New Jersey’s first lady helped kill the Hudson River rail tunnel, according to her hubby.
Gov. Chris Christie says wife Mary Pat was an outspoken opponent of the controversial project, pointing out that its planned Manhattan terminal under Herald Square posed a hassle for busy commuters.
“The lobbying to me on this one was from [the first lady],” said Christie, whose wife commuted from the Jersey suburbs to New York City for nearly two decades as a Cantor Fitzgerald bond trader.
“She’s, like, ‘So this thing’s going 10 stories under Macy’s, [and] then I gotta go back up and I gotta walk over to Penn Station. I get on a subway. . .’ ”
“She said, ‘This is crazy. This doesn’t make any sense,’ ” Christie told The Record of Hackensack.
Christie last month called a halt to construction on the $8.7 billion Access to the Region’s Core (ARC) project, which would connect northern New Jersey to Manhattan via a tunnel to 34th Street.
The governor said his financially flagging state couldn’t afford the potential billions in cost overruns.
His decision was blasted by Democrats, environmentalists and some commuters.
But a recent Quinnipiac University poll showed New Jersey voters agreed, 53 to 37 percent, with Christie’s controversial call.
Christie made the comments to The Record after the Federal Transportation Administration said this week it would seek an immediate payback from New Jersey of the $271 million that it has put toward the tunnel project.
But Christie said he’d fight the feds.
The Garden State, he declared, won’t fork over “a nickel more than we think we have to” in payback.
Christie also fumed that the government didn’t offer to kick in for the cost overages of ARC.
“If this is such an issue of huge national importance to the federal government, I gave them an opportunity over two weeks to come back to me and say, ‘We want to assume the overages or assume a large percentage of the overages,” Christie said.
“They never offered that.”
Christie said he believes there should be more rail access to New York and confirmed New Jersey officials are in talks with Amtrak about using some of what’s been done on ARC for a high-speed rail line.