More trouble for Chris Christie, this time with airplanes

Politics & Elections
1

AP story here.

NJ gave United Airlines $100,000 in incentives to fly to Atlantic City for at least a year. 8 Months later, United canceled the flights. NJ didn’t ask for the money back; Christie’s Transportation Commissioner Jamie Fox is a former United lobbyist.

Turns out that UA agreed to the AC flights because they were trying to make nice with NJ authorities over some stuff at Newark Airport: they wanted lower rent, lower fees and a $1.5 billion extension on train service to and from the airport.

Negotiations then broke down and UA filed a complaint with the FAA alleging that " the Port Authority was illegally overcharging the airline at Newark and improperly diverting airport revenue to Christie’s pet projects elsewhere in New Jersey."

Christie looks worse and worse as a Governor every week; no way in hell he’s ever going to be POTUS.

2

I’m going to need a little more than an airline’s complaint about their fees to believe this is scandalous.

The marketing incentives sound like the sort of thing a state should do when one of the state’s major tourist cities is failing.

3

I’ve read a couple of stories about this one and it’s quite a bit more than “an airline’s complaint about their fees”. It really does look like Christie and cronies treated the PA as their personal playground.

4

UAL’s CEO, Jeff Smisek, just resigned when it came out he’d had the airline add flights from Newark to Columbia, SC, near a PA bigwig’s vacation place.

But of course this was all Port Authority stuff, nothing to do with Christie, as I’m sure we are all about to hear.