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Current and former officials of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey say a scheme was devised to give the governors of both states political cover for a 2011 toll hike at bi-state bridges and tunnels.

(John Munson/The Star-Ledger)

On Aug. 5, 2011, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey issued a jaw-dropping proposal to immediately raise bridge and tunnel tolls by $4 for E-ZPass subscribers and $7 for cash customers, followed by another increase in 2014. The proposed hikes amounted to a 75 percent increase for E-ZPass users and 112.5 percent for those paying cash.

The authority also proposed PATH fares go up $1, from $1.75 to $2.75.

The reaction was swift and angry, with commuters and lawmakers blasting the increases.

Gov. Chris Christie, who said he had no advance knowledge of the proposal, was among them.

“You’re kidding, right?” Christie told reporters three days after the announcement, describing what he said when briefed on the proposal.

But within two weeks, after a blizzard of 36 press releases by the Port Authority on behalf of toll hike supporters and after public hearings packed with union laborers backing the plan, Christie and his New York counterpart, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, consented to a more modest increase. Even then, the governors conditioned their approval on a top-to-bottom financial review of the agency.

The thing is, a former Port Authority official told The Star-Ledger, “It was all bullshit.”

From the start, the fix was in, said that former official and five others who occupied key Port Authority posts when the toll hike was rolled out and eventually approved.

The whole process, the authority officials said, was orchestrated from the outset to make the governors look good even as they reached deeper, through the long arm of the authority, into the public’s pockets.

The former Port Authority officials (five who are no longer with the agency and one who is still there) outlined the strategy and execution of the plan in separate interviews with The Star-Ledger. Each asked that their names not be used because they feared repercussions from speaking out even after they had left the agency.

The first proposal disclosed to the public, the former officials explained, was deliberately inflated. Also planned was Christie and Cuomo’s shocked — shocked! — reaction and an unusual one-day series of eight public hearings. Those hearings were all held during the morning or evening rush hours to discourage attendance by irate commuters, but were stacked with union members who backed the hike because of the construction jobs it would fund.

All this, the sources said, was designed to set up the governors’ ostensibly reluctant approval of a more modest hike, accompanied by their stern admonitions that this was it and that the agency had better get its financial house in order once and for all.

But it was all Hollywood on the Hudson, the six sources said, scripted all the way through.

"They knew what the toll increase would be," said one former official. "They set the governors up to look like heroes. It was all a farce."

BRIDGING THE SCANDALS

And, the sources said, the fictional plan was led by the same people who two years later would arrange the September 2013 George Washington Bridge lane closures, which have engulfed the Christie administration in scandal.

The two were Bill Baroni, the former Republican state senator and GOP campaign lawyer named by Christie to the agency’s deputy executive director post in early 2010, and David Wildstein, the former political blogger and Republican mayor of Livingston, where he went to high school with Christie.

Baroni’s lawyer, Michael Himmel, said his client had “no comment” on the assertions.

Wildstein’s lawyer, Alan Zegas, called the officials' version of the toll hike “inaccurate.”

He did not specify how. He also suggested there was a conspiracy to tar his client. “It is a snippet, and a not fully accurate one, of reality,” Zegas said.

The Christie administration did not return phone calls or emails. Ranking officials at the authority also did not comment. Cuomo’s office likewise did not respond to calls or emails.

While none of those officials would comment, a committee chaired by Assemblyman John Wisniewski has subpoenaed all documents and correspondence between the Port Authority and the Christie administration regarding the toll hike.

Wisniewski was one of the original skeptics of the hike when it was announced, and he still isn’t buying it.

“My suspicion is — I think it’s pretty well understood as fact — that the original announcement of whatever the toll increase was was all theater, so that would allow the governor to say, ‘No, no, it has to be lower,’ ” Wisniewski said in an interview following the most recent round of subpoenas.

For him and others, the toll hike scenario was too pat. How, the skeptics asked, could Christie not have known about the initial proposal when he had appointed two of his closest political allies to Port Authority leadership, Chairman David Samson and Baroni?

