Before the Bergen County lawmaker grabbed his scalpel, NJ Transit was a miasma of known unknowns. Watch video
If you are one of the 300,000 New Jerseyans who ride the rails every day, or one of the 500,000 who take a bus, you lost one of your most tenacious advocates last week.
Veteran State Sen. Bob Gordon left the Legislature Wednesday after spending the last 18 months disinfecting NJ Transit, a once-great agency that had been usurped by people in floppy shoes, suspenders and red rubber noses.
With an unflashy gameness, the soft-spoken lawmaker from Fair Lawn set a standard for oversight by convening a joint committee that turned over every rock and exposed every worm. Co-chaired by Assemblyman John McKeon, D-Essex, the committee held seven hearings between Oct. 2016 and August 2017 that revealed to taxpayers the bureaucratic underpinnings to the commuter’s daily migraine.
It was at these hearings where NJ Transit’s top executives were forced to publicly admit its torrent of problems – dangerous problems, such as rampant staffing shortages, safety violations, and accident rates that led the industry.
It was at these hearings where NJ Transit acknowledged years of the financial distress, created by an operating budget that relied too heavily on passenger revenue and cannibalistic funding schemes.
It was at these hearings where we finally put names to the patronage parade conducted by Chris Christie, whose method of handing out six-figure salaries involved weeding out the truly qualified to reward the truly loyal.
The coup de grace was the committee unleashing Todd Barretta, the agency’s former compliance officer, who gave the public a peek behind the curtain and explained how political hacks had created a “toxic environment” that has destroyed morale and compromised safety.
Yes, commuters already knew it was bad. But nobody knew it was this bad.
Gordon also put his name and expertise on every reform bill for NJT and the Port Authority over the last five years. He also formed a redoubtable tandem with Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg, D-Bergen, during the interstate pie-fight over a new PA Bus Terminal. “Bob never lost focus on what had to be done to improve our state’s infrastructure,” Weinberg said.
His new job is with the Board of Public Utilities, which oversees our state’s electricity, natural gas, water, telecommunications and cable television systems. We hope he continues to do what the best public servants do, and defy Machiavelli’s time-honored observation: “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”
Gordon did that, and a grateful state salutes him today.
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