Hoboken Mayor claims that Chris Christie held Sandy relief funds hostage to pressure her to sign on to a development deal. And the hits keep on coming!

Chris Christie with Mayor Zimmer in the background.

Courtesy of Mediaite: 

Last weekend, Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer (D-NJ) told WNYC that the unfolding Bridgegate scandal made her wonder if Governor Chris Christie’s administration had denied her city Hurricane Sandy relief funds as payback for her refusal to endorse Christie’s reelection. On Saturday morning’s Up with Steve Kornacki, Mayor Zimmer revealed that Christie Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno explicitly connected Hoboken’s Sandy relief to a different motive. 

In the days following Hurricane Sandy, Hoboken was one of those places that made it into every network’s video package of hard-hit areas, as thousands of people remained trapped by flood waters for days. Since then, Governor Christie waged, and won, a hard-fought battle to secure federal relief for the state, but in light of the Bridgegate revelations, Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer wondered if her city was shortchanged when it came time to dole out those dollars simply because she wished to remain neutral in the gubernatorial election. Now, she says the motive was a redevelopment deal, and the payback scheme was much more explicit. 

In his opening segment, Kornacki ran down a complicated history of area politics, but the nuts of the story are that the Christie administration was pushing hard for a development project that Mayor Zimmer and the Hoboken planning board had slowed down, and after almost all of the city’s Hurricane Sandy relief requests were denied, Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno told Mayor Zimmer that in order to get the Sandy relief funds flowing, she needed to move the development project along. 

According to an entry in Zimmer’s personal diary, Guadagno pulled her aside after a political event in Hoboken, “and says I need to move ahead with the Rockefeller project. The word is you’re against it and you need to move it forward or we’re not going to be able to help you. I know it’s not right. These things should not be connected but they are. If you tell anyone I said that, I will deny it.”

It should be noted that Mayor Zimmer was considered a "Christie Democrat." In other words she was a political ally, and one who could be relied on to work in a non-partisan manner with him in the past.

So for her to WRITE IN HER DIARY that she was troubled and upset about what was taking place, is huge.

Because unless the Christie camp really wants to suggest that this former friend of the administration foresaw this crisis and made a diary entry so as to help with the piling on, it would seem to indicate a truthful account of an administration that bullied those who interfered with their agenda, and even withheld humanitarian aide from its constituents, as a form of punishment.

You know I think it took fewer hits to bring down Godzilla than Christie is getting nailed with right about now.