The deep cavern in Manhattan is one of Governor Christie's gripes with the ARC Tunnel. (Via ARCTunnel.com)
Since New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced in mid-September that he would be suspending work on the trans-Hudson rail crossing we know as the ARC Tunnel, the staff of The Star-Ledger has been all over this story. They were the first to report on the suspension and have numerous sources within the Christie Administration keeping them abreast of the latest developments. Their latest piece — a glimpse inside the negotiations with the feds that resulted in a two-week reprieve for the project — might just be their best.
The gist of their piece is, as the headline suggests, the 36 hours that saved the ARC Tunnel. They track Christie’s decision to make the announcement to scrap the tunnel after he made a few key political appearances in Iowa and the timing of the announcement that conveniently coincided with testimony by Bret Schundler on a mistake that cost New Jersey hundreds of millions of federal education dollars. Christie, they say, was intent on scraping the ARC Tunnel as early as June but acted recently when it became politically prudent to do so. They write:
Christie — riding a wave of national popularity built on the combination of his government-cutting bona fides and his tough-guy-from-Jersey image — was already leaning toward killing the project as far back as June, say those close to him. Last month, in a decision that startled transportation advocates and Washington, Christie abruptly suspended the project after more than half a billion dollars had already been spent. But it was not until last week that he made the final decision to cancel.
The actual timing of the governor’s final decision caught many off guard — including those in Washington. And it came as the governor was suffering through a public flogging at the hands of one of his own — the man he had chosen to lead his push to reform education. Bret Schundler had been fired in August in a dispute over a failed $400 million federal grant.
Thursday morning, Schundler was telling the Senate under oath that the governor lost the federal funding because of a vendetta against the state’s leading teachers union. And as Schundler’s testimony was reaching toward its third hour in a Statehouse committee room, the governor’s office sent out a news alert, summoning reporters for an announcement. The topic was not specified, but it was quickly learned that Christie was killing the ARC tunnel.
Christie denied he timed his announcement to steal Schundler’s thunder, but political observers said it couldn’t have been mere coincidence since less than 24 hours earlier the governor had said he didn’t know when he would have enough information to make his decision.
At first, aides to Ray LaHood, the nation’s Secretary of Transportation, wanted to attack Christie for this short-sighted decision, but LaHood went with diplomacy instead. The government believes that Christie’s claims of $5 billion in cost overruns are both wrong and intentionally misleading, but the two were able to work together to reach a detente. The feds would address some of Christie’s legitimate gripes with the project — its need for a new station deep under 34th St. that doesn’t offer a quick and easy to connection to Amtrak — and Christie would be open to their suggestions.
Still, the problem remains one of costs. “We have to work on the money,” Christie said as his meeting with LaHood ended, and the costs are still an issue. The governor still has the tunnel is “not financially viable” and would prefer to use that money — and not higher gas taxes — to save the state’s sinking Transportation Trust Fund. In this instance, though, killing two birds with one stone would be committing mobility murder.
So now, we wait. In ten days, Christie and LaHood will come together to determine the fate of a project the region needs and, with it, billions of dollars and thousands of jobs. Still, I’m not going to hold my breath. This one feels a little less optimistic than it should.
23 comments
Does anyone here know what work was done so far, before the plug was pulled? The article mentions that design changes might be entertained. But any significant changes might mean that work done to date would have to be abandoned.
I don’t know the specific details of the contracts already awarded, but I’d imagine it’s mostly prep on the New Jersey side. I think whatever changes happen on the Manhattan end won’t impact work already completed. Just a guess though. Don’t quote me on that.
On the one hand, anything that makes a Republican look bad is good. But on the other hand, I really hope that this doesn’t mean the cavern will be built anyway as collateral damage. Some things are more important than partisan politics.
Ideally, the end result would be that ARC would be switched to Alt G, a competent panel would review some of the decisions and cut costs, and Christie would look like a buffoon. However, I’d settle for one and a half out of three.
I agree. Keep in mind that historicly polititions like him dont like public transport because of 1. unions & 2. they cant enrich them selves unlike the suburban sprawl moddle wich as we know includes forever road construction & patted contracts.
Also with transit you can starve the system & at the same time say that drivers are the real victoms. I actually read that in reguards to Los Angeles a few years ago. It went something like this… if L. A. County didn’t spend ANY money on transit, the dollars would have been spent on more worth while projects like freeway expantion.
Utter nonsence.
