Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

Fighting a Pipeline, but Feeling and Fearing Christie’s Influence

By MICHAEL POWELL
JAN. 8, 2014

Pity Gov. Chris Christie. He sounds so assertive, so obstreperous, so, so ... in charge.

Then it turns out maybe he’s just another chief executive locked in a closet by his staff. Or at least that was the explanation he offered on Wednesday.

Those senior advisers of his who conspired to close ramps in Fort Lee, N.J., that lead local traffic to the George Washington Bridge, which just happens to be the nation’s busiest bridge? That payback because the mayor didn’t endorse him? He was mortified.

“What I’ve seen today for the first time is unacceptable,” Mr. Christie said in a late afternoon statement transmitted from the fastness of the State House. “I am outraged. ...”

Our governor’s problem is that this is a patented rhetorical move. Somebody crosses the governor, on a matter large or small, someone displeases him, and unfortunate stuff often happens. Last month my colleague Kate Zernike collected a baker’s dozen examples [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/25/nyregion/accounts-of-petty-retribution-reinforce-christies-bullying-image.html ] of his retributive justice. A former governor blocked Mr. Christie on some matter, and the State Police superintendent pulled his police escort. A political scientist at Rutgers declined to endorse a Republican gerrymander of state districts, and darned if the governor’s office didn’t cut $169,000 for an institute directed by this professor.

Then there are the three respected prosecutors in Hunterdon County [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/11/nyregion/43-count-indictment-of-a-christie-ally-quashed.html ] who obtained an indictment of a Republican sheriff and asked questions of a favored Christie fund-raiser. The attorney general’s office — which is controlled by the governor — took over the Hunterdon office, tossed the indictments and fired or forced into retirement the three lawyers.

One prosecutor, Bennett Barlyn, sued the state, charging political interference. I asked Mr. Christie’s spokesman, Michael Drewniak, about that and he scoffed: “This truly is some of the most wild-eyed conspiracy theories I’ve heard in a long time.”

Yes, well.

As it happens, those who dust for the governor’s fingerprints have found another hardball example in southern New Jersey. The South Jersey Gas Company wants to thread a 22-mile-long pipeline through the heart of the Pinelands, a 1.1-million-acre protected expanse of scrub pines, gnarly oaks and yellow-brown river deltas.

The Pinelands Commission, a state agency, oversees this reserve, which includes a trillion-gallon aquifer that provides freshwater to residents. Board members traditionally have treated proposals to trespass into this reserve with deep skepticism.

But the Christie administration badly wants this pipeline, and has crafted a highly unusual agreement. The gas company has offered to pay $8 million to the commission. The commission staff members, who are state employees, have blessed the project. And the law firm of the governor’s good friend David Samson — the chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey — is representing the power plant that would receive the gas.

Still, the governor faces a tough battle. New Jersey is densely settled, and its residents take seriously the defense of their green spaces. Four of his predecessors — the Republicans Christine Todd Whitman and Thomas H. Kean, and the Democrats James J. Florio and Brendan T. Byrne — together wrote a letter of opposition to the commission.

“The current proposal,” they wrote, “would compromise the integrity of the Pinelands Plan and serve to encourage future development.”

On the commission itself, Edward Lloyd, an environmental law professor at Columbia University, loomed as a formidable roadblock. Mr. Lloyd, 65, had not taken a position but he had asked tough penetrating questions.

On Dec. 6, a deputy attorney general called Mr. Lloyd. We have a letter, the deputy told him, from the nonprofit Eastern Environmental Law Center asking the Pinelands Commission to hold another public meeting on this proposal. You are president of this center’s board of directors, and we think this is a conflict of interest.

Mr. Lloyd noted that he had not heard of this letter and that a public meeting request should not represent a conflict of interest. (The law center has withdrawn the letter.)

The deputy attorney general told Mr. Lloyd that he could appeal to the Pinelands Commission’s ethics lawyer. Mr. Lloyd was working on that appeal when his phone rang. It was the ethics officer.

“She said, ‘Don’t shoot the messenger, but on orders of the governor’s office, I went to the State Ethics Commission and they have ordered you to recuse yourself.’ ”

Mr. Lloyd was taken aback. “I thought to myself, ‘The governor’s office?’ That’s remarkable.”

Mr. Lloyd could refuse to recuse himself. But he could face fines of thousands of dollars. “That’s a lot of money if I guess wrong,” he noted.

From here, the case grows murkier still. On Wednesday I called the attorney general’s office, and a spokesman, Leland Moore, sent an email reply. We advised Mr. Lloyd to recuse himself, he noted, and recommended that he consult with the State Ethics Commission.

The Ethics Commission, Mr. Moore noted, “apparently made the same determination.”

I called the Ethics Commission, and its executive director said this was not true. “We haven’t made such a determination,” said Peter Tober, the executive director. “It came from the attorney general or the Pinelands ethics officer.”

So I called the Pinelands Commission. It was 3:40 p.m. The ethics officer, I was told, was gone for the day.

The commission votes on the pipeline on Friday and the vote is expected to be very close. All that’s left, as Mr. Lloyd noted in an email from China, where he is traveling, is to decide — in light of the news from the Ethics Commission — whether he should vote.

And to wonder what may happen if he crosses a governor who pays very close attention.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/09/nyregion/in-calm-of-a-nature-reserve-feeling-and-fearing-christies-influence.html?_r=0

what a sob.. I'm thought I disliked him before but now I want him OUT of ALL offices! .. come on People! in New Jersey .. throw the bum out! .. You can do it! .. OR see to it that he has absolutely no power whatsoever ...ever.. ; )