Christie can never be trusted after purposely deceiving New Jerseyans Stile: Secrecy at heart of Port Authority toll-hike ploy Wednesday, March 5, 2014 The Record In a booming, decisive voice that captivated voters and drowned out his critics, Governor Christie successfully cast himself in an assortment of first-term roles – reformer, fiscal hawk, champion of a beleaguered middle class. Now, at the start of his second term, Christie is no longer entirely in control of the narrative. The latest example came Sunday when The Record reported that the same cast of Christie confidants at the Port Authority involved in the George Washington Bridge fiasco also concocted a secret scheme in 2011 to raise tolls at Hudson River crossings in a way that would minimize public backlash and leave Christie and his counterpart, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, free of blame. They did this simply by floating a plan to dramatically raise tolls $6 by 2014, so that Christie and Cuomo could swoop in like a pair of fiscal hawks and scale it back at the last moment to $4.50, thus saving thousands of motorists from being milked by a mismanaged agency. It was a shrewd, first-term triumph of public relations. The fact that Christie and Cuomo would carry out a prearranged strategy to manipulate voters with a cycle of fear and relief doesn’t shock political veterans. It’s a hardball tactic used in past budget negotiations, contract talks and legislative battles. In this case, the hike also generated a $942 million slush fund that both states could tap for future transportation projects. “The idea of issuing a proposal, scaring the public and then pushing it through at a lower number where you wanted it, is Public Negotiation 101,” said Ben Dworkin, director of the Rebovich Institute for Politics at Rider University. But Sunday’s report, and a similar one in The Star-Ledger of Newark, revealed a governing style that remains largely buried by Christie’s first-term bluster — a style that puts a premium on secrecy over transparency, and deceptive campaign-style tactics over straightforward debate. It showed a governor willing to take elaborate steps to protect his image, even if it put his vaunted “truth telling” credibility at peril. The report showed the great lengths Christie’s confidants took in carrying out a campaign-style operation, complete with false dramatics. Christie publicly expressed surprise and outrage over the magnitude of the hikes. But a knowledgeable source said Christie met privately with his aides three days earlier to discuss the inflated toll-hike proposal. So far, Christie and Cuomo have said nothing about the reports – no disputing of the sourcing, no disputing of the overall narrative, which came from separate interviews with eight sources. Normally, he confronts trouble head-on, as he did in a Jan. 9 press conference about the bridge-lane scandal that has threatened his hopes for a 2016 presidential bid. He hasn’t said much about it since then, and his silence-amid-a-storm strategy suggests how much his second-term trajectory has spun out of his control. The toll-hike disclosure is also likely to fuel new doubts about Christie and the bridge-lane scandal. Christie has said that he had no idea that some of his closest aides hatched a plot last September to close two approach lanes to the bridge in Fort Lee, in an apparent attempt to punish the borough mayor for not endorsing Christie’s reelection. The incident is now the subject of federal and legislative investigations. No evidence has emerged to contradict Christie. But some of the same cast members in the bridge-lane controversy — former Deputy Executive Director Bill Baroni and David Wildstein, who served as Christie’s enforcer at the Port Authority — devised the toll plan and the strategy to carry it out under an expedited and carefully planned series of public hearings. Christie critics will inevitably conclude that if Christie was aware of the toll-hike scheme, then he must have been equally aware of the bridge-lane closings, despite his forceful denials. “I think that what you see is possibly a pattern,” said Martin E. Robins, director emeritus of Voorhees Transportation Policy Institute at Rutgers University, and a director at the Port Authority in the 1980s. “Only time will tell.” It’s not entirely surprising that loyalists for the politically aggressive and media-savvy Christie would cobble together a plan to make their boss look good. But it was the scale of the secrecy detailed in The Record’s report that seemed to catch longtime observers of the Port Authority by surprise. Baroni and Wildstein oversaw the campaign, planning inside a “war room” in a paneled conference room at the agency’s Park Avenue headquarters in Manhattan. Hanging from the door was a sheet of paper that warned: “Do Not Enter.” More than a dozen people were regularly inside the room, mostly Christie loyalists, who were told not to reveal its secrets. The room was accessible to only a few of the agency’s senior staff. The New York-appointed executive director, who had fallen out of favor with Christie and Cuomo, was kept out. The career professionals whose expertise is tapped to help prepare toll increase plans, were largely cut out, the news report found. “It was certainly unprecedented … to exclude people who have been deeply and historically involved in comparing the kind of projects that could be undertaken and weighing it against the financial demands,” said Jameson Doig, a retired Princeton University professor who studied the agency and has chronicled its history. And the public hearings for the toll increase also seemed geared toward minimizing public input — eight of them scheduled on the same day in difficult-to-reach locations. The Laborer’s International Union, which supported the increases and whose lobbyist was granted access to the war room, packed the hearings with orange-shirted members carrying signs. Input from motorists was minimal, dissent was muzzled. To Robins, the whole operation seemed determined to “cut corners.” “In the mind of the consumer, it raises the question: What’s going on here? What is the basis of jamming major toll increases down the throats of motorists?” he said. When Christie came to power in 2010, he blasted independent authorities, like the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission, as patronage pits in desperate need of reform. He appointed David Samson to help lead the charge at the Port Authority as its new chairman. He named Baroni as the deputy executive director and brought in Wildstein in a newly created position, to serve as Christie’s eyes, ears and muscle. Now Baroni and Wildstein are gone and have hired criminal lawyers as the bridge investigations pick up steam. Samson, who also was brought into the planning of the toll-hike plan, is coming under fire for failing to recuse himself on votes on Port Authority matters that also involved clients represented by his law firm. In the first term, Christie characterized them as the people who carry out his agenda and reforms. Now at the start of the second term, we have learned that they were the Christie aides who carried out cynical schemes to dupe the public. And that’s indelibly part of the new Christie narrative. Email: stile@northjersey Tags: Political Stile/Charles Stile | Politics | Political Stile/Charles Stile - Politics | Record Politics | State More Political Stile/Charles Stile Headlines: Stile: Christies Gandhi quote an odd choice Stile: New reality hangs over Governor Christies policies and attitude Stile: Gauging Christie’s words on new terms Stile: New attacks on Wildstein raise questions for Christie
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 04:49:33 +0000
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