Elizabeth Kolbert: How Chris Christie Wrecked the Port Authority
-- snip
Back in 1921, when the Port of New York Authority, as it was then chauvinistically called, was founded, it was—in the words of Jameson Doig, a professor emeritus at Princeton and the author of “Empire on the Hudson,” a six-hundred-page history of the agency—a “reformer’s vision.” A product of the Progressive Era, the authority was to be insulated from the vagaries of politics on both sides of the river, which is to say also from Trenton’s and Albany’s multifarious forms of corruption. Half its commissioners would be appointed by the governor of New York and half by the governor of New Jersey, but to promote their independence they would serve staggered, six-year terms.
Amazingly, this arrangement worked for the better part of the twentieth century. One of the Port Authority’s first major construction projects was, as it happens, the George Washington Bridge. When the bridge was dedicated, on October 24, 1931, New York’s governor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, declared that the authority was “charting the course toward the more able and honorable administration of our nation’s affairs,” and that it should serve as “a model for government agencies throughout the land.” The span—twice as long as any suspension bridge previously built—was completed below budget and ahead of schedule. The authority earned a reputation for integrity and professionalism. Writing in the nineteen-fifties, a reporter for the Newark News noted the “incredible vigor and efficiency” of its operations, “as contrasted with the slumberland of the average City Hall.”
A recent audit of the Port Authority, which, in addition to the George Washington Bridge, now runs the New York metropolitan area’s three major airports, the PATH train, the Holland Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, the Bayonne Bridge, the Goethals Bridge, and the Outerbridge Crossing, described the agency’s operations succinctly as “dysfunctional.” The audit, performed by a private consulting firm, suggested that at least some of the problems could be traced back to September 11, 2001, when the authority, which owned and was also headquartered in the World Trade Center, lost its executive director and eighty-three other employees. The terrorist attack, the report observed, took “a significant emotional toll on the psyche of the organization.”
In this case, as in so many others, farce followed tragedy. As soon as Christie took office, in 2010, he set about stuffing the weakened agency with his supporters. A lawsuit filed by a former employee revealed that within two years the new administration had sought berths at the Port Authority for nearly fifty loyalists. These included Wildstein, who attended high school with Christie, in Livingston, and was hired as the agency’s interstate-capital-projects director, at a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. (Wildstein resigned last month.) The patronage push made front-page news in the Bergen Record in early 2012, a development that should have been chastening to the Christie administration, but wasn’t. By the end of the year, the patronage count at the agency had reportedly reached eighty. By September, 2013, when the events at the center of the scandal took place, the authority was in such disarray that top-level Christie appointees were barely speaking to their colleagues from across the Hudson. The authority’s executive director, Patrick Foye, a New Yorker, seems not to have learned about the jam in Fort Lee until four days in; when he did, he ordered the lanes reopened. The chairman, David Samson, a New Jerseyan, responded with fury. Foye, he wrote in a private e-mail since made public, had a habit of “stirring up trouble.” This time, Samson said, Foye had “made a big mistake.” The chairman reached for a suitable metaphor: “He’s playing in traffic.”
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2014/01/27/140127taco_talk_kolbert?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews?mbid=social_retweet
= new reply since forum marked as read
Well in some way: (grrrrr, beautiful structure incredible loss)
The opposition reached a crescendo over the demolition of Pennsylvania Station, which many attributed to the "development scheme" mentality cultivated by Moses[20] even though it was the impoverished Pennsylvania Railroad that was actually responsible for the demolition.[21]
By the way this is one of the cars we drove in on Moses parkways.
Here's a description of the parkways.
It was Robert Moses who was the primary force behind the plan to create a system of efficient, scenic parkways to replace the increasingly congested and unattractive local roads. Although Robert Moses is credited as the force behind the development of the parkways, other designers were involved, most notably Clarence C. Coombs.
The Long Island Parkway System was envisioned as great ribbon parks, stretching east-west and north-south across Long Island, providing scenic access and linkage between the state parks then under development, such as Jones Beach, Bethpage and Sunken Meadow. The Long Island Parkway System followed the same design characteristics as the parks themselves, the two visually linked through common design. The system employed stone-faced arched bridges, turf shoulders, bracketed-arm wood light posts, post-and-rail fences and guide rails, naturalistic road alignments and plantings, and unobtrusive black-faced signs.
Ahhh. I'll have to remind my dad about those trips in this indulgent car!
We didn't have seatbelts.
Thanks 
I actually saw on Rachel's that PA created Wildstein's job as a favor to Christie. How much could you not know that guy if you are the Gov?
thanks flamingdem~
verrry limited zone, that!
I'm very unimpressed with his spin, not up to the likes of the rest of the republicons, a light weight. 
Bullies and Smear freaks.. at least give something worthy of your best Scams.. that are getting you busted right freaking NOW! 
Tiny tiny Awareness Cone Zone! that would be gov chris Christie of New Jersey.
