Christie Administration Now Probed on Port Authority Funding of Pulaski Skyway Rehab

Media outlets continue reporting that Gov. Chris Christie and his administration is being investigated for how the Port Authority funded the Pulaski Skyway rehabilitation project.

New Jersey got the Port Authority to shift funds originally meant for the ARC tunnel to go to rebuild the Pulaski Skyway. That happened when Gov. Christie cancelled the ARC project in 2010, and it's a decision I agreed with because NJ Transit could never keep to a capital budget and New York was not contributing to a project that would benefit immensely from the added tunnels, as well as the fact that the project design was flawed with no through-running trains to Sunnyside Yards for maximizing train access into Manhattan during the morning rush hour and additional trains for the PM rush back to New Jersey.

The Pulaski Skyway was one of the first superhighways designed and opened in 1932. It connected Newark to Jersey City across the Hackensack River and Meadowlands, along with providing direct access to the Holland Tunnel. The bridge was determined to need massive rehabilitation, particularly after the collapse of the bridge in Minnesota a few years back.

The rehabilitation project is indeed a worthy and needed project, but New Jersey didn’t want to raise its own taxes or fees to cover it. That would have put Gov. Christie in a tough position had he wanted to run for President. So, it appears that Gov. Christie and his appointees at the Port Authority got the Port Authority to issue a ruling that the Skyway was an access road to the Lincoln Tunnel, which would be a valid use of Port Authority funds. But the reality is that it’s a stretch to call it a Lincoln Tunnel access road since it directly leads to the Holland.

This has consequences for the bond offerings by the Port Authority since it would be a material misrepresentation of what the bond offerings were for.

Now, a complicating factor is that the Port Authority doesn’t answer to Christie alone. It’s a bistate agency and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo would ordinarily need to sign off on the deal through his representatives on the Board.

Bridgegate showed how the system inside the Port Authority has completely broken down and how New York's appointees on the authority were outside the loop for the GWB lane closures. Is it possible they’re outside the loop on the Skyway funding deal?

I consider that possible but highly implausible because all the major news outlets reported on how Port Authority funds were going to be reallocated to do the Pulaski project. That would seemingly implicate Cuomo as well. These issues should have been raised back then and there were questions about how the money was reallocated, though no one appeared to have raised the question about whether the reallocation was legal from a securities offering perspective.

How wouldn’t it implicate Cuomo? If the New Jersey cronies were the ones who ginned up the legal authority to shift the funds, ignoring other counsel, then the prosecutors might be able to isolate the culpability for the deal to Christie and his allies inside the Port Authority.

Frankly, the way Gov. Cuomo has screwed with regional transit and played games with MTA funding, I wouldn't be shocked if both were involved in these actions and that there was a quid pro quo for the Port Authority to spend a similar amount of funds on New York based projects.

Turning the Screws; Prosecutors Looking at Indicting Gov. Christie's Inner Circle

Esquire Magazine is reporting that the federal prosecutor in New Jersey, Paul Fishman, is preparing to indict four of Gov. Chris Christie's inner circle over their actions relating to Bridgegate.
The indictments are pending against Bill Baroni and David Wildstein, who were at the Port Authority, Bridget Kelly and Bill Stepien, who were in the governor's office.

You could see the writing on the wall now for months, but Fishman is actually looking at getting evidence of wrongdoing by Christie himself.

Fishman’s challenge is to nail down specific criminal charges on several fronts -- the diversion of Port Authority money to fund New Jersey road and bridge projects; the four-day rush-hour closures of George Washington Bridge lanes in Ft. Lee; and a web of real-estate deals spun by David Samson, long a Christie crony, when he chaired the PA’s Board of Commissioners as Christie’s appointee. (One such deal, a stalled office-tower development in Hoboken, New Jersey, is central to a claim that Christie’s lieutenant governor told the town’s mayor that the state would withhold Hurricane Sandy relief aid from Hoboken if the mayor didn’t sign off on the development project.)

Whatever Christie says or does -- and whatever potential donors or Jimmy Fallon and his viewers think -- the question that truly matters is whether Fishman’s pursuit leads to the governor himself. Christie’s Port appointees -- not only Samson, but former PA Deputy Executive Director Bill Baroni and his oddball sidekick David Wildstein -- all face near-certain indictment and are being pressed to hand up Christie, as is the governor’s former chief counsel, Charlie McKenna.

Wildstein, portrayed as the mastermind behind Ft. Lee’s traffic problems, has made proffers to Fishman’s investigators -- hoping to trade information to the prosecutor in exchange for gentler legal treatment -- but Fishman has cut no deals with anyone so far, and the looming indictments have encouraged Christie’s PA appointees to sing. “Don’t underestimate what Wildstein has on Christie,” says one source. “And Wildstein and Baroni have both turned on Samson. If Samson doesn't give Fishman Christie, Samson is toast.”

Bridgegate opened a window into the inner workings at the Port Authority and the New Jersey governor's office, and the back-room deals that exceeded the authority of the bistate agency to fund projects outside its scope.

In particular, I'm talking about the Pulaski Skyway reconstruction. It was a much needed project, but Gov. Christie didn't want to use state money (which would have required increasing taxes/fees in the state to cover the empty transportation trust fund). So, his office concocted a rationale for using the former ARC tunnel funds that the Port Authority had set aside to use on the skyway reconstruction.

So, the indictments are all pending, but the question is who will crack first. My bet is still on Bridget Kelly, who was the only one of the four to actually be fired. The rest were "retired" and allowed to resign with full benefits. That would lead to a whole lot of resentment against the Governor.

But there's an additional wrinkle, and that's David Samson, who was also at the Port Authority. Samson is the big fish that would lead to Christie himself. If Samson turn's on Christie, then that would likely lead to indictments against Christie himself.

Of course, it's rather ironic that Fishman is Christie's successor at the federal prosecutor's office, and that Christie used similar actions to indict corrupt politicians while federal prosecutor.