Nobody Could Have Predicted
By Chris Christie, brave truth-teller:
The report by the Government Accountability Office, to be released this week, found that while Mr. Christie said that state transportation officials had revised cost estimates for the tunnel to at least $11 billion and potentially more than $14 billion, the range of estimates had in fact remained unchanged in the two years before he announced in 2010 that he was shutting down the project. And state transportation officials, the report says, had said the cost would be no more than $10 billion.
Mr. Christie also misstated New Jersey’s share of the costs: he said the state would pay 70 percent of the project; the report found that New Jersey was paying 14.4 percent. And while the governor said that an agreement with the federal government would require the state to pay all cost overruns, the report found that there was no final agreement, and that the federal government had made several offers to share those costs.
But these lies were crucial to fulfilling Christie’s key objective — i.e. right-wing identity politics. Killing an infrastructure project the state very much needed was the end in itself.
Of course, this is all just a product of Christie’s highly principled Fiscal Conservatism, which holds that state money should go to property developers rather than actual public infrastructure.