A furious New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie took another slap at plans for the 9/11 anniversary ceremony yesterday, saying Mayor Bloomberg has now snubbed the Port Authority chairman.
“The Port Authority lost 84 employees on September 11, and the Port Authority should be represented there that day,” Christie demanded.
He said that his appointee, PA Chairman David Samson, “should be included in the ceremony.”
It was Christie’s second shot in as many days at the plans surrounding the solemn ceremony, which is being fully choreographed by the Bloomberg administration.
Christie privately denounced Hizzoner as a “dictator,” “Napoleon” and a “putz” because the city initially left former New Jersey Gov. Donald DiFrancesco — who was in office at the time of the terror attacks — out of the ceremony.
On Wednesday, Mayor Bloomberg finally agreed to invite DiFrancesco after “Gov. Christie’s staff” called his office.
“If we allow New York to make every one of these decisions with just New York, no one from New Jersey would be there,” Christie told reporters yesterday. “That’s my job. I’m standing up for the people of my state.”
Still, the Garden State governor insisted he and Mayor Bloomberg are “friends” despite a roiling tension between the two.
“We’re not going to have an Alexander Hamilton-Aaron Burr moment, as much as you guys might like it,” he told reporters yesterday, alluding to the celebrated duel of political rivals in nearby Weehawken.
Bloomberg also tried to shrug off the cross-Hudson squabble.
“As you know, we’ve tried to keep the focus away from politics and politicians and on families, where it belongs,” he said yesterday.
When it comes to the terror attacks, Hizzoner said, “I don’t think the public is interested in these probably-made-up stories about political squabbling that really take away from the solemnity, if that’s the right word, of the occasion.”
But that — and the DiFrancesco concession — didn’t seem to be enough for Christie yesterday.
DiFrancesco “didn’t get an invitation to come, let alone an invitation to speak,” Christie said. “My view was I was going to keep asking [about an invitation] until I got ‘yes.’ ”
And as for Samson, he “is the leader of the ground we will be standing on. I don’t understand why this is such a hard thing,” Christie said.
Christie said all the invited VIPs, which include President Obama, Christie and Gov. Cuomo, “will do exactly the same thing” — reading short, apolitical passages or poems.
Asked if he has spoken to Christie about issues concerning the World Trade Center site, Bloomberg said, “Governor Christie has not called me, and he’s not a shrinking violet. If he had something to say, I’m sure he’d pick up the phone.”