The Assembly Budget Committee has released the newly revised state budget — a spending plan negotiated between the leadership of the two houses of the state Legislature and the governor — but the state Senate panel is not ready to move.
It remains likely that a budget will be approved before the July 1 deadline, averting a reprise of the 2006 state government shutdown, but not without some serious battles occurring.
The budget is a mixed bag. While some of the aid to New Jersey hospitals has been restored, money for Muhlenberg in Union County has not and the medical center could still close.
Tax rebates have been cut for higher-income New Jerseyans, as well, and there remains no agreement on how to finance aid for school construction.
So the dance continues.
The dance, of course, and the difficulty of crafting a spending plan that is fair to everyone in the state demonstrates how badly off the tracks the state’s fiscal reform effort has gone. After the 2006 state shutdown, the governor ordered a special joint session of the Legislature that was supposed to craft a plan to alter the way government works and rebuild state finances that were teetering on a cracked and disintegrating fiscal foundation.
Some of the early proposals were amazingly far-reaching — a base-closing-style commission that would look at municipal consolidation and shared services and recommend mergers to the Legislature and governor, who would then have final say; a state comptroller with extensive powers to investigate state and local finances; changes in school financing and administration — but in the end most were either watered down or abandoned.
Other proposals — the governor’s highly questionable plan to leverage Turnpike and Parkway tolls to pay down the state debt — also ran ashore.
So we stand in the same spot as we did two years ago, the poisonous and partisan culture in Trenton making it impossible for the vast majority of the 120 members of the state Legislature to see beyond their own narrow constituencies and the status quo and make the kind of changes that truly could be called reform.
We remain wedded to the outmoded property tax system, convinced that rebates are the only way to lighten the tax burden on homeowners. We refuse to consider an expansion of the state income and corporate taxes or significant revenue sharing as a way to reduce the burden on property taxpayers (raise more from income taxes to pay for education, a state responsibility under the state constitution).
We remain stuck with 566 municipalities in a state of 8 million people, stuck with 611 school districts and another 200 or so taxing districts (county governments, fire districts, etc.) that do little more than create administrative redundancies while doing everything they can to protect their own little fiefdoms.
I’m not arguing that bigger is better — just look at the mess that the cities of Trenton and Newark have become over the years — and it can be legitimately argued that some small towns have the resources and land mass to manage on their own (Cranbury comes to mind).
But towns like Jamesburg, Helmetta and Spotswood, many in Bergen County and along the Jersey Shore, and dozens of others (the two Princetons, the Hopewells and Pennington come to mind) should be looked at seriously to see if merging them either with each other or with another neighbor (Jamesburg into Monroe, for instance, or Hightstown into East Windsor) might result in tax savings, better or expanded services or both. There are 70 municipal governments in Bergen County — an absurd number given the physical size of the county and its population.
We continue to allow legislators to skirt constitutional rules designed to limit their ability to borrow money, which were designed to ensure that borrowing was used only for legitimate longterm expenses (infrastructure improvements, for instance) and not to balance the books.
And we continue to put off our pension and health care obligations waiting for that time bomb to explode.
By we I mean not just the state Legislature and governor but municipal and county officials, school administrators, taxpayers, voters — everyone seeking to protect their own small piece of turf at the expense of the larger public good.
I could continue, but why bother. No one seems to be listening anyway.
Hank Kalet 