One source said complete responses to the latest subpoenas from the legislative committee would reveal that the bridge closures and the toll hike were engineered out of much the same playbook.

A minimum of agency officials were made aware of what was happening with the toll hike and sworn to secrecy under the implied threat of losing their jobs, the six sources said. And both actions included some of the same players.

“He’ll find emails,” the official said of Wisniewski, who co-chairs the joint committee with state Sen. Loretta Weinberg (D-Bergen). “And he’ll find the emails between Baroni, Wildstein and the governor’s office. And he’ll also find emails between Baroni and Cuomo’s office.”

GOOD COP-BAD COP

To keep track of who knew what, a list was kept of those with knowledge of the scheme, the former officials said. And just as Port Authority officials have testified that the lane closures were kept secret from the agency’s current executive director, New York appointee Patrick Foye, Foye’s predecessor, Christopher Ward, was also excluded from the planning and implementation of the toll hike.

According to the former agency officials, the toll hikes were planned behind the scenes, primarily by Wildstein though Baroni was Wildstein’s official supervisor.

Former Port Authority official David Wildstein was allegedly at the helm of this political "theater."

The former officials said the two seemed to act in tandem, depending on what the situation called for.

“I always got the impression that they played good cop-bad cop, and Wildstein was always the bad guy, and Baroni was always the good guy,” one official said. “Within the agency, they would send Wildstein, and when they wanted a cheerleader, they would send Baroni.”

All about timing

Ward, a 2008 appointee of former Gov. David Paterson of New York, broached the idea of a toll hike with Christie’s incoming team in the spring of 2010, as the agency’s looming financial problems became increasingly clear, the former officials said.

But for the New Jersey side, the problem was political as well as financial. Christie had campaigned for governor in 2009 as an anti-tax fiscal conservative and had criticized his Democratic opponent, then-Gov. Jon Corzine, for increasing tolls on the New Jersey Turnpike.

So, the former officials said, Ward’s talk of a toll hike was rebuffed, with the assertion that, because most bridge and tunnel users are from New Jersey, raising tolls was a Garden State prerogative.

“ ‘This is a New Jersey thing, this is our thing, this is not your thing,’ ” one former official said, recalling New Jersey’s response.

However, as time went on, the former officials said, the New Jersey side acknowledged the need to raise tolls, particularly if the agency was to forge ahead with a capital plan that included redevelopment of the World Trade Center site and other projects more strongly backed by Christie.

Most notable of those was a plan to raise the Bayonne Bridge roadway to ensure the viability of container ports in Newark and Elizabeth, which generate tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in economic activity annually.

Putting off the toll hike until 2011, the former officials said, not only allowed Christie’s anti-toll, anti-tax campaign rhetoric to fade from the public’s memory, but it also meant that Cuomo, a Democrat who took office in January 2011, would be in office to share in the toll hike decision — and any political fallout from it.

The keeper of the list

Then, as during the September 2013 lane closures, Wildstein was seen by colleagues as the hand behind the machinery. Before joining the Port Authority, Wildstein’s public-sector experience was limited to a single, unpopular term as mayor of Livingston, the Essex County suburb where he grew up and first got to know Christie when they both attended Livingston High School. And while some former colleagues viewed Wildstein as an operative drawn to politics and to Christie out of a fascination with power, others had a more sympathetic view of his motives.

“I really think that he believed that he was doing the political version of god’s work,” said one of the officials. “He had a very difficult time as mayor of Livingston, and this was a chance at redemption.”

The sources say the toll hike operation was run out of a conference room on the 15th floor of the Port Authority’s Manhattan headquarters on Park Avenue, and only those on Wildstein’s secret list had access to the room.

A component of the operation was to create the appearance of a groundswell of public support for the toll hikes to help offset the inevitable commuter anger. So, the officials said, Wildstein presided over a blizzard of press releases — 36 in three days — in support of the project. They were issued by the Port Authority on behalf of groups ranging from the Building and Construction Trades Council, whose members stood to gain financially from projects funded by the hike.

“They produced all of those (releases) from that room,” said one former official.

