raising the gas tax would spoil the political image he has built for himself, all the way to Iowa. He’s a rock star on the national conservative circuit now, and that’s hard to give up.

For New Jersey, this is a serious blow. Roughly 250,000 people commute to jobs in Manhattan that pay 60 percent higher salaries than the average. Rail ridership has quadrupled in the last two decades.

But the tunnel is now at capacity. The governor, in effect, is slamming this door shut. The boom in commuter job growth is now doomed to end. And that will reduce home values and worsen the state’s budget shortfalls.

One final insult: Sen. Frank Lautenberg said yesterday that New Jersey will have to pay $300 million to reimburse Washington for the work that’s already been done. That’s quite a price for a tunnel to nowhere.

http://blog.nj.com/njv_editorial_page/2010/10/tunnel_blunder_the_govs_motive.html

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