It was four years ago tonight, during COVID and the presidential campaign, that a prominent Democrat and his wife visited with the president and first lady at a golf club.
Donald Trump then tweeted: “Just finished dinner in Bedminster, New Jersey, with Governor Phil Murphy and his wonderful wife, Tammy. Talked about many things, including the opening of the beautiful Garden State, getting people back to work, and rebuilding America’s infrastructure with projects like the Portal North Bridge, which I have given authorization to proceed!”
Trump, then running for reelection, got to appear a bit bipartisan hosting the Democratic governor. As for Murphy, he left the dinner with something more substantial, as Trump was getting behind a new rail bridge on the Hackensack River feeding passenger trains towards the Hudson River tunnel and Manhattan’s Penn Station.
Actually, Trump was only forecasting a coming approval, as a week later, on June 19, the Federal Transit Administration advanced NJTransit’s $1.8 billion Portal North Bridge project into the engineering phase and qualified for a $766.5 million grant in the FTA’s Core Capacity program.
The final contract between NJT and Uncle Sam for the $766.5 million was signed on Jan. 14, 2021, a week after Trump’s failed putsch at the Capitol and a week before Joe Biden was sworn into office.
That payment of $766.5 million was, and remains, a fraud on the law, as Congress has explicitly required in statute that all such Core Capacity grants produce at least a 10% increase in ridership. And this new two-track bridge, now half built, will carry the exact same number of NJT trains as the 1910 two-track bridge it is replacing: a maximum of 21 commuter trains an hour at the peak of the morning inbound rush. There are also three Amtrak trains during that 60-minute period.
We exposed this obvious fraud in a 2018 editorial with the headline “Bridge of lies,” as another of the terrible problems with the larger Gateway boondoggle, now costing perhaps $50 billion, but both the NJT and FTA continued to collude to fake the process. NJT is supposed to obey the law when applying for federal money and FTA is supposed to enforce that law. Instead both the state and federal agencies willfully ignored the law.
The scheming started during different Republican and Democratic administrations in both Trenton and Washington in 2016 when Barack Obama was president and Chris Christie was governor. NJT was then operating 13 double-decker trains and eight single level trains during the morning peak. They claimed that a new bridge would allow them to run all 21 as double-deckers, thus boosting capacity and meeting the 10% threshold.
But it was a lie and the feds knew and let it slide. NJT was already in the process of replacing its single level train sets with the double-deckers. As of now, five have been switched over and the last three will be subbed out next year when new rolling stock arrives. That means that all of the gains will have been realized and the new bridge will not produce any improvements in capacity. Ergo, it doesn’t deserve a penny of Core Capacity money and definitely not $766.5 million.
NJT must return every dollar to the feds.
