GUEST COLUMN
By Hank Kalet Managing Editor, South Brunswick Post
Few legislators, of either party, were willing to expend the political capital necessary to force the toughest and most far-reaching of reforms to the table.
Tax reform remains a work in progress in New Jersey.
Too bad there’s only been a moderate amount of work and little progress toward fixing the real problems that face the state of New Jersey.
New Jersey will begin next year’s budget negotiations $2.5 billion in the hole — about 7 percent of the total budget — and the options for dealing with the deficit appear limited.
The state, as The Record of Hackensack reported last week, is carrying about $29.7 billion in debt, which costs about $2.5 billion a year. Pension funds remain underfunded — to the tune of at least $25 billion and promised health coverage for state retirees is expected to cost the state about the same in the future.
And New Jersey property tax bills remain among the highest in the nation.
Hard to believe that the state convened a historic joint session of the Legislature last year, one that was supposed to reconfigure state and local government and change the way the bills are paid.
Four committees were formed, each charged with studying a different issue and making recommendations. A total of 98 proposals were unveiled in November to great fanfare, but as the year has worn on, few have been enacted into law in the format in which they originally were conceived.
The reason is not hard to understand. Politics.
Few legislators, of either party, were willing to expend the political capital necessary to force the toughest and most far-reaching of reforms to the table. Some, like the creation of a merger commission with the power to consolidate towns, were watered down in committee, while others, such as the ban on dual-office holding (signed into law on Tuesday) were weakened when they went from recommendation to bill.
What survived were those that were the most likely to win votes — the 20 percent tax rebate, for instance, designed to put cash in the hands of voters in the final weeks and months before the legislative elections — or those the governor was willing to fight for — a 4 percent cap on the growth of municipal and school tax levies that manages to be overly restrictive and overly porous at the same time.
In the end, however, the state remains in the red and will once again rely on short-term loans to get it through the end of the calendar year when an infusion of tax receipts is expected. This is not an unusual move — most states do something like this — but New Jersey is looking at a $2 billion loan this year.
Gov. Jon Corzine had promised it would be different. New Jersey was going to end the fiscal games and make the necessary sacrifices to put the state in the black. Nice rhetoric, but the reality is that voters have little stomach for the kind of changes that will be necessary to achieve that goal.
Few voters appear willing to agree to forced mergers of municipalities or school districts and streamline local government — at least if their communities are to be among those consolidated out of existence.
Nor are voters likely to endorse the kind of extreme budget cuts or tax hikes needed to plug the structural deficit and fully fund pension and employee health care accounts.
Nor do voters appear ready to accept the sale or lease of state assets like the N.J. Turnpike or Garden State Parkway, a maneuver the governor says could help pay down the debt and create budgetary breathing room.
Voters are not happy with the status quo, according to the polls, but there does not appear the kind of groundswell growing that swept the Democrats out of office in 1991, the year after Gov. Jim Florio’s $2.8 billion tax increase led to a tax revolt.
My sense is that the voters rightly understand that this is a bipartisan problem, that the succession of governors and legislators who have held office since the Florio years have shown little political courage.
And maybe, just maybe, they also understand that they’re complicit in the mess and that fixing it will require them to make sacrifices they just aren’t willing to make.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press. His e-mail is [email protected] and his blog, Channel Surfing, can be found at www.kaletblog.com.