Assemblyman Joe Cryan (D-Union) on Tuesday responded to a new Congressional report detailing the disparities between Governor Christie’s cost estimates of the cancelled Hudson River tunnel project and a year-long study conducted by the Government Accountability Office:
“These latest details are more evidence of the Governor’s continued pattern of distorting the facts to suit his agenda. This time it shouldn’t be dismissed.
“The ARC tunnel project would have brought thousands of jobs to our region and increased capacity and provided long-term stability to our severely aging transportation infrastructure.
“Instead, the Governor put together a team to exaggerate the price tag on the project and then massively overstated the state’s share of the costs. The end result? Millions of dollars wasted on the early stages of the project, preliminary work left now to wallow, and $4 billion raided so the Governor wouldn’t have to come up with any creative solutions of his own to fund the Transportation Trust Fund.
“This project was widely supported by economists, the federal government and governors from both political parties going back several decades. One has to question whether the Governor unilaterally decided to ignore the long-term future of our economy and our infrastructure so he could boost his conservative credentials in the early stages of his campaign for the national spotlight.
“In the end, the real casualties of the Christie conservative agenda are the commuters who now sit in congested traffic and aged tunnels with no hope for a better commute in the near future.”