Document shows regional rivalry on transportation

New York and New Jersey dicker for project funding

If New York gets $2.3 billion for La Guardia Airport, then New Jersey gets $2.3 billion for Newark Liberty International Airport.

Want cash for an AirTrain that might not be fiscally sound? You can have $1.5 billion for yours as long as we get $1.5 billion for ours.

Call it “the quid pro quo capital plan.”

A confidential document obtained by The Record shows how interstate jealousies over funding define how $30 billion will be spent on transportation in the region over the next 10 years.

Such horse trading might seem trivial if the fates of millions of daily commuters, traveling by road, rail and air — not to mention thousands of cargo containers that sail in and out of the region’s ports — were not at stake.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was founded a century ago to take parochial politics out of regional infrastructure planning. The idea was that the best engineers and transportation planners would recommend the placement, running and expansion of assets for the greatest benefit to the bistate region.

John Degnan, the agency’s chairman, said a demand by both states to be treated equally has led to a drive to ensure that an equal amount of money is spent on the perceived priorities for residents of each state.

“Most of the projects in the capital plan represent the recommendations of staff as to which projects have the highest priority,” Degnan said, confirming the document’s authenticity. “But it’s most — not all.”

Degnan declined to identify which projects do not have the support of the agency’s staff. He stressed that the document is a “hypothetical allocation” and could change before a draft plan is published.

Port Authority commissioners are planning the agency’s spending through 2026.

The last time they met, in December, several commissioners refused to sign off on the capital plan, citing reservations about the necessity of certain projects and their long-term financial viability.

Once commissioners have agreed upon the spending plan, it’s subject to the approval of the governors of New York and New Jersey. The draft outline obtained by

The Record shows how focused the agency has become on how much money is allocated to each state.

The plan lists projects with their funding assigned to one or more of three columns: “New Jersey,” “New York” and “Interstate.” It allocates roughly 32% of spending to each of the two states, and the remaining 35% is to be spent on interstate projects. Several billion dollars of additional spending, split roughly between the two states, will be sourced from grants.

Former leaders of the Port Authority said that although state sensitivities always played a role in how the agency’s resources were allocated, they had never seen it taken to such an extreme.

Stanley Brezenoff, the agency’s executive director in the early 1990s, said he was not overly troubled by the document. He did worry that the agency could go too far down the route of accounting for every dollar the agency spends according to the state it supposedly benefits.

“If it gets out of hand, it gets ugly and dysfunctional,” Brezenoff said

Peter Goldmark, who led the agency from 1977 to 1985, said he was concerned that the focus appeared to have shifted to how much “each state can get from the Port Authority as opposed to what the Port Authority can do for the region.”

He said, “The states seem to have sunk to a period of tit-for-tat competition.”

Such horse trading might seem trivial if the fates of millions of daily commuters were not at stake.