Port Authority officials: Battle over toll hikes was all for show
By Steve Strunsky/The Star-Ledger
on March 02, 2014 at 6:02 AM,
On Aug. 5, 2011, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey issued a jaw-dropping proposal to immediately raise bridge and tunnel tolls by $4 for E-ZPass subscribers and $7 for cash customers, followed by another increase in 2014. The proposed hikes amounted to a 75 percent increase for E-ZPass users and 112.5 percent for those paying cash.
The authority also proposed PATH fares go up $1, from $1.75 to $2.75.
The reaction was swift and angry, with commuters and lawmakers blasting the increases.
Gov. Chris Christie, who said he had no advance knowledge of the proposal, was among them.
“You’re kidding, right?” Christie told reporters three days after the announcement, describing what he said when briefed on the proposal.
But within two weeks, after a blizzard of 36 press releases by the Port Authority on behalf of toll hike supporters and after public hearings packed with union laborers backing the plan, Christie and his New York counterpart, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, consented to a more modest increase. Even then, the governors conditioned their approval on a top-to-bottom financial review of the agency.
The thing is, a former Port Authority official told The Star-Ledger, “It was all bullshit.”
From the start, the fix was in, said that former official and five others who occupied key Port Authority posts when the toll hike was rolled out and eventually approved.
The whole process, the authority officials said, was orchestrated from the outset to make the governors look good even as they reached deeper, through the long arm of the authority, into the public’s pockets.
The former Port Authority officials (five who are no longer with the agency and one who is still there) outlined the strategy and execution of the plan in separate interviews with The Star-Ledger. Each asked that their names not be used because they feared repercussions from speaking out even after they had left the agency.
The first proposal disclosed to the public, the former officials explained, was deliberately inflated. Also planned was Christie and Cuomo’s shocked — shocked! — reaction and an unusual one-day series of eight public hearings. Those hearings were all held during the morning or evening rush hours to discourage attendance by irate commuters, but were stacked with union members who backed the hike because of the construction jobs it would fund.
All this, the sources said, was designed to set up the governors’ ostensibly reluctant approval of a more modest hike, accompanied by their stern admonitions that this was it and that the agency had better get its financial house in order once and for all.
But it was all Hollywood on the Hudson, the six sources said, scripted all the way through.
“They knew what the toll increase would be,” said one former official. “They set the governors up to look like heroes. It was all a farce.”
Bridging the scandals
And, the sources said, the fictional plan was led by the same people who two years later would arrange the September 2013 George Washington Bridge lane closures, which have engulfed the Christie administration in scandal.
The two were Bill Baroni, the former Republican state senator and GOP campaign lawyer named by Christie to the agency’s deputy executive director post in early 2010, and David Wildstein, the former political blogger and Republican mayor of Livingston, where he went to high school with Christie.
Baroni’s lawyer, Michael Himmel, said his client had “no comment” on the assertions.
Wildstein’s lawyer, Alan Zegas, called the officials' version of the toll hike “inaccurate.”
He did not specify how. He also suggested there was a conspiracy to tar his client. “It is a snippet, and a not fully accurate one, of reality,” Zegas said.
The Christie administration did not return phone calls or emails. Ranking officials at the authority also did not comment. Cuomo’s office likewise did not respond to calls or emails.
While none of those officials would comment, a committee chaired by Assemblyman John Wisniewski has subpoenaed all documents and correspondence between the Port Authority and the Christie administration regarding the toll hike.
Wisniewski was one of the original skeptics of the hike when it was announced, and he still isn’t buying it.
“My suspicion is — I think it’s pretty well understood as fact — that the original announcement of whatever the toll increase was was all theater, so that would allow the governor to say, ‘No, no, it has to be lower,’ ” Wisniewski said in an interview following the most recent round of subpoenas.
For him and others, the toll hike scenario was too pat. How, the skeptics asked, could Christie not have known about the initial proposal when he had appointed two of his closest political allies to Port Authority leadership, Chairman David Samson and Baroni?
One source said complete responses to the latest subpoenas from the legislative committee would reveal that the bridge closures and the toll hike were engineered out of much the same playbook.
A minimum of agency officials were made aware of what was happening with the toll hike and sworn to secrecy under the implied threat of losing their jobs, the six sources said. And both actions included some of the same players.
“He’ll find emails,” the official said of Wisniewski, who co-chairs the joint committee with state Sen. Loretta Weinberg (D-Bergen). “And he’ll find the emails between Baroni, Wildstein and the governor’s office. And he’ll also find emails between Baroni and Cuomo’s office.”
Good cop-bad cop
To keep track of who knew what, a list was kept of those with knowledge of the scheme, the former officials said. And just as Port Authority officials have testified that the lane closures were kept secret from the agency’s current executive director, New York appointee Patrick Foye, Foye’s predecessor, Christopher Ward, was also excluded from the planning and implementation of the toll hike.
According to the former agency officials, the toll hikes were planned behind the scenes, primarily by Wildstein though Baroni was Wildstein’s official supervisor.
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