Tunneling into the muck

Leave it to New Jersey to take a flawed project like the Trans-Hudson tunnel and turn it into the kind of fiasco that would make Sarah Palin proud.

I’ve written about the tunnel before, saying that a breather was warranted to give everyone a chance to answer some questions and figure out what the best way to move foward might be. Moving forward, in the end, made sense, though not given the current budget parameters or design.

Killing it, however, just seems too much, especially given the need to create jobs and move commuters into New York.

That’s why I like Mark Di Ionno’s column today in The Star-Ledger. It cuts through the rancor and blame to make the point that our dysfunctional political culture helped kill the tunnerl.

This saga is convoluted, to say the least, and everybody has their own version of why this won’t happen. Cost, cost overruns, empty transportation funds, politics as usual.

There is plenty of blame to go around — a series of compromises that left us with an inadequate plan, a massive recession and the state’s fiscal irresponsibility, a short-sighted and arrogant governor.
The basic problem remains in place. A better solution needs to be sought. And if it can’t be found, we may need to give in and build the tunnel as proposed. But we have to do that work.

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Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

One thought on “Tunneling into the muck”

  1. Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert are definitely pro the Trans-Hudson tunnel. They put the blame where it belongs, on the shoulders of our arrogant blowhard GOP pro-corporate anti-government stealth right wing governator. This disaster of a governor is destroying our public school system, it will take years to recover from the damage he is inflicting on our public schools. It's just an appalling tragedy for our schools.

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