I’m not getting the Christie hatred here. Corzine got the state to commit on a project that is about the least-commuter friendly of the possible alternatives and started construction without the slightest notion of how to finance it. These are facts. Among the casualties of this budgetary monster are a range of rail expansion projects in NJ which will be shelved for a generation while this dungeon sucks up every dollar in the state in perpetuity. Corzine was the head of Goldman Sachs! After he left the governorship he went to another investment house. Look, just pretend he was a Republican and have at him.
I’m for an effective alternative as much as anyone, but ARC was at least financed. I have a (perfectly rational) disgust for Republikans, including their lackeys the Demokrats, but all Christie had to do was find a way to get two tracks of rail service to stop in Manhattan and reverse somewhere in New York* more cheaply than this boondoggle, and he would have saved boat loads of money and come out looking good. Sure, he might have been criticized because the big, fancy station had to be shelved, but so what? As the price of actually moving people, I think even the dumbest, most reactionary of commuter rail reprobate would agree it’s worth it – and, ironically, most people would be better off not having to climb the height of a medium-sized housing project, or walking several blocks to Penn Station.
* Within reason, almost anywhere would have been fine. Sunnyside comes to mind. Any LIRR branch line would have worked too. GCT would have worked. Hell, even four tracks just under street level would have worked better.
Hey, I’m with you on Corzine being a bad governor. However, he’s not a member of the party whose thinktanks say that making government more efficient is bad because then people will want more or it, and whose standard bearers propose cutting volcano monitoring programs as a way of reducing waste.
The point here is that Christie gives me the same vibes as Giuliani and Romney in the 2008 primary season: he has no idea how to make government work, but he needs to cut spending for the sake of cutting spending.
I don’t understand how that non sequitor has a thing to do with Christie.
When I look at the ARC project, I almost get the sense that the problem with Corzine’s dungeon station is that the guy was so rich that he never actually took the train, and thus had very little interest in getting the project executed in a manner that would actually amke life better for people. You have all these super-rich insulated politicians who promote 2 mile light rail trips that take 45 minutes, and tunnels to 180 foot caverns. What do they care, they go everywhere via chauffered SUV anyway. It seems that the only faction not at the table when they come up with this idea was the demographic that would use it — middle class workaday types with jobs in midtown east, making their way from some suburban loaction. No one in that position would have greenlighted this.
Christie isn’t exactly your average middle-class type, either. The issue with him is that he doesn’t actually seem to think government should be done better. He owns NJT; if he wanted to, he could change back to Alt G, or drop the cavern and put a connection to Penn Station. He’d save the state a few billion dollars and be a local hero. Instead, he seems to be grandstanding, like Bobby Jindal on volcano monitoring.
When I look at the ARC project, I almost get the sense that the problem with Corzine’s dungeon station is that the guy was so rich that he never actually took the train, and thus had very little interest in getting the project executed in a manner that would actually amke life better for people.
I hear what you’re saying about Corzine, but my problem with it is that it places too much power on the governor. Sure, Corzine signed off on the project, but he did so after people who are experts in the field presented the pluses and minuses of a variety of alternatives. Corzine himself didn’t undertake the planning studies or present the alternatives. He’s just going on what his advisers — who ideally know what they’re talking about — told him.
I find that a little questionable. Is it really the lower-middle and middle classes that predominantly use NJT services? Typical jobs in midtown are fairly advanced service-oriented positions in finance, marketing, publishing/media, etc..
Just a guess, but a big piece of the political puzzle here, and perhaps what makes Christie’s decision a little surprising, is that the upper middle class in NJ probably depends heavily on rail.* A big reason the two richest states are New Jersey and Connecticut is they’re the ones who have those types of people who commute into New York City.
* And, for that matter, keep in mind how Obama and LaHood are interested. If this was just about moving lower to middle class people, the POTUS probably wouldn’t be interested either.
Neither Christie nor Corzine are poor, but Corzine is among the most super of the super-rich.
I agree that Corzine was hardly developing ARC plans in his basement, but when I look at these things I just can’t fathom how a guy who is commiting NJ, realistically to what $15 billion in spending between this and the related Portal project from all the sources he can strongarm, doesn’t ask the most sensical question: is this worth it? You can buy a lot of stuff for this kind of money, and NJ is a stat with something like 8 million people. Commiting NJ to this project was one of the biggest decisions of his tenure, maybe the biggest, when you consider that many of his other decisions were at least revocable later. When this dungeon is done, it’s done.
I’d love to get an Alt. G project done here, but I imagine that we’ll be back to the drawing board for years with impact statements and run the risk of potential lawsuits. If that’s not correct, that would be great.
