'Vindictive ... p***k' Chris Christie accused of THIRD political revenge act as Democrats say he shut down urban DMV office because they opposed him



Elizabeth, NJ lost its Motor Vehicle Commission office at the end of 2010, leaving locals without a place for licenses and vehicle tags



The city's largely poor, black population was left in the lurch, the town's mayor says, because he and two state lawmakers ran afoul of Gov. Christie

The three Democratic politicians opposed Christie's first election as governor, and later pushed back against a plan to cap property tax hikes

The 'Bridgegate' scandal sounds familiar now as Elizabeth residents have to go miles away and wait in hours-long lines



A state assemblyman calls the situation the 'same thing' as Christie's alleged punishment of another mayor with traffic jams in September

'There was no logical reason to do it,' he says, 'other than to be a vindictive – I don't want to use the word "p***k" – but a vindictive individual'



Governor Chris Christie has been accused of exacting still more political revenge after his administration shut down the DMV office in a large New Jersey city three years ago – and Democratic politicians say it was because they opposed his tax policies and worked for his Election Day opponent.



'He shut it down, plain and simple, and of course this was political,' New Jersey state Assemblyman Joe Cryan told MailOnline of the Motor Vehicle Commission office in Elizabeth, the fourth-largest city in New Jersey. 'This was complete retribution. ... There was no other possible explanation for it.'

Cryan's district includes Elizabeth. He was former Gov. John Corzine's state Democratic chairman when he ran for re-election in 2009, unsuccessfully, against Christie.

Ray Lesniak, Cryan's state Senate counterpart representing the city, had been a top Corzine strategist since the future Democratic governor was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2000.

And Elizabeth's longtime mayor, Chris Bollwage, got under Christie's skin soon after he took Corzine's job, joining Cryan and Lesniak to publicly oppose what they called a 'flawed' plan to cap the rate of annual property tax increases in New Jersey.

The three Democrats now say closing the motor vehicle bureau in Elizabeth was a way for Christie to crush three political adversaries with a single stroke of his pen.



Christie and his insiders, Bollwage told MailOnline, 'are used to getting their way no matter the consequence to constituents and families.'

65 Jefferson Avenue in Elizabeth was once the location of a busy New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission office, but taxpayers in the region now have to trek to other cities to get their plates or licenses renewed, and politicians say wait times have skyrocketed

Mayor Chris Bollwage says the closure of his town's motor vehicle bureau office was an act of political retribution from Gov. Chris Christie Governor Chris Christie has begun his second term in office under a cloud of scandal related to traffic bottlenecks whose alleged political subtext sounds familiar to Democrats in Elizabeth and surrounding Union County

The mayor added that he suspects foul play in the Christie administration's awarding of money to fund red-light traffic safety cameras.

Three towns near Elizabeth have received the funds, but 'high volume' intersections in Elizabeth 'with numerous accidents and near-misses' didn't make the cut.



'Just another retaliation by this administration,' said Bollwage of Gov. Christie.



'And some folks think its a good idea that he gets the nuclear codes.'

The swipe is a reference to Christie's ambition to make a run at the White House in 2016.



While the moderate Republican has not yet said if he will enter the race, pollsters are already fond of taking the public's temperature with scenarios that pit him against Hillary Rodham Clinton in the next presidential contest.



But Christie's road to Washington, D.C. has become bumpy of late.

Need a state ID renewed but take mass-transit from your home in Elizabeth, NJ? Good luck finding the Newark Motor Vehicle Agency without a car

New Jersey state Senator Ray Lesniak, shown campaigning with U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, said the 'predominately minority, low-income' people of Elizabeth were left behind by the Christie administration

He fired two aides this month and watched as two political appointees resigned from the Port Authority in December, following an alleged plot to manufacture traffic jams leading from the town of Fort Lee to the George Washington Bridge during four days in September.

Democrats in Trenton are feverishly investigating the possibility that Christie personally gave the order as punishment for Democratic Mayor Mark Sokolich's failure to endorse his re-election bid.

Cryan compared the experience of frustrated Fort Lee commuters with Elizabeth's largely lower-income population after their local MVC office disappeared.



'Same thing,' he offered.

'And there was no logical reason to do it other than to be a vindictive – I don't want to use the word "prick" – but a vindictive individual.'

Christie spokesman Colin Reed defended the closing in a statement.

NJ Assemblyman Joseph Cryan said 'there was no logical reason' to close the Elizabeth MVC office, 'other than to be a vindictive -- I don't want to use the word "prick" -- but a vindictive individual.'

The governor, he said, 'immediately acted' when he took office 'to eliminate wasteful spending and ensure all government agencies were operating efficiently.'

'The Elizabeth agency was not only the least used of the three in Union County, but its consolidation saved New Jersey taxpayers nearly $300,000.'

