Still steaming over those steep (and soon-to-be-steeper) Port Authority toll increases imposed last fall?
Not to worry. The PA’s new leadership has moved “quickly and aggressively” to “radically” reform the agency.
Translation: All’s going swimmingly.
That, anyway, is a key theme of a “top-to-bottom” agency audit by two outside consultants, the PA said last Wednesday.
What a hoot! The truth? The claim is a fraud wrapped in a lie spawned by a deception. (For starters, the audit never uses the words “radically” or “aggressively.”)
Rewind to 2011, when the PA, then headed by Chris Ward, proposed stiff bridge and tunnel toll hikes. Fearing an outcry, Govs. Cuomo and Chris Christie (who oversee the agency) threw howling tantrums — though it’s preposterous to claim they didn’t OK the hikes well in advance.
Days later, they officially signed off on the hikes, which had been scaled back some — but vowed a searing “audit” that would expose the “massive” PA overspending driving the toll spikes and explain why Ward was a goner.
Gee, they should’ve been reading The Post: For years, we’d been citing the boatloads of cash being poured into PA projects at Ground Zero, particularly the white-elephant PATH station, with its $4 billion price tag — some $80,000 for each daily PATH rider who’ll use it. (Buying each of them a Mercedes instead would save a bundle.)
No matter. Ward was out. The first half of the audit appeared in February. And, of course, it found a boatload of PA “dysfunction.”
Now drops the second shoe: The audit’s authors are referring to the folks who hired them as “revitalized [PA] leadership,” citing their “proactive approach” and “resolve to drive change.”
As for the toll hikes? Yeah, they were necessary, just as Ward said — and still are.
Indeed, the audit suggests, they weren’t enough: The “challenges” facing the PA are “enormous,” it notes. Some $44 billion in capital projects remain in want of funding.
Let’s face it: This audit game was nothing but political theater, meant to justify toll hikes neither governor had the courage to back, and to rationalize the ouster of Chris Ward, who’d done much good at the PA.
Its saving grace is its focus on the need for funds for vital maintenance, repairs and upgrades to keep the region’s transportation network (and the local economy) humming — and its call to “contain costs.”
But beyond that, it’s just political armor plate, and rusty at that.
The PA could have done better had it nixed the multimillion-dollar audit from the start.
Call it “cost containment.”