New on the transportation front, a new open records policy. Old bus terminal trouble calls for a new Trans-Hudson train and criticism of Gov. Chris Christie by the Transportation Commissioner Christie appointed. Founding Director of the Alan Vorhees Transportation Center and former NJ Transit official Martin Robins told NJTV News Anchor Mary Alice Williams that the new open records policy was an important step of the Port Authority.
The Port Authority has a new open records policy and Robins said that he thinks that it is a very important step and the commissioners deserve credit for taking the cue and implementing the policy. He said whether the policy will satisfy everyone remains to be unseen.
When asked how much money New Jersey will need to contribute to get new rail tunnels built, Robins said that is a very difficult question to answer. He said the project has been redefined and narrowed so that Amtrak is now talking about the first phase being the building of two new rail tunnels and that is in response to the engineering report that said they desperately need to have additional tunnels to run their services. He said the project will be redefined and the cost will be recalculated and then the question will be how is the cost responsibility divided up? He said that the North-East Corridor Commission that is working on cost allocations and that may create a binding set of guidelines as the how the costs are to be shared. Robins said that he has heard some people talk about it being that the guidelines might relate largely to the number of trains that each agency runs per hour or per day. He said that would put a pretty heavy burden on New Jersey tax payers because it is NJ Transit, which runs a lot of trains.
The new Commissioner of Transportation, Jaime Fox, has been critical of Christie for canceling the ARC Tunnel project. Robins said that it is surprising for a commissioner to criticize the governor who appointed him. Fox has also called out past policies to fund infrastructure projects as gimmicks and band-aid solutions. Robins said that there have been so many policies to fund infrastructure projects that they have to be taken one at a time and examine them.
He said that he thinks that Gov. Jon Corzine decided that he was not going to raise the gas tax and instead he raised the sales tax and he said he did it to amass the greatest amount of bonds the market can take and fund transportation through excessive bonding. Robins said when Christie came along, he came up with what has to be looked at in retrospect as a very suspect program, which has failed on many levels. He said that it is why the state is now at a point where as of next July, there will not be any money for the Transportation Trust Fund to continue.
The Port Authority Bus Terminal did not get the $230 million in grants that were requested. Robins said that he is very disappointed that happened but that he thinks that Port Authority has to go back to its capital program. He said it needs to be reexamined and costs need to be calculated, so that the capital program can be adjusted to what Port Authority needs. He said it is an essential investment.