Although he also had supporters in the crowd of more than 400 today, Christie’s 113th town hall in this suburban Burlington County town was not the warm and friendly kind he had grown used to over the years. After a short speech discussing the states financial troubles and his new $34.4 billion budget proposal, Christie began to take questions from the audience when Rowan student Michael Brein shouted criticisms and a question about Sandy relief funding. “Either sit down and keep quiet or get out,” Christie told him. Brein continued, and police officers escorted him out of the Mount Laurel YMCA. He spent two-and-a-half times as much money on advertisements with himself in them ... than on small businesses affected by Hurricane Sandy, Brein said, referring to the $2.5 million Stronger Than The Storm ad campaign that featured the Christie family in tourism ads bankrolled with federal Sandy relief funds. I just wanted to ask how he can justify that to the small businesses in the state?... Im here to say people still care about the Bridgegate scandal. They still care about the misappropriation of Sandy money. Protesters kept piping up until the end of the event, police kept removing them, and the governor scolded them for interrupting while he answered other people’s questions. Don’t take away from them for your own partisan, personal purposes, he said. Brein, 19, said he was representing the New Jersey Working Families Alliance, a coalition of union and environmental groups. “I believe whatever he says about the lane closures, but what does it show his leadership skills were by hiring all these crooks?” said Kailee Whiting, 20, another Rowan student. She was referring to the closures of two New Jersey access lanes to the George Washington Bridge in September. Top aides and associates to the governor orchestrated the closures for reasons that remain unexplained and that many Democrats believe was political vengeance on the mayor of Fort Lee, whose town was snarled in traffic for four days. Other Rowan students removed from the event were Leah Ly, 21, and Patrick Oehne, 18. A total of six people were removed. Before he began to take questions, the governor announced that the average property tax bill rose 1.7 percent in New Jersey in 2013, one of the lowest increases of the last decade, according to preliminary data. And he took shots at the state Supreme Court, blaming it for the state’s financial troubles. Environmentalists and housing advocates for the poor were also on hand at today’s town hall. Although they oppose Christie’s policies, they did not interrupt the governor’s remarks today. Near the end of the meeting, more than a dozen people opposed to hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” silently raised signs that read, “Don’t Frack Our Water.” Fracking is the controversial practice of blasting chemicals deep underground to extract energy reserves.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 09:42:31 +0000
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