New Jersey has been given a final deadline of next Tuesday to appeal or repay a $271 million bill from the federal government for work done on the canceled ARC commuter train tunnel to New York City.
The one-week reprieve is the third — and last — extension the Federal Transit Administration is permitted to give.
Gov. Chris Christie derailed the Access to the Region’s Core tunnel 12 weeks ago, but he and Uncle Sam have been like locomotives heading toward one another on the tracks.
Last month, Christie said the federal government was holding New Jersey to a different standard than other states that canceled public works projects, and contended the FTA was relying on "bureaucratic power plays to wring even more money from New Jerseyans."
And last week, during a visit to the offices of the Wall Street Journal,
the governor said the federal government released the money even though the tunnel did not have final approval or safeguards in place to guard against waste.
"That’s my argument of why I don’t have to pay the money back," he told the newspaperhttp://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/01/nj_is_given_final_deadline_to.htmlAn absolute criminal scumbag Puke
The FTA said in a Nov. 24 letter to NJ Transit that if the debt to the federal government became delinquent, it would charge New Jersey interest, could report the claim to commercial credit bureaus and reserved the right to forward it to the U.S. Department of Justice for debt collection