Chris Christie's Piggy Bank: The real reason Christie killed the new NY-NJ commuter tunnel (Esquire)

[Laxman]

23. Mark Magyar From NJ Spotlight....

is all over this today. Legislative Probe Expands To Controversial ARC Tunnel Cancellation You can read it here: http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/14/02/13/legislative-probe-expands-to-controversial-arc-tunnel-cancellation/ Contains a pretty good explanation of the tunnel cancellation.

Christie’s October 7, 2010, cancellation of the ARC Tunnel made him a darling of conservative talk show hosts and set the stage for Republican governors elected the following month to cancel major rail transit projects in Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida.

But most important, cancellation of the ARC Tunnel freed up billions of dollars in Port Authority and New Jersey Turnpike Authority revenue that was used three months later by Christie to fund a five-year extension of the Transportation Trust Fund without raising the gas tax.

Wisniewski and the late U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), the state’s leading mass-transit advocates at the time, charged on the day Christie announced the cancellation that his real motivation in killing the rail tunnel was to “steal” billions of dollars to refuel the Transportation Trust Fund, which was scheduled to run out of money for new projects that budget year.