The congestion pricing apocalypse could be coming.
President Trump’s choice to become New Jersey’s next governor has a message for New York: drop the congestion tolling scheme — or pay the price.
Republican Jack Ciattarelli is vowing to slap a “reverse congestion pricing” fee on all New York vehicles entering the Garden State if he wins the race to replace term-limited Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy.
“We’re not going to be pushed around by New York,” Ciattarelli told The Post.
The 63-year-old frontrunner in the June 10 GOP primary said, if elected, he’ll set up toll cameras along bridges and tunnels entering Jersey to ID New York license plates, so that vehicle owners could be billed the same $9 fees most drivers pay to enter Manhattan below 60th Street — unless Gov. Hochul puts the brakes on congestion pricing as Trump has demanded.
Revenues collected would go towards upgrading state-owned NJ Transit — just as New York’s scheme is used to raise funds to improve its dilapidated mass transit.
“We will replicate the New York model,” he said. “If this is what they are going to do to New Jerseyans, this is going to be what we will do to New Yorkers. New York needs to fix its subway system on its own, just as we’re trying to fix [NJ] Transit on our own.”
Regarding the NJ Transit strike, he said it should be illegal for train engineers to walk off the job because the public depends on them to safely travel – just as it is for federal air traffic controllers. He said he wants to “examine” the feasibility of such a policy.
Ciattarelli, a former state assemblyman representing part of Hunterdon County in central Jersey, said he would carry out Trump’s policy agenda, including ending New Jersey’s sanctuary state status and scrapping bail reform laws that help put violent criminals back on the street.
“I think that every governor should work in partnership with the president on securing our borders and not welcoming the illegal immigrants to our states,” he said.
During the 2021 election, Trump strategically stood on the sidelines of the New Jersey gubernatorial race because New Jersey historically leans blue. However a stronger-than-anticipated showing in the Garden State during last year’s presidential race compared to 2016 and 2020 no longer makes his endorsement there a liability, despite Democrats outnumbering Republicans by roughly 800,000 registered voters.
Ciattarelli predicted Trump’s endorsement will not only help him win the primary — but also the general election in November after losing the same race four years earlier to Murphy by a mere three percentage points.
“This endorsement is very important in terms of bringing awareness to New Jersey, certainly awareness of my candidacy,” he said. “The president believes I’m the only one who could win in November, and I greatly appreciate his faith, trust and confidence.”
Ciattarelli’s main competition in the primary are former conservative talk show host Bill Spadea and New Jersey Sen. Jon Bramnick (R-Union).
Ciattarelli declined to discuss his GOP opponents or most of the six candidates running in a hotly contested Democratic primary – except Newark Mayor Ras Baraka. He called Baraka’s arrest last week for trespassing while protesting outside a Newark immigration detention facility a “publicity stunt.”
“This is a mayor of a town that has crime in the streets,” he said. “He’s not showing up in the schools or showing up at crime scenes. Newark Airport is in the midst of an unprecedented meltdown, . . . yet he’s showing up to a detention center where the federal government is detaining people who came here illegally, who then committed crimes. I don’t understand what it is we’re protesting.”
Baraka’s spokesperson Kabir Moss shot down Ciattarelli’s claim that Newark has fallen on hard times and insisted the mayor wasn’t trespassing.
“He didn’t go there to get arrested; he went to join a press conference with congress members,” Moss said. “But if Jack Ciattarelli can’t recognize the Constitutional crisis we’re in — where due process is being denied on American soil — then he’s not fit to be governor.”
Hochul’s office did not return messages.