First, it’s not really $15 billion. It’s $8.7 billion, plus $600 million for NJT’s portion of Portal Bridge. Further cost escalations are possible, but in the past, the biggest transit cost overruns in the US have been before groundbreaking, not after.
Second, one of the nice features of the AA/EIR process is that it makes it relatively easy to switch alternatives late in the game. The EIR is still valid for Alt G, and the money already spent is on the New Jersey side and is blind to which alternative is used. Only the engineering done for the cavern would have to be changed, and that’s a relatively small deal.
In fact, one standard way to delay or change projects is to sue claiming that the EIR was biased and demand a change to another alternative studied. Most of the lawsuits against the California high-speed rail projects are of this nature. Port Authority was afraid of such a lawsuit earlier this year, because of Alt P’s use of eminent domain on the Manhattan side.
Lets hope they come to a conclusion which includes a connection to Penn station
Sometimes in politics you have to be an SOB to get anything changed, because if you don’t push your interests the other special interests are going to roll you 100 percent of the time.
If Christie’s doing this for the supposed reason(s) — he wants to stuff more money into N.J. road projects — it’s not going to solve the underlying problem that the roads, just like Penn Station, eventually have to funnel into a limited number of crossings if they’re to actually be of any use. On the other hand, if he’s playing hardball to get the cost of the project down, and if that includes scrubbing the Macy’s batcave station for one or two new tunnels that connect up with Penn Station’s existing trackage, then both he, the N.J. Transit commuter and Amtrak passengers will probably come out ahead in the long run.
Hear hear! I bet the outcome of these talks with Ray LaHood result in the Federal Government not only footing the bill for a full line-by-line review, but also covering some or all of the difference between the two estimates.
As an aside, I previously never knew that Christie had problems with the tunnel other than costs. That fact seems to be swept under the rug in favor of partisan reactionary bickering.
I’m sure Christie can take or leave ARC, but it’s certainly not a priority for him. Although I seriously doubt the racial anxieties baby boomers often have about rail (subsidized transportation that brings Negroes in to steal your TV) are not at play too, particularly with Repuglikans, it appears Christie got a measure of support from oil/automobile interests, who no doubt expect at least gestures in kind.
It’s not a racial thing, not here. Northeastern commuter rail serves predominantly white people. The places that ARC would help are the communities along the Erie lines in Bergen and Passaic Counties, which largely supported Christie and are mostly white. Elsewhere the racial anxieties manifest themselves in fights over whether to fund commuter rail or local buses and urban rail.
Sure it is, at least sometimes. Specifically, it’s a generational/racial thing. Those who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s still associate rail with dilapidated urban cores. That’s as true in New Jersey as it is in suburban Atlanta.
Naturally, such right-wing bogeymen rarely if ever carry much relation to reality. If suburban houses are such convenient targets, nothing stops anyone from driving to them. Heck, the doors are often unlocked! I don’t see the attitude as any different than I see other racial anxieties, like “wealth redistribution” (really, who gets most of it?) and busing, though the latter is at least legitimately racial.
Usually, those who grew up in the 1970s and 80s are the most anti-driving cohort – they’re used to traffic jams and oil crises and hear that bullet trains are the new black. It’s the people who came of age earlier than that who are the most anti-rail.
The racial issues in suburban New York are not the same as in suburban Atlanta. For one, white people already use transit to get to Manhattan. It’s the local buses that have a stigma. When there are proposals for school integration, you do see the racial bogeymen come out: suburbs whose residents look down on Southern racism would distribute leaflets predicting crime and drugs if their children go to the same schools as middle-class blacks. But with transit, there’s nothing like it; people might complain about cost, or about railroading tradition, but not as much about the usual racial codewords.
David Brooks weighs in on ARC and related issues here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10.....=1&hp
If there’s anyone who can make Paul Krugman’s bloviation look good, it’s David Brooks. Good catch.
Thanks for posting this. Perhaps I am too cynical about GOP governors of eastern states who have chosen to spend time in Iowa, but I have suspected from the beginning that Christie did this for the reasons the article highlights. “riding a wave of national popularity built on the combination of his government-cutting bona fides and his tough-guy-from-Jersey image — was already leaning toward killing the project as far back as June, say those close to him.”
Is there any evidence at all that Christie is trying to change the project?
The decision was made to impress conservative GOP primary voters – and most likely in places like Iowa & South Carolina. Not to change the design of the NY terminus of the tunnel.