Court blocks Waterfront Commission breakup

On his last day in office as governor, Chris Christie signed a bill into law withdrawing New Jersey from the bi-state compact that created the agency in 1953.    A federal court on Friday blocked an attempt by the State of New Jersey to withdraw from the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor.
   On Jan. 15, then-Gov. Chris Christie signed into law a bill on his last day in office withdrawing New Jersey from the bi-state compact that created the agency.
   New Jersey and New York created the Waterfront Commission in 1953 to fight crime and corruption on the waterfront. One of its powers is to determine how many longshoremen can work in the port. Terminals have complained in the past that they have not been allowed to hire all the workers they need quickly enough.
   The New York Shipping Association, which represents employers of longshoremen in the Port of New York and New Jersey, noted in its annual report that “it has been the desire of NYSA to modernize the responsibilities of the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor for many years now.”
   The state said the Waterfront Commission has “over-regulated the business at the port” and become “an impediment to future job growth and prosperity at the port.”
   New Jersey also argued in court that “organized crime has been driven out of the port” and that its state police are “suited to undertake an investigation of any criminal activity.”
   The day after Christie signed the bill into law, the Waterfront Commission filed a complaint seeking a declaration that the bill was invalid, void and without force and effect and requesting preliminary and permanent injunctive relief enjoining Christie’s successor, Gov. Phil Murphy, from implementing or enforcing the bill. The Waterfront Commission says New Jersey cannot unilaterally dissolve the agency and that New York would have to take similar action.
    U.S. District Judge Susan D. Wigenton of the U.S. District Court of New Jersey granted the preliminary injunction Friday.
   “Allowing one state to dictate the manner and terms of the commission’s dissolution and the subsequent distribution of the agency’s assets,” she wrote, “runs counter to the requirement that any change to the compact occur through concurring legislation.” She also rejected New Jersey’s contention that the commission lacked the power and authority to institute the litigation.
   “It’s a preliminary injunction so the case is not in a technical sense over,” noted Michael A. Cardozo of Proskauer, an attorney who represents the Waterfront Commission. The state has a right to appeal Wigenton’s grant of a preliminary injunction to the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals. If the state does not do so, then he says the case would go forward and the state would file an answer to the Waterfront Commission’s complaint.
   But Cardozo thought Wigenton’s opinion “doesn’t seem to leave much room for any other argument.”
   In addition to management, politicians from both parties and the International Longshore Association have criticized the agency.
   Last August, for example, then-Gov. Christie of New Jersey, a Republican, wrote to Walter Arsenault, the executive director of the commission, and complained it “has continued to expand its jurisdiction and allowed brief but damaging labor shortages in the port.”
   At an International Longshoremen’s Association rally last October in the run-up to the election, Murphy, a Democrat, told the union’s members he would be a governor who “not only respects organized labor, but celebrates it.”
   He also vowed, “We’re going to figure out the damn Waterfront Commission once and for all.”
   Dennis Daggett, ILA executive vice president and president of ILA Local 1804-1, the local that hosted the rally, echoed a frequently heard complaint that waterfront workers are subject to unusual oversight by the Waterfront Commission, saying that Murphy “understands that it’s not right that our (ILA) people have to go to work each and every day walking on eggshells because of a Gestapo regulatory agency.”