Chris Christie Reopens Dialogue With Dems on Transportation Trust Fund
The political leaders at odds in New Jersey’s ongoing transportation funding crisis are talking again for the first time since mid-August.
Republican Gov. Chris Christie met with Democratic Assembly Speaker Vincent Prieto on Aug. 29 and said he hoped to meet this week with Democratic Senate President Stephen Sweeney, his chief antagonist.
“The speaker and I met today, we had a really good meeting,” Christie told reporters at an Aug. 29 press conference in the State House in Trenton.
Christie declined to say more, and Prieto, who at one time supported the approaches of both the governor and Sweeney, wasn’t much more informative.
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"It was just a good dialogue between me and the governor,” Prieto told reporters after meeting with Christie. “I'm willing to budge. [Christie and Sweeney] are going to have to come and be reasonable. They have got to walk to the middle of the room.”
It remains unclear when Christie and Sweeney will be in the same room.
“I've been able to come to a deal with a Democratic Legislature over and over and over again over the last seven years," said Christie, who shut down all nonessential road construction and maintenance in New Jersey on July 8 because the Transportation Trust Fund was on the verge of running out of money. “I'm the first governor in 27 years who said I would sign a gas-tax increase. … I got the bill, along with the speaker, through the Assembly with a bipartisan vote, and the Senate wouldn't support it. If [Sweeney] can't compromise, then we're not going to get a Transportation Trust Fund done. I’m willing to do the right thing. If the Senate president is unwilling to do it, that’s his call.”
Christie and Sweeney both support tax increases of 27 cents per gallon on diesel and 23 cents per gallon on gasoline to boost the Transportation Trust Fund, but they differ on related tax relief. New Jersey’s current taxes of 17.5 cents on diesel and 14.5 cents on gasoline are the nation’s lowest outside of Alaska and haven’t been raised since 1988.
“There’s a limit to the tax cuts that we can provide,” Sweeney said at an Aug. 2 press conference. “There’s a level that beyond it, you can’t fund things.”
Legislative analysts have said Christie’s package would cost between $1.8 billion and $2 billion. The governor said he thinks it will cost about half of that.
“We'll have to wait and see how the meeting with Sweeney goes,” said Gail Toth, executive director of the New Jersey Motor Truck Association. “At the end of the day, the fuel tax will go up. … It's just a matter of how they are going to sell the plan by reducing taxes somewhere else.”
