NEW YORK - New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie Wednesday ended an $8.7 billion mass-transit tunnel project that would have doubled commuter rail capacity between the Garden State and Manhattan.
Christie said New Jersey cannot afford to take on cost overruns that the federal government estimates to be between $1.1 billion to $4 billion. The project, called the Access to the Region’s Core, would also require the state to spend $775 million to construct the Portal Bridge South, a part of the ARC project, according to Christie.
New Jersey committed $2.7 billion towards the mass-transit tunnel. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the federal government pledged $3 billion each.
Christie initially terminated the project on Oct. 7, but U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood persuaded the Republican governor to review the tunnel project further. After nearly three weeks of discussions with the federal government, Christie Wednesday said that no additional federal aid would be forthcoming for the project.
“Gov. Christie accepted the recommendation of NJ Transit executive director Jim Weinstein to continue the orderly and expeditious shutdown of the ARC project,” according to a Christie press release. “Despite intense negotiations with federal and state participants, no agreement was reached on terms that would assure New Jersey’s taxpayers would not pay more than $2.7 billion for a completed Trans Hudson Express ARC project.”
Conversely, New Jersey’s U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg, a Democrat, said Tuesday evening that Christie’s plan was to end the project all along, even with additional financing help from the federal government.
“The federal government presented Gov. Christie with a number of financing options that would limit and even eliminate New Jersey’s responsibility to pay for cost overruns on the ARC tunnel,” Lautenberg said in a statement. “The federal government demonstrated its strong commitment to building this tunnel, but it was clear from the beginning that Gov. Christie planned to kill this project no matter what.”
The state has already spent nearly $600 million on the tunnel project and will need to give back $200 million to the federal government now that Christie has ended the development, according to the New Jersey Treasury Department.
The ARC tunnel would have created at least 6,000 construction jobs. It would have given NJ Transit an additional pathway under the Hudson River to run 48 trains at peak rush hour. The current tunnel’s capacity is 23 trains per hour.
