Mikie Sherrill, who marks her first week as governor of New Jersey tomorrow, is making a rookie mistake in demanding that she appoints a deputy executive director of the bistate Port Authority. That’s a no-way, no-never, deal breaker and both Gov. Hochul and the 12-member Board of Commissioners (six from each state) must refuse. The deputy executive director (DED) position is a dangerous and destructive force within the PA that should be permanently abolished. As we’ve said before, leave the DED as dead.
But Sherrill, a Democrat who won a landslide victory in November, must be able to exercise her will over the Port and that has to be her ability to name a chair of her choice. That has been the tradition of Jersey governors going back decades, with the New York governor picking the executive director (as Hochul has selected Kathryn Garcia, who was our first choice for NYC mayor in 2021 and if the voters had heeded us, would be starting her second term in City Hall).
Kevin O’Toole, the former Republican state senator installed by Gov. Chris Christie in 2017 as chairman and kept there by Gov. Phil Murphy, must relinquish the gavel to someone of Sherrill’s choice. Sherrill and Hochul must both jointly insist on that and promise to veto any actions of the board until Sherrill’s legitimate power is recognized.
That means one or more of the half dozen Jersey commissioners of O’Toole, Christian Bollwage, George Helmy, Joe Kelley, Kevin McCabe and Fanny Cedeño (who was just put there a month ago) should step down, giving Sherrill a chance to nominate her own person for chair, who the Jersey Senate should confirm.
It was the Senate and Christie that boxed out Murphy, filling up the board and preventing Murphy from nominating anyone for years. Now the Senate and Murphy have boxed out Sherrill, filling up the board and preventing Sherrill from nominating anyone. That cabal must be broken. The two governors, the only ones involved with the PA who were elected to anything, have to be able to exercise control over this vast government agency. The governors must threaten to stop all actions of the Port’s board until the board yields to Sherrill.
O’Toole says he cares a lot about the Port. Well, stepping aside will show that he puts the Port over his own personal ambitions.
Sherrill’s DED pick is Jean Roehrenbeck, who ran Sherrill’s congressional office and later served in the federal Department of Transportation. We asked around and heard some quite positive things about Roehrenbeck. But while Roehrenbeck may be very good, the DED post is very bad and no one should hold it. Sherrill should give Roehrenbeck another job.
The DED role was created at the insistence of Jersey Gov. Christie Todd Whitman, who didn’t like Gov. George Pataki’s 1995 choice of George Marlin as executive director, but Whitman always had her own pick as chair. The DED job was held by Ron Shiftan, Mike DeCotiis, Jamie Fox, Susan Bass Levin and Bill Baroni, highly political figures who engaged in various forms of bistate political mischief.
The worst mischief was Bridgegate in 2013, which sent Baroni to federal prison, until the U.S. Supreme Court decided that closing lanes to the George Washington Bridge as political retribution against the mayor of Fort Lee, while terribly wrong, wasn’t a crime.
Before Bridgegate, there was Tollgate in 2011, when Baroni went behind the back of the executive director to conspire with Christie to concoct a phony and fantastically too high 50% toll hike plan, that Christie could knock back and be the hero. It fooled no one, but messing with the needed revenue has cost the Port $5 billion over the years.
There can never again be a DED, even if Sherrill promises that Roehrenbeck will be subordinate to Garcia. Sherrill’s accountability and her eyes and ears should be through the chair.
The Port is already a two-headed beast, with the two governors, represented by the executive director and the chair. Leaving O’Toole in place with the backing of the Jersey Senate and Sherrill installing a new DED would produce a three-headed monster like Cerberus guarding Hades.
