Stop me if you've heard this one before.

New Jersey officials meet with New York officials to come up with a plan to build two trans-Hudson tunnels to supplement the two built early in the 20th century.

Little by little the price grows. At the same time the benefits to New York increase and the benefits to New Jersey decrease.

Eventually the project collapses under its own weight.

That was the story of the failed Access to the Region's Core project. It began in the 1990s as a way to give Jersey commuters access to Grand Central Terminal on the east side of Manhattan and to give Amtrak and NJ Transit trains better access to Penn Station on the west side.

By the time the New York side got done chipping away at ARC, both of those goals were discarded. First NJ Transit trains were denied access to Grand Central. That meant the plan had to be expanded to include a new dead-end terminal deep under Manhattan.

And because the tunnels now went to "Macy's Basement," Amtrak trains could no longer share them.

In 2010, Gov. Christie axed the ARC project. Then in 2011, Amtrak officials announced the beginning of the Gateway Project to build two new tunnels.

This was a virtual clone of one of the original ARC plans that would have cost about $8 billion. But now the price tag had risen to $13.5 billion.

It's still rising. At a Monday legislative hearing on the Gateway project, the price tag was almost $30 billion. The Jersey guys, both Republicans and Democratic, are getting fed up.

Leading the charge was state Senate minority leader Tom Kean Jr. What set him off was a presentation by a representative of the Regional Plan Association who talked about how 150,000 new jobs would be created in Brooklyn and Queens.

If new jobs are going to be created in places adjacent to Manhattan, then let's create them on this side of the Hudson, Kean said.

"My point is that if we out-compete New York, at least a portion of those jobs and that tax revenue would actually come to the state of New Jersey," he told me after the meeting. "It should be clear to everybody that New York is beating us in this competition."

That's certainly true when it comes to tax revenue. New York gets more than $3 billion a year from Jersey commuters' income taxes. Yet the New Yorkers seem to think they're entitled to an even bigger slice.

The plan from the RPA, which is a private planning agency, calls for adding another $7 billion to the price tag to build a connection from Penn Station to a new train station to be built above the Sunnyside Yards rail complex in Queens.

But who the heck wants to go to Queens? Certainly not Sen. Bob Gordon.

Gordon is just one of many Bergen Democrats who are fed up with the way their county gets slighted when it comes to transit. Gordon said Gateway doesn't do much for Bergen commuters, who rely largely on buses.

If Gateway is going to be expanded to places outside Manhattan, then perhaps that badly needed extension of the Bergen-Hudson Light Rail should be included, he said. But we don't have the money.

"We're trying to figure out where we're going to get the $30 billion for the current proposal," he told me. "Why would you want to add another $7 billion to the price?"

A transit advocate who testified, former Long Island Rail Road executive Joe Clift, said that Gateway needs to be pared back to its essentials. He said the cost could be reduced to perhaps $10 billion by simply building the two new tunnels, replacing the ancient Portal Bridge over the Hackensack and modernizing the current Penn Station rather than building a new Penn Station South.

As for the $30 billion-plus plan, "It's a crummy deal for New Jersey," he said.

Commuters on the line run by his former employer, the LIRR, will soon be able to take advantage of a direct connection to Grand Central. But under the current Gateway plan, Jersey commuters will still be stuck on the west side.

"Long Island has primo access to the core of the city while Jersey will have the crummy access it has today," he said. "You spend $30 billion and you still have second-class service?"

Yes, that's the plan.

And unless $30 billion falls out of the sky, a better plan would be to figure out how to keep those commuters on this side of the river.