This week’s Dispatches is available on the site. Its focus: With broad agreement on the decal provision of Kyleigh’s Law (it’s bad), the candidates for the senate seat in the 14th District should move on to other issues.
Legislation passed by a near-unanimous Legislature last year and signed by then-Gov. Jon Corzine has become the political football in this year’s 14th District state Senate race.
Sen. Tom Goodwin, the Republican appointed to fill Bill Baroni’s seat until November’s election, has been pushing hard for repeal of a decal provision of regulations passed to protect teen drivers. The law, known as Kyleigh’s Law, went into effect May 1 and requires first-year, probationary drivers younger than 21 to display a red decal on their front and rear license plates. The law also bars young drivers from operating vehicles between 11:01 p.m. and 5 a.m., prohibits more than one passenger in vehicles driven by first-year drivers and bans the use of any hand-held or hands-free electronic device.
The law was written and then passed in response to the death of Kyleigh D’Alessio, a 16-year-old from Washington Township in Morris County, who was killed in a car accident involving another teen driver in 2006.
The law was rather uncontroversial at the time of its passage — it passed 78-0 in the Assembly and 36-3 in the state Senate — but has raised some concerns among parents since taking effect. In particular, parents and young drivers worry that the decal provision makes younger drivers easy prey for pedofiles and scammers and could make it easier for police to profile.
In response, several bills have been proposed, some good, others less so, with Sen. Goodwin being aggressive in his push for change.
Both Sen. Goodwin and Assemblywoman Linda Greenstein, the Democrat running for the Senate seat, are seeking revisions to the larger law. But the folks backing Goodwin are seeking to cast Greenstein as out of step, blaming her for sponsoring bad legislation (she was an early cosponsor, though her name was not attached to the legislation that passed) and making it appear as though Sen. Goodwin is the only one standing up for average parents.
I don’t wish to weigh in on which repeal bill is better. What I find interesting, however, is the way that the 2008-2009 discussion of the bill has been recast in political terms. As I said, 78 Assembly members voted in favor of the bill, including Assemblywoman Greenstein; 36 Senators did the same, including Sen. Baroni. No one can say how Goodwin would have voted were he in the Senate at the time, but it seems unlikely to me that Goodwin — who is running as the new Baroni — would have voted any differently.
It is convenient for supporters — you will see letters from two of them in this week’s South Brunswick Post — to attack a sitting Assembly member for her vote, especially when they know that their candidate can’t be tied to any previous action on the same legislation.
If this is how the race is going to unfold in the district, then 14th District voters might be better off staying home.
This has gotten a bit too stereotypical — trading half-truths and ugly barbs, a seemingly desperate candidate, another staying above the fray but relying on his running mates to take the battle to his opponents and a venal outside group lobbing bombs from outside the playing field.
Voters need to remember the issues in this year’s campaign in the 14th legislative district:
1. Property taxes and tax reform
2. The governor’s monetization program
2. Ethics in government
3. The environment
4. Civil unions and same-sex marriage
5. Affordable housing
6. Infrastructure
This election is not supposed to be about the mud. When you go into the voting booth next week, remember that.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
E-mail me by clicking here.
Our endorsement is out: Bill Baroni for Senate and Linda Greenstein and Adam Bushman for Assembly.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
E-mail me by clicking here.
The state’s pilot clean elections program has had a better showing this time out than it had two years ago, but I think it’s still premature to call it an unqualified success.
Yes, all six major party candidates in both the 14th and 24th legislative districts managed to collect the requisite contributions, but two Libertarians in the 14th failed to do so, as did three Republicans in the 37th (a district so Democratic that Republicans can seem like fringe candidates).
As anyone who has read this blog or my columns both for the Princeton Packet and the Progressive Populist knows, I am a supporter of clean elections and I agree that the enthusiasm for the program, especially here in the 14th, is great news.
But the hyperbole surrounding the announcement overstates what reaching the threshold actually means.
Here is Assemblyman Bill Baroni, the Hamilton Republican who is running for state Senate and a sponsor of the clean elections law:
“This may be one of the most important days in New Jersey’s fight to clean up elections. For two years, we’ve been hearing the naysayers say it couldn’t be done.”
A bit of an overstatement. All we have actually learned, so far, is that the thresholds that have been set and the contributions figures agreed to appear to be fair. They streamlined the program, but set a high enough bar to ensure that only candidates with serious support had a shot at the ballot (if you can’t collect 800 $10 contributions, you probably don’t have a lot of actual support).
What we don’t know at the moment is whether the program will have the desired impact on the system.
Remember, the program in its current form has been tried in only three districts, two of which were not competitive. It has not been tried during a primary and it was not put in place until after the candidates had already filed to run — a key point, because one of the main rationales for supporting clean elections is to expand the pool of available candidates beyond those with access to party money.
The reality is that the six candidates in the 14th, for instance, had access to significant campaign war chests had they chosen to forgo clean elections or had the state opted for a different district. The calculus that went into choosing the candidates — making sure that Hamilton is represented on the ticket, for instance, and making sure there is at least one Middlesex County candidate from each party — remained in place. None of the candidates stand out for being outsiders or newcomers to the process (two sitting Assembly members, three current or former municipal office holders and a former state official).
Getting what is essentially dirty, private cash out of the system is a real benefit, but that should not be the only goal and the only criteria for judging the program. And it should not be its only goal.
The clean elections system deserves a full run — all 40 districts for both primary and general elections, with third-party candidates being treated as equal players (unlike the current experiment, which provides them with a pittance when compared with what the major party hopefuls receive).
Only then will we have a real sense of whether the program can expand access to office beyond the run of political insiders who tend to rise of the ladder in this state and whether the influence of private money can be tamed.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
E-mail me by clicking here.
Hank Kalet 