Speaking at a press conference in Fort Lee, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy announced that his administration has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) in an effort to block what he described as the “the ill-conceived” congestion pricing plan put forward by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and New York City and State agencies.
In the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, the State of New Jersey argues that the USDOT and the FHWA violated the National Environmental Protection Act, which requires a full environmental impact review for projects of this projected impact and scope, as well as the Clean Air Act.
Today’s announcement comes a few weeks after the Murphy Administration announced that it had retained Randy Mastro and Craig Carpenito of King & Spalding to explore all of its legal options.
“After refusing to conduct a full environmental review of the MTA’s poorly designed tolling program, the FHWA has unlawfully fast-tracked the agency’s attempt to line its own coffers at the expense of New Jersey families,” Murphy said.
“The costs of standing idly by while the MTA uses New Jersey residents to help balance its budget sheets are more than economic. At the MTA’s own admission, its tolling program would divert traffic and shift pollution to many vulnerable New Jersey communities, impacting air quality while offering nothing to mitigate such considerable harm. Today we stand as a unified front against this reckless scheme and reaffirm our commitment to combat the unjust taxation of our hardworking residents by other states,” he added.
This coming from the guy who wants New Jersians to pay more and be forced to buy electric cars and pay for bags at the grocery. All of a sudden climate change doesn’t matter, NYC is trying to save the planet and Murphy wants everyone to die instead.
He wants everyone to pay more to NJ not NY
I’ve been riding the Subways for many and I love the subway; however, I believe that the MTA cannot be trusted with a single stitch of money when it comes to managing their finances. They are the bureaucrats of all bureaucrats and waste tremendous amounts of money on things that should have cost them much less.
And now they want to go and tax NJ due to their complete inefficiency when it comes to money. And not only that, if they really wanted to ease up on the problem of their wildly ballooning deficit, before turning to NJ and asking them to fund their projects, they should do something about the open fare evasion. Instead, on one hand they say about how much they don’t care about the fare evasion, and that there’s nothing they can do and that they’re okay with letting it slide, but then they turn around and say “oh my goodness we have these huge gaping holes in our budget- let’s tax new taxes because we’re doing everything we can already and yet we’re still running on a deficit” while completely ignoring the $700 million fare evasion that they let happen.