Christie Bridgegates His Entire State

Chris Christie continues to inflict even more damage to New Jersey’s infrastructure as road repair work all over the state has stopped as a result of Christie and the legislature not being able to agree on the details of a hike in the gas tax. Over $3 billion in projects are being held up because the state’s transportation fund that relies on the state’s third lowest in the nation gas tax is virtually empty. In Princeton, drivers are having to deal with a single lane bridge and a major repair job on a critical connection to the Lincoln Tunnel in Hoboken has been held up. And the notoriously bad Jersey drivers are fuming – it is Bridgegate on a statewide scale. Of course, the delays in these projects will actually increase the costs to get this repair work done and if the impasse cannot be resolved by August, some projects may have to be delayed indefinitely. But the probability of resolving the dispute before then seems a little remote as Christie is spending his time working on the Trump campaign.

This crisis is in addition to Christie’s even more disastrous decision early in his tenure to kill the $12.4 billion project to build a third tunnel between New Jersey and New York. The two existing tubes are over 100 years old and one tunnel that was hit especially hard by Hurricane Sandy may have to be shut down within the next couple of years due to its deterioration.  The two tunnels carry virtually all train traffic from New Jersey to New York, operate at maximum capacity continually, and are continually subject to long delays whenever a problem arises. If Christie had approved the fully funded tunnel back in 2010 instead of killing it, it is possible that the new tunnel would have been operational by 2018 and it would have created over 200,000 jobs according to the GAO. But Christie claimed that New Jersey would have been on the hook for too much of the cost and decided against it, using the money save to work on other bridge and road projects in New Jersey.

Reality eventually set in and in early 2015 Christie finally endorsed building the third tunnel, over four years after killing it. Of course, the project no longer is funded and is now expected to take about a decade. And now, having used up all the previously allocated money for the tunnel on regular road repair and the state’s low gas tax no longer adequately funding the repairs that need to be made, Christie once again finds himself having to somehow reverse course. It all would have been much easier to build the third tunnel and increase the gas tax way back in 2010, but that would have hurt Christie’s conservative credentials that he needed in order to run his bust of a Presidential primary campaign.

Christie already has historically low poll numbers in New Jersey with only 26% (the traditional GOP hard core) approving and 62% disapproving of his performance. And they are not likely to get any better if one of the rail tunnels has to shut down for a few weeks for emergency repairs and drivers are stuck in the already horrendous traffic because road repair work has not been completed. One day, someday, I hope Republicans come to their senses and realize how important infrastructure is to the economic vitality of a region. Christie and New Jersey may end up learning that lesson the hard way.