It was another furrowed, paternal hiding administered by the state’s most popular governor on the state’s least popular governor.

They’ve been at odds for years, former Governor Tom Kean, Sr., and former Governor Chris Christie, probably ever since Christie’s GOP caucus allies tried to take junior out of the senate minority leadership chair.

In an NJTV interview with Michael Aron last night, Kean continued to school the former pupil who once stood in the elder Livingstonian’s driveway.

This time it’s that controversial tax incentive program overseen by the state Economic Development Authority (EDA), its activities in the Christie era now under investigation by a Governor Phil Murphy-appointed task force.

This from NJ.com:

The task force last month began a series of public hearings into the EDA grants, which was highlighted by the testimony of a whistleblower. She claimed that the company she had worked for — later revealed to be Jackson Hewitt Tax Services — had been awarded a $2.67 million state grant after falsely claiming it was considering a move out of the state and planning to take those jobs to New York and Florida.

A 2015 lawsuit, meanwhile, revealed that political pressure was also put on the EDA by former Gov. Chris Christie’s administration to approve hundreds of millions in subsidies. In that lawsuit, another whistleblower claimed that he was ordered to change data to help companies obtain state tax breaks.

Christie this month has repeatedly punched back against Murphy’s objection to what the sitting governor said was $11 billion in EDA-administered tax breaks going back to 2008, arguing that it was only given out $700 million since 1995.

“If you listen to the governor, you would believe that billions of dollars, just in my administration, were going out the door in tax incentives,” Christie said, as quoted by NJTV. “This is a complete falsehood. Complete falsehood perpetrated by this administration to kill a program that they philosophically disagree with. But since they can’t win the philosophical argument — because Gov. Florio’s argument about what’s happened in Camden — in a Democratic, urban center shows that the program works. So you can’t win the philosophical argument, so what you do is vilify and lie about the program.”

But Kean disagrees with Christie, and said so last night.

“It has a reason to exist, but it should not have been giving away the amount of money it has been giving away, he said of the EDA. “We are bribing companies now with huge amounts of money to come into New Jersey, and you ask companies why they don’t come…taxes are too high… regulations are too strong. So why don’t we address the kinds of things that businesses care about and see if we can do something about the taxes and I know we can do something about the regulations and then we don’t have to bribe them to come in. We never used to have to bribe them to come in.”

The rest of the transcript of Aron’s interview with the former governor, in addition to comments by former Governor Jim Florio, can be found below:

Interviewer: You are suggesting reform is needed at the EDA?

Governor Kean: Yep, there are moments you need the EDA. We used it to jumpstart the Hudson waterfront. Because it was hard to get people from New York. We used it in that case. But it was small, it was small amounts of money, and it worked. So its good to have it there, but I think its been abused and overused, and the amount of money it is giving out to some of these corporations, are bribes, simply bribes to come to New Jersey.

Interviewer: What are your views, Governor Florio, and what about the public policy responsibility to oversee such an agency as the EDA?

Governor Florio:  The EDA is an agency with an administration of programs as its function. The current controversy is really about the program, something called Growth New Jersey, and whether this program of business tax credits is being administered correctly. I really heard the New Jersey Comptroller testifying before the legislature saying that it is not so much the outcomes as the fact that the auditing is not being done well and they couldn’t give the assurance that the program is working. So its not so much the program as the administration of the program.

Interviewer: Because ultimately it’s the taxpayers’ money for these business arrangements which involve tax abatements and financial incentives, right?

Governor Florio: And the responsibility is to make sure that the money that goes out is equaled by at least the jobs and money that comes in, and that’s been the question. Its not so much anything that’s been done that’s been wrong, its that nobody knows whats been done.

Interviewer: So you’re suggesting reform too, as Governor Kean did. So where should that begin, what kind of reform?

Governor Kean: Jim is absolutely right. You reform with proper oversight, so somebody is looking at it, so somebody is looking at the money, looking at the calculations that Jim just talked about. What I still say is that its too much money. We shouldn’t be paying billions of dollars to corporations to get them to come to New Jersey. New Jersey is a wonderful state, its wonderfully located, we have a tremendous number of assets. We’ve just got a couple of things that stop corporations from coming here. And you ask them, why won’t they come? They say taxes or regulation. And if you reform those two things, I think the EDA would be an agency you use every now and then, not all the time.