New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s top appointee to the Port Authority resigned Friday — the second casualty of a growing scandal over lane closures that caused massive delays at the George Washington Bridge.
New Jersey Democrats have claimed that Christie loyalists at the Port Authority shut the lanes as payback after the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee — the town on the Jersey side of the bridge — refused to back the reelection of Christie, a Republican.
At the time, the Christie camp was seeking the endorsements of local Democrats to increase the margin of his expected victory and burnish his credentials as a 2016 presidential candidate.
The official who stepped down Friday, Bill Baroni, was the $289,000-a-year deputy executive director.
He had testified at a legislative hearing in Trenton that the lanes were closed for a traffic study.
But Port Authority Executive Director Patrick Foye, who is Gov. Cuomo’s top appointee to the bistate agency, testified he was unaware of any such study.
Other witnesses said another Christie ally at the Port Authority, David Wildstein, directed the bridge’s supervisor to close the lanes — and not notify Foye, Fort Lee’s mayor or the cops.
The shutdown, which began on Sept. 9 and lasted four days, closed two of the three local-access lanes from Fort Lee to the bridge’s upper level.
The closure caused four-hour delays on the Jersey side of the GWB — one of the world’s most heavily traveled bridges — creating a potential nightmare for emergency vehicles.
Fort Lee officials said they received no advance notice of the closures.
Wildstein, the Port Authority’s director of interstate capital projects and one of Christie’s high school friends, sent a resignation letter last week.
On Friday, Christie said he believes Baroni’s version of events and does not believe his staffers ordered the closures. He said that he did not learn about the closures until later. Christie also downplayed Baroni’s exit, saying he “offered his resignation and I accepted it, but this wasn’t something I hadn’t planned already.”
The tough-talking governor also accused Democrats of hyping the bridge dustup and “all the other politics swirling around it.”
