State – Page 5 – Hank Kalet

‘I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today’

I am not the only New Jersey columnist who believes the state needs to rethink how its local governments are organized. Alfred Doblin, editorial page editor for The Record, takes on the sacred cow of home rule in his column today:

What is more important: Quality education or a local school district? Is the firefighter less competent because he or she answers to a regional supervisor instead of a local chief? Does it matter if the municipality, county or an independent contractor removes snow as long as the snow is removed?

He likens the state’s fiscal crisis to the Chicago fire that destroyed that city in the late 19th Century, saying New Jersey has “burned down” and adding that “We should not build it like it was.” As he says of the sacred cow of “Home rule” — a “very big cow”: “it’s time it either produced a beverage or became an entrée.”

The fiscal reality is bleak. But there are ways of providing many of the services we expect while still spending less. We don’t have too many teachers. We don’t have too many parks. We don’t have too many roads. We have too many districts. We have too many municipalities. We have too many departments that essentially duplicate other departments.

It is in the new governor’s hands. Gov. Chris Christie, Doblin says, “has the personality to withstand the blowback from reactionaries afraid of change.” But does he have the vision? Is he willing to take on the web of problems that have created our fiscal mess, or does he plan to just slash indiscriminately, balancing the books but breaking our backs?

The jury is still out, though his budget freeze — which essentially will create problems for many school districts next year and exacerbates pension problems — raises some concerns.

Ultimately, though, as Doblin points out,

Change is happening. The issue is whether it is change for the better or for the worse. It is time to put the home-rule sacred cow on the altar of fiscal sanity.

In desperate times, every cow is accountable. Either produce milk or end up as hamburger.

That may not be popular, but it has to happen.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Arrogance and hypocrisy

The Democratic power structure in New Jersey just doesn’t get it. After a half-dozen years in which the party’s big dogs have made a mockery of small ‘d’ democracy, ethics and good government, the new Senate president shows that he is unconcerned with anything but his own power — the height of arrogance and hypocrisy, as Rosi Efthim points out on Blue Jersey.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Money where your mouth is

I want to go back to something that former Gov. Christie Todd Whitman said early in her first term. Budgets, she said, are where politicians prove their priorities, where they back up their talk with cash.

The history of Trenton, of course, is that politics has been the priority, with legislators of both parties larding on the spending and using an array of gimmicks to both win votes and avoid angering the natives. Cut the income tax, as Whitman did, but pay for it with fancy accounting tricks. Sell state roads to the Turnpike, as Florio did. Borrow, borrow, borrow, as McGreevey did.

Chris Christie, who replaces Gov. Jon Corzine next month, is promising not to play these games. Like Corzine, he is promising to return the state’s finances to a level of sanity that no one can actually remember. Corzine — as I think history will show — did some good, even if his tenure in office ultimately has to be viewed as a failure.

Christie has laid the gauntlet down, ordering severe cuts in state spending targeted toward eliminating programs that do not meet the mission of individual departments and consolidating duplicated services. This comes from a memo obtained by The Star-Ledger and shows that, just maybe, the new governor plans to play hardball.

The question, of course, is what he views as necessary programs. When Whitman was governor, she slashed the budget of the Department of Environmental Protection and eliminated the public advocate — moves that saved some money but made it far too easy for the business community to escape scrutiny.

She balanced the budget and cut the state income tax rate, but left the state in a far worse position than when she took office as future governors were left to rebuild the regulatory apparatus and plug the massive hole she blew in the state’s pension accounts.

Christie may succeed in slashing state spending, but how and who will pay the price? Will it be towns or schools in the form of state aid? Or the state’s healthcare or prescription assistance programs? Or the DEP? Or the arts community? Some of these groups already are hurting, thanks to Corzine’s budget cutting, and can only be further damaged by additional cuts.

It is not just about cutting spending. It is about priorities. Christie didn’t outline those for us during his campaign — even as he sung the zero-based budgeting song. (What is the Ledger talking about, by the way, in this story? How does this memo tie back to the zero-based nonsense all politicians spout?) He has until his first budget address to do so. Let’s hope his priorities are the same as the bulk of the state’s residents.

Putting the income tax on the table

I’m glad to see the League of Municipalities, which has too often failed to stand up for low-income New Jerseyans, attempt to put an expanded income tax on the table. I’ve long thought that shifting the burden of education funding from local property taxpayers to a broadbased income (and corporate tax) made the most sense.

I understand the concerns being raised by Mary Forsberg of New Jersey Policy Perspective — we’ve talked about them in previous interviews — and I think they need to be considered. But the status quo is unsustainable and we have to start talking about different ways of doing things and paying for things in New Jersey.

Offering a little help, though a lot is needed

The state Legislature has approved a bill that would create a “Community Food Pantry Fund” that would distribute money to community food pantries through the state’s food purchase program. The money would be generated by a voluntary check off on state tax returns and the money would be used to be food.

It’s a decent — if only partial — solution, maintaining the current charity structure but simplifying both donation and distribution.

The legislators who sponsored the bill — Democrats Gordon Johnson, Wayne DeAngelo, Elease Evans, Albert Coutinho and Herb Conaway — said in a press release that the legislation would address hunger issues by taking advantage of New Jerseyans’ generosity.

“The global economic meltdown means hunger isn’t being limited to the poor,” said Johnson (D-Bergen). “New Jersey is a generous state, and we can and should make it easier to spread that generosity and do whatever we can to ensure no one in this state goes to bed hungry.”

“The global economic crisis is hitting our state hard and may get worse,” DeAngelo (D-Mercer) said. “People who never thought they would ever visit a food pantry are now relying on them to put food on the table for their families. These are tough times, and anything we can do to make it easier for people to help those less fortunate is a good thing.”

I’m glad to see the legislation pass — and I expect the governor to sign it shortly — but as I said, this is just a half measure. State and federal governments — which are the people’s representatives, an extension of the citizenry — have a responsibility to take care of those who get battered by our poorly structured economy, which is set up to favor people with money and tosses aside those deemed expendable.

As I wrote last week,

The cyclical nature of our economy in which the booms are inevitably followed by busts leaves each of us vulnerable. It has become a cliché that most of us are one misfortune — a lost job, a health-care crisis, a divorce — away from a visit to the soup kitchen.

This leaves private charitable organizations vulnerable, as well. When the money dries up donors tend not to contribute, leaving the mostly private agencies that act as our de facto safety net with less money and food to distribute at a time when more money and food is being requested.

It is the reason why government programs like Social Security and welfare, unemployment and disability insurance, food stamps and school lunch programs, Medicare and Medicaid and the other New Deal and Great Society programs we have come to rely on were created.

We dismantled much of it over the last 30 years, stigmatizing the poor and others in need and leaving it to the private, underfunded and understaffed agencies to take care of what is a very public problem.

The thing to do, if we hadn’t gutted our ability to generate revenue, if we had not made taxes a bad word and turned government into a pejorative, would be to rebuild what we’ve deconstructed, to fix what we’ve broken. Government has its uses and one of its most important is to protect its citizens, and not just from crime of a terrorist attack, but from corporate greed and the vicissitudes of the irrational marketplace.