Chris Christie's big decision
Oct 10th 2010, 17:49 by N.B. | WASHINGTON, DC
ON THURSDAY, Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, announced that the state will not contribute its share of the money for a new train tunnel that would take commuters under the Hudson river and into Manhattan. The federal government and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey are putting up the bulk of the money. But without New Jersey's $2.7 billion, the new tunnel—the largest public transportation project in America—will not be built.
If the tunnel—called the "Access to the Region's Core," or ARC project—doesn't get built, New Jersey is almost certain to lose the federal money that had been committed to the project. The state will also have to pay back around $300 million that's already been spent. Meanwhile, commuters and Amtrak riders will continue to suffer through long delays every morning as trains wait for their turn to pass through a century-old train tunnel under the Hudson. Property values near commuter rail won't increase, as they did after the first commuter connection to midtown Manhattan opened in 1996. The people who were working on the project will, of course, lose their jobs. And the strain on the existing tunnel will continue to increase, until New Jersey is eventually forced to build a new tunnel, with or without the federal money and super-low interest rates that make the ARC project so attractive today.
After Mr Christie made his announcement, Ray LaHood, the Obama administration's secretary of transportation, hurried up to Trenton to try to remind the governor of all this. The project has since been granted a two-week stay of execution.
Still, the tunnel's future looks bleak. Mr Christie and his boosters cite cost overruns and the state's fiscal position as the reason for the decision. But there's a lot more going on here. Mr Christie is a newly elected Republican governor in an up-year for the GOP. He's building a national reputation and a national following—and a lot of that is based on his refusal to raise taxes. Cancelling the ARC project will allow him to use the money to replenish New Jersey's transportation trust fund, which is nearly bankrupt. That way, he won't have to raise the state's gas tax (among the lowest in the nation) or otherwise break his anti-tax promises. That's the kind of behaviour that will continue to earn him praise from conservative activists nationwide—including those who see the whole tunnel project as "socialism."
Mr Christie already knew about all of the arguments in favour of the tunnel when he killed it on Thursday. It's hard to see what has changed since then. The governor says he still believes the project is "not financially viable." I won't totally rule out the possibility that the state and the federal government work out some sort of cost-sharing agreement for cost overruns before the two weeks are out. But it's not likely.
The project will almost certainly benefit New Jersey in the long run. But cancelling it will benefit Mr Christie—he'll be able to keep his tax promises, replenish the trust fund, "stand up" to the Obama administration, and burnish his reputation with conservatives. When the two weeks are up, it's a good bet that Mr Christie's interests will win out yet again.
UPDATE: Some readers are upset because they think that this post did not mention Mr Christie's supposed reason for cancelling the project: cost overruns. It does, of course, in the second sentence of the fourth paragraph. The first commenter also overstates the size of the current overrun estimates: even the numbers Mr Christie cites are not that high. (Here's a good article on the argument over cost overruns.) Anyway, fixating on overruns is missing the point. Cost overruns are typical on a project of this size. Sure, the first two tubes of the Lincoln Tunnel (which also goes under the Hudson) cost "just" $2.4 billion in 2009 dollars. But the ARC tunnel is more than twice as long, with almost twice as much vertical clearance. Modern engineering, worker and passenger safety, and environmental concerns (including not stirring up the bottom of the Hudson, which is a Superfund site) make the ARC project an immensely more complicated and costly endeavour than building a car tunnel in the 1930s.
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