Gov. Murphy Vowed to Fix N.J. Transit. Now It’s His Problem.

Just seven months into his first term, New Jersey Gov. Philip D. Murphy is already resorting to emergency measures to try to fix New Jersey Transit, the state agency that has been failing to keep its trains running on time — or at all.

After admitting that he had underestimated the dysfunction at New Jersey Transit, Murphy now is calling for help from residents of other states. He asked for a waiver that would allow the agency to hire train engineers and other workers who do not live in New Jersey.

Transit officials have cited a shortage of engineers as the main reason they have had to cancel hundreds of trains during the morning and evening rush hours this summer. Angry commuters have aimed their resentment at Murphy, who campaigned last year on a plan to restore the transit agency’s reputation for efficiency.

Like his counterpart across the Hudson River, New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, Murphy is experiencing the peril of taking responsibility for rescuing a failing transit system. Cuomo promised to fix the subways and now has a rival for his office, Cynthia Nixon, blaming him for the system’s deteriorating service.

Murphy, a Democrat like Cuomo, has called New Jersey Transit a “national disgrace” and blamed much of the mess on his Republican predecessor, Chris Christie. But Republican leaders in Trenton have pushed back, pointing out that Murphy has already failed to deliver a comprehensive review of the agency.

A week after he took office, Murphy appeared at the train station in Summit, New Jersey, to sign an executive order calling for an audit of the agency. He said it would be completed in about 100 days, but it is not done yet.

“I think he over-promised,” said Assemblywoman Nancy F. Munoz, a Republican from Summit. “It’s very convenient to blame everything on Chris Christie.” But, she added, “This does now belong to this administration.”

Munoz was among a panel of lawmakers who heard explanations at a hearing last week about the dismal performance of New Jersey Transit, whose trains carry about 300,000 passengers each weekday. She said many of their questions went unanswered as officials cited the unfinished audit, now expected to be done by the end of September.

Murphy’s transportation commissioner, Dianne Gutierrez-Scaccetti, emphasized that her team had only had 213 days to cope with “almost a decade of neglect.” She said they had inherited an agency so dysfunctional that it had not maintained enough spare parts to repair trains and had not trained enough engineers to replace those who retired or left for other jobs. The management of personnel had been so degraded that it was “in need of triage,” Gutierrez-Scaccetti told the lawmakers.

Allowing residents of neighboring states to fill some of the hundreds of openings at the transit agency would help, the officials said. But building back a full complement of engineers will take many months, if not years.

Kevin Corbett, the agency’s executive director, said the railroad had suffered a net loss of 57 engineers since 2011 and would close that gap by just nine this week with a batch of new hires. He explained that the training of engineers takes 20 months.

Echoing Murphy, Corbett said, “If anything, I underestimated the state of affairs.”

In asking for a waiver of the residency requirement, Murphy said the shortage of engineers was “a crisis in itself, one that has left countless thousands of commuters stranded by canceled trains.” He also called for legislation that would permanently lift the restriction for “mission essential employees” of New Jersey Transit. (The agency also has had trouble hiring bus drivers and is now offering $6,000 sign-on bonuses.)

David Peter Alan, a longtime rider and a frequent critic of the agency, told lawmakers that while it was fair to blame Christie, “the Murphy administration has been in office for seven months and has continued or exacerbated many of the policies of the Christie administration.”

Alan complained that New Jersey Transit remained a “very secretive, opaque agency” and that Murphy had not fulfilled his campaign promise to appoint commuters to its board of directors. “There’s an old saying that if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu, and we transit riders are sick and tired of being on the menu,” he said.

Martin Robins, a former deputy executive director of New Jersey Transit, said Murphy may have erred in insisting on a full-scale audit of the agency so quickly. Awaiting the results of the audit may have delayed some of the drastic actions that were obviously needed, he said in an interview.

“The passengers really suffered grievously in the summer of 2018,” said Robins, director emeritus of the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers University.

“Much of this is a problem of having new people on the scene and not comprehending the amount of dysfunction around them,” Robins said. “It would have taken a dramatic, almost military takeover of the agency, a willingness to throw people out of their jobs and start anew.”

He said he thought that the Murphy administration lacked the confidence to take action immediately — to “go 100 percent,” as he put it. Absent an approach like that, he added, “I’m not surprised that things have gone haywire.”

Mahen Gunaratna, a spokesman for Murphy said, “The public deserves a true accounting of New Jersey Transit, and the governor feels it is necessary to first assess the audit results before enacting full-scale reforms to ensure our actions will be effective.”