Bollwage scoffed at that idea, saying in a little-noticed MSNBC interview that 'the salaries of the folks who worked there were relocated or assumed by others, and therefore all you were left with was lease payments.'

'And we wanted to work with the DMV, and move them into a building that may have even been owned by the city – because the service is important. Our demographics, our community needs a DMV that's located on bus lines.'



The closure of MVC offices in Elizabeth and two other towns came at the end of 2010, ten weeks after the governor's office notified local officials that the decision had been made. Whispers had circulated around Trenton for months about a plan to consolidate locations, but insiders tell MailOnline that no one expected Elizabeth to be on the short list.

'We heard at the time that Christie was stupid, that he made poor blacks think he didn't sympathize with them,' a veteran New Jersey Republican strategist said Wednesday, 'and in retrospect that's probably what happened.'



'I mean, look – these are folks who need to take the bus to renew their ID. They may have an old car, but they take the train to work. The Elizabeth location was on all the transit routes. And the one in Newark? You have to drive there.'

'Maybe Christie's people were a little tone-deaf,' the political insider said.



Lesniak sounded a similar note at the time, calling his home town 'predominately minority, low-income.'

'I think it’s a cold, cruel and, ... despicable thing for them to do this,' he said, noting that Elizabeth's taxpayers were less likely than New Jerseyans in wealthier areas to be able to conduct their MVC business online.



Scene of the crime? These George Washington Bridge toll booths were the location of the man-made 'Bridgegate' traffic bottlenecks that backed up commuters across the town of Fort Lee, New Jersey in September. Investigators are probing how high up in the governor's office the plot reached

Heads roll: Bridget Kelly (R) was a fixture alongside Christie as he toured disaster areas following the devastating Hurricane Sandy in 2013, but got the axe this month when emails from her emerged in which she appeared to orchestrate the bridge toll lane closures

Months later, with the Elizabeth office shuttered, Lesniak said his constituents were finding 3- and 4-hour wait times at other MVC locations, more than 5 miles away, that absorbed the overflow.

'The agencies around us got all that foot traffic from the shut-down Elizabeth office,' Cryan recalled,



He and Lesniak introduced a bill forcing the Motor Vehicles Commission to find a way to limit wait times to just 15 minutes system-wide. It passed in the Senate but never got a vote on the Assembly floor.

In one public hearing, Assemblyman Gary Schaer, a Passaic Democrat, quickly calculated that the Elizabeth MVC's 23 employees were already meeting that 15-minute standard when they lost their jobs.



'Why in the name of whatever would we want to be eliminating one of the branch divisions of your organization that is already achieving that?' Schaer asked a hearing witness from the Motor Vehicle Commission. 'And I did this on the back of a napkin.'



Mayor Bollwage added Wednesday via email – he's recovering from surgery on his vocal cords – that Gov. Christie saw the reorganization as an opportune moment to appoint two political allies as managers of the nearest MVC locations to survive.

Bollwage named Carlos Trujillo and Armando Da Silva, current and former members of the Elizabeth Board of Education who have supported Christie in both of his statewide elections. Their MVC jobs pay in excess of $70,000 each, according to public records.

'This administration is not one to deal with unless you want to get hurt in the future,' Mayor Bollwage said of Gov. Chris Christie's GOP inner circle in Trenton

The decision to close his city's MVC office, Bollwage said, came after a drawn-out legislative battle over annual increases on property tax rates.

Christie ran for governor on a platform of capping those rate hikes at 2 per cent. The mayor objected, he said, because 'tax bills in New Jersey are comprised of local taxes, county taxes and school taxes, and some have fire district taxes too.'

'All of those entities have a 2 per cent cap on their tax levy,' he explained, 'which in essence amounts to a 6 per cent tax increase to the property tax payer.'

More slights? A budget for red-light cameras in Elizabeth fell on deaf ears -- another sign, says the town's Democratic mayor, of political favoritism at work

And, Bollwage said, the Christie administration has given legal exemptions to some municipalities – allowing Elizabeth's school board, for instance, to push through a 7.5 per cent tax hike last year.

After the mayor objected, a Christie administration official in charge of education finances wrote to the city government insisting that despite the law's plain text, 'the tax levy cap for school districts ... is not a hard 2 percent cap.'

The mayor cited that episode as another indication that New Jerseyans in Democratic strongholds like Elizabeth and Fort Lee aren't served well by their governor.

'This administration is not one to deal with unless you want to get hurt in the future,' he said.

But the motor vehicle department office closure still stings three years later, he said.

'We have had a DMV since Henry Ford was building cars,' Bollwage said.

And Cryan told MailOnline that he knew right away when the announcement came in October 2010 that he had been 'Christied.'



'It wasn't hard to figure it out,' the assemblyman said. 'We knew the deal'