"For [Christie's] political friends, it was World Trade Center memorabilia and Hurricane Sandy grants; for enemies, it was subpoenas and traffic jams."

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Removing 9/11 Artifacts From New Jersey’s Nest of Political Patronage
By Jim Dwyer, March 11, 2014

Still up for grabs from the ruins of the World Trade Center are roughly 90 pieces of steel and 200 other artifacts — things like bits of antenna, a wrecked car, turnstiles — recovered after Sept. 11. Remnants of a dwindling inventory, they have been stored in a hangar at Kennedy International Airport for more than a decade, as pieces have been shipped to 50 states and at least seven countries for memorial sites and museums.

Perhaps it goes without saying that the distribution of trade center steel in New Jersey over the last few years was turned into a series of political high holy days.

The lieutenant governor and an appointee of Gov. Chris Christie to the Port Authority traveled the state to personally deliver tons of it to politically important towns.

The distribution policies for the steel given out in New Jersey were changed at the Port Authority last week, officials said Tuesday, and will no longer be handled by Mr. Christie’s political appointees, but by the agency’s professional staff, which handles the steel for the 49 other states and the rest of the world.

The steel was one element in an article published Tuesday in The New York Times that amounted to a virtual atlas of the uses to which the agency has been put in service of Mr. Christie’s machine: patronage appointments, raids on bridge and tunnel tolls to keep taxes down in New Jersey, a new PATH station for a town led by the first Democratic mayor to endorse Mr. Christie for election.

Throughout his quick rise in New Jersey politics over the last decade, Mr. Christie has been uninhibited in deploying the tools of whatever office he was serving in to political ends.

As the chief federal prosecutor in the state, he could and did bop subpoenas on the heads of political foes at the height of election campaigns, conveniently tarring them as being “under investigation.” When Mr. Christie was governor, grant money available after Hurricane Sandy was awarded to favored projects that were far from the coast, and held back from towns that were all but drowned by the storm but had been unaccommodating to the needs of his pals.

 And then there are the George Washington Bridge traffic jams of last September, engineered directly by one of his senior aides and his appointees at the Port Authority, apparently in retribution for a local mayor’s failure to endorse the governor.

For political friends, it was World Trade Center memorabilia and Hurricane Sandy grants; for enemies, it was subpoenas and traffic jams.

In 2010, Christopher O. Ward, then the executive director of the Port Authority, created a program for the agency to divest of the masses of steel that it had been storing since 2001. The Port invited municipalities and nonprofit groups to request a piece of the steel for public display.

By September 2011, the 10th anniversary of the attacks, 80 percent of the steel had been distributed, in a program managed by Nancy Johnson, a career employee of the Authority.

Around that time, Bill Baroni, the deputy executive director of the agency, who was appointed by Mr. Christie, took effective control of the steel distributed in New Jersey. Accompanying Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno to ceremonies, Mr. Baroni gave speeches about the work that was being done at the Port Authority under Governor Christie, and spoke emotionally on the losses of Sept. 11.

“In early September the lieutenant governor and I traveled around New Jersey and delivered pieces of World Trade Center steel that were part obviously of the towers that collapsed Sept. 11,” Mr. Baroni said in a television interview.

Mr. Baroni quit the Port Authority in December as the scandal over the bridge traffic jams was unfolding. His successor, Deborah L. Gramiccioni, suspended the distribution of the steel in New Jersey soon after she took the job. Last week, she had it removed entirely from her control.

Officials say that what remains will be given to cities and groups that have filed requests, a process that is not expected to take long.

Any politician hoping to find advantage in the trade center attacks — which, after all, were cited as reasons for separate wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — will have to act fast.

Any spare ruins are not likely to be around by the time the 2016 Iowa caucuses are held.
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