At what point does the governor’s attacks against the state’s teachers union become seen for the petty, vengeful and unseemly vendetta that they are? After all, Gov. Christie rarely misses an opportunity to slam the NJEA — as he did yesterday.
Well now everything dies baby that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back
Put your makeup on fix your hair up pretty
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City
— Bruce Springsteen, “Atlantic City”
I mentioned this yesterday, but I want to expand a bit on it. The governor is proposing a long overdue overhaul of the state’s gaming and sports bureaucracy, but one that may not go nearly far enough.
Here is what the Ledger has reported about the plan:
Among the recommendations contained in the report, which was reviewed by the newspaper:
• The state would seek to transform Atlantic City into a convention and family friendly resort, including a major expansion of the boardwalk that would include amusement rides. The entertainment areas would be placed under the control of a new state authority, essentially turning it into an independent city within a city.
• Money from the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority, now shared throughout the state, would stay in Atlantic City for projects and improvements there.
• The Meadowlands Racetrack could be sold for a token $1, or turned into an off-track wagering facility without live horse racing.
• The New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority would be all but disbanded, becoming simply a landlord for the facilities it now operates. The Izod Center arena in the Meadowlands could be privatized or sold.
• The state would help re-finance the long-stalled Xanadu project in the Meadowlands, enabling a new developer to take control of the garish, high-visibility retail and entertainment complex alongside the New Jersey Turnpike that many consider an embarrassment.
The dysfunction that has crippled these interlocked industries has to be addressed and I think that the governor is right to move forward with a complete restructuring. The question is whether the plan goes far enough toward disengaging the state from industries that should be private.
I would argue that the state should get out of the stadium building and leasing business altogether, get out of the management of racetracks and sell the businesses and properties to private hands during an open bidding process. The state should then create a set of stringent regulations covering both at-track and off-track betting. As part of the move, the state should make it clear that there will be no subsidies in the future for tracks, football teams and concerts and that the businesses will have to pay their way, including the overtime that might be due to police as a result of a major event.
Entertainment, afterall, is not the kind of service government needs to provide. Goverment’s role is to assist those who need help, to protect the citizenry (with police and environmental, safety, consumer and health watchdogs) and to provide services and facilities that are needed by society as a whole (such as roads, schools, health centers — which we should provide, but don’t).
The government’s job should not include construction of a massive football stadium that will be used by two teams and for some college games. Leave that to the private sector.
Atlantic City poses a different set of issues, given the way in which it was created as a gaming town (via statewide referendum) and the need for heavy regulation. The governor’s proposal — to take over the gaming districts and impose a new vision on them — seems to make sense. The city needs to be more than a gambling destination — as things stand now, the casinos are designed to keep you from wanting to go outside, the beach and boardwalk are not very accessible and the outlet shopping near the casino district is no different than outlet shopping anywhere else, except for the lower sales tax.
The casino experiment in New Jersey has gone on for a long time, but it cannot be called a success. Atlantic City remains a depressed city and has been losing out ot other areas for years. It is not a resort destination, by any stretch of the imagination and stands as one of the least interesting Shore towns in the state.
It’s time to change things.
As Mark Di Ionno points out today, the sports and entertainment industries are “a billionaire’s game these days, not something taxpayers should shoulder.”
This is not necessarily a bad plan — refinancing transportation debt to raise some short-term cash for the next year, to get needed projects going and create some jobs — but isn’t it exactly what Corzine did two years ago? Didn’t the Republicans blast him for doing it? I’m waiting to hear the Christie administration explain how this is not a budget gimmick.
The governor spoke before a joint-session of the state Legislature today and reiterated his desire to see a constitutional amendment be placed on the ballot that would limit tax increases to 2.5 percent — or, barring that, a state law that would do the same.
Gov. Chris Christie calls it tax relief, but it really is nothing more than an abrogation of executive and legislative responsibilities and an admission of failure.
Property taxes have been and continue to rise in New Jersey, driven upward by a mix of bad policy and the high cost of health insurance. The bad policy part — a belief that we could avoid making hard decisions without paying the cost of those decisions, cannot be addressed by a cap; rather, it takes one of the decisions out of the hands of the people we’ve elected and sent to Trenton — or that we have sent to town hall.
The problem in New Jersey is not just out-of-control spending. A good chunk of the money the state spends is on programs its citizens want: Good schools, police officers, open space, etc. The problem is that the state government has ignored the revenue side of the ledger for years, preferring to offset rising costs with one-shot gimmicks and magical sleight-of-hands that delayed the day of reckoning.
For 15 years, for instance, governor after governor has shorted the state pension fund, which reduced expenditures in the short-term, but shorted the fund for the longhaul.
We have sold roads from one the state to the Turnpike Authority, borrowed agagainst a settlement with the tobacco industry, and so on until we had run out of shell games to play.
All the while, property taxes continued to rise, angering taxpayers and leaving the state in the lurch.
The governor’s response has not been to put the state on sound fiscal footing, though he has talked as if that is his goal. His budget is balanced using an assortment of tricks — pension shortfall, anyone? — that are no different than those used by his predecessors. And now he wants to enact the biggest gimmick of all, an artificial cap that removes all fiscal flexibility from elected officials. That sounds good now but, as the folks in California and Colorado and elsewhere are finding out, it is going to come back to bite us hard on the ass in the future.
I would applaud the governor if I thought he would go to bat for a school board member who was censured for being critical of the state’s education cuts. He’s right that the board should have let the school board member have her say, even if I disagree with what she had to say.
My suspicion, unfortunately, is that the governor is not interested in defending the rights of school board members to speak their minds, but only of those members that speak their minds and back his causes.
Gov. Chris Christie is nothing if not brutally political, to a degree well beyond any governor in my memory.
Hank Kalet 