WORKING THE MEETINGS

Others identified as having taken part in the toll hike campaign included Maggie Moran, a former Corzine deputy chief of staff and Cuomo campaign official, who at the time was director of business development for the Laborers International Union of North America, or LIUNA. Port Authority Commissioner Ray Pocino is a vice president of the union.

The former officials said Moran was tasked with ensuring a strong LIUNA turnout at the public hearings. The officials said ordinary commuters, on the other hand, were deliberately discouraged from attending by the scheduling of the eight hearings on a single day, Aug. 15, either during the morning or evening rush hours, at locations largely unfamiliar to the general public.

The laborers’ union said it was proud of its role in pushing through the toll hike, which was intended to fund billions of dollars in infrastructure projects and create thousands of jobs for union workers.

“LIUNA Vice President Pocino has an entire staff dedicated to supporting infrastructure investment and economic growth, so supporting the Port Authority fare increase was a no-brainer,” read a statement from the union. “Maggie, along with many other staff at the union, was involved in all aspects of building a coalition in support.

"The public had a variety of opportunities to express their views including online, written testimony, and the hearings," the statement added. Moran declined comment.

in the public

As anticipated, there was an outpouring of rage over the initial toll hike proposal.

Then-U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) — a harsh critic of the governor's cancellation of the ARC commuter rail tunnel in late 2010 — called the increases an "outrageous proposal" that would be unacceptable even if cut by half.

Steve Carrellas, a New Jersey delegate to the National Motorists Association, called the proposals “unbelievable” and “insane in this economic environment.”

DINNER DATE

In a joint statement, Christie and Cuomo said that although the Port Authority was facing financial issues, so were families in the states of New Jersey and New York. Separately, Cuomo characterized the initial proposal as “a nonstarter.”

But as planned, according to former officials, the governors ultimately agreed to a more modest increase: from $8 for all cars, to $9.50 for E-ZPass users and $12 for cash customers immediately, followed by smaller increases in each of the next four years. The plan was approved by Port Authority commissioners, and tolls will top out at $12.50 for E-ZPass subscribers and $15 for cash customers in December 2015, totals that will be less than the $14 and $17 initially proposed.

A week before the initial, higher toll hike proposal was announced, Christie and Cuomo had dinner at the Beacon restaurant in Manhattan, a meeting disclosed that September, when Cuomo’s office released his appointment schedule. Word of the dinner further fueled suspicion that the governors had agreed to an elaborately fictionalized toll hike scheme, but Christie refused to say what he and Cuomo discussed while they broke bread.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo

“It doesn’t change any of the statements I made previously,” Christie told reporters on Sept. 22, 2011. “I was informed of the toll increase, of the magnitude of the toll increase after that dinner.”

It was after their dinner that the governors sent a joint letter to Samson, directing him and the board to approve the more modest hike.

“We did not want to see any toll increase,” Christie and Cuomo wrote to the chairman on Sept. 18, the eve of the toll vote. However, given the agency’s financial straits, the governors concluded, “an increase cannot be avoided.”

Gov. Chris Christie

But as the skeptics suspected, former officials said, it was just for show.

“It was all orchestrated to make the governors look good,” the official said. “But who takes the black eye in that scenario? The agency.”

Carrellas of the National Motorists Association said it all makes sense now “in light of what we now know about behavior at the Port Authority.”

He added, “As a voice of reason, this should be the straw that broke the camel’s back about real reform at the Port Authority.”

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

The six former and current officials the paper spoke to provided one final revelation.

The first toll hike proposal was, they say, much like the one that was eventually implemented, but getting there was sheer theater.

After Christie and Cuomo’s dinner, the current and former officials say, Baroni made a trip to the Statehouse, taking with him a set of numbers that included the dollar amount of a modest toll hike and its projected revenues — all worked out by the staff.

Upon his return, however, Baroni presented staffers with a set of much higher increases, which he said the governors had agreed on.

“This is crazy,” one former official recalled thinking.

After the higher increase was announced to the public, officials were once again baffled by the governors’ joint statement expressing concern over the size of the proposed hike, as well as by Christie’s exclamation: “Are you kidding me?”

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