1hundredsixty8

Errr… I meant “Of, By and For the Governors.

You may have noticed last weekend that a bill to reform the bi-state Port Authority of New York and New Jersey that had unanimously passed the legislatures of both states was simultaneously vetoed by Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie, the governors of the respective states. In an act of seldom-seen political courage, the two chief executives issued a joint press release late Saturday night. I am guessing that they were aiming for maximum media coverage.

This, boys and girls, is how representative democracy works these days.

“We crossed party lines to pass Port Authority reform, and they crossed party lines to obstruct it,” said Democratic Assemblywoman Valerie Vainieri Huttle of New Jersey, who sponsored the bill in her state, referring to the fact that Cuomo is a Democrat and Christie a Republican. What they have in common, besides the Hudson River, is outsized political ambition.

The reforms in the vetoed bill had the goal of making the workings of the agency, which administers metro New York’s three major airports, interstate tunnels and bridges, and the Trans-Hudson subway, more transparent and more insulated from political interference.  Among its provisions were the opening all of the agency’s meetings to the public and the requirement that PA’s commissioners acknowledge in writing that their primary fiduciary responsibility was to the Authority itself.

The latter is significant because, under the current arrangement, the Authority’s executive director is appointed by the New York governor, the deputy executive director by the New Jersey governor. Having their appointees run an agency which does much of its business behind closed doors has appealed to governors for decades.This has, in turn, made the agency a patronage plum, given the jobs and contracts it controls. Its 2015 budget is $7.8 billion dollars. It owns valuable real state throughout the area, including One World Trade Center. A lesson learned from Robert Moses’ control of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority in the mid-Twentieth Century was these quasi-public authorities are a great source of political power.

It is doubtful that Messrs. Christie and Cuomo are willing to relinquish that power. They certainly want to appear to be supportive of reform: In their joint press release, they threw their support behind the recommendations of a panel they themselves had appointed earlier this year. As former NY Assemblyman Richard Brodsky said, "They ripped the heart out of real reform in order to maintain their control and power. Power trumped good government."