Start the day off with Chris Christie? Why not.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) scored another in a series of major political victories, signing a bill capping the growth of property taxes and municipal spending at 2% annually. The bill replaces the Garden State’s previous cap, at 4%, which the governor assailed as ineffectual due to 14 exemptions that allowed local governments to virtually ignore the law. The new cap, which Christie pushed the Democratic-controlled legislature to enact, requires municipal councils to get approval from the voters before going over the lower limit.
The bill is the result of a compromise between Christie and Senate President Steve Sweeney (D-Camden). Christie had proposed a 2.5% cap as part of a package of 33 bills, which he dubbed a “toolkit” for local government to get skyrocketing spending and property taxes under control. Christie’s proposal would have amended the state constitution to include the 2.5% limit and mandated the approval of a supermajority of 60% of voters for a local council to exceed the cap, with debt service as the lone exception.
Sweeney and Senate Democrats favored a non-constitutional 2.9% cap. Sweeney’s bill would have provided automatic exemptions for a broad set of items such as pension obligations, healthcare premiums, and natural disasters and other emergencies. The bill would also have allowed local school boards to apply for a waiver for spending necessary to meet core curriculum standards, and for towns to seek waivers for items related to “public safety, health and welfare.” Democrats in the House and Senate passed this bill and sent it to Christie for his signature.
The most important lessons for the Republican party aren’t coming from any of the retired politicians doing their speaking tours right now. They come from two sitting governors, Governor Christie of New Jersey and Governor Brewer of Arizona. And what they’re doing is very simple. They’re confronting the problem.
When Christie won an election, like so many other state governors he was thrust into the middle of an impossible budget nightmare, which was full of impossible problems. State budgets had been bulked up by entitlements and their attached public sector unions. Cutting them meant a battle with the unions. But not cutting them meant serious tax hikes. Most governors chose to walk some kind of middle path, negotiating with the unions with the least political fallout, and raising taxes, to create a compromise that everyone hated.
But Christie made the rational calculation that he had nothing to lose by taking on the unions, because they would reliably come out against him during reelection anyway. And if he didn’t take them on, he would have to shoulder the blame for a budget crisis that he had nothing to do with. So while neighboring New York’s state government was trying to tiptoe around a complete shutdown over budget talks, New Jersey’s new governor took the initiative and picked a fight with the unions, turning them into the villains in the budget crisis.
Unlike Schwarzenegger who had tried the same thing in California a few years too early before buckling under the response in response to his failed referendums, Christie benefited from better timing and from voters being able to directly connect the teacher’s union to property tax hikes over school budgets. It was a scenario that gave people who were already cutting back a chance to directly stand up to tax hikes in local elections. And while teacher’s unions are almost as good at wrapping themselves in a self-righteous cloak, as the California nurses union was, their own stunts ended up backfiring on them.
New Jersey would close its centralized car inspection lanes and motorists would pay for their own emissions tests under a sweeping set of recommendations set to be released by the Christie administration today.
State parks, psychiatric hospitals and even turnpike toll booths could also be run by private operators, according to the 57-page report on privatization obtained by The Star-Ledger. Preschool classrooms would no longer be built at public expense, state employees would pay for parking and private vendors would dish out food, deliver health care and run education programs behind prison walls.
All told, the report says, New Jersey could save at least $210 million a year by delivering an array of services through private hands.
“The question has to be, ‘Why do you continue to operate in a manner that’s more costly and less effective?’ rather than, ‘Why change?’ ” said Richard Zimmer, the former Republican congressman who chaired the task force.
It is unclear how many of the recommendations will be adopted by Governor Christie, who commissioned the report in March. Christie’s spokesman declined comment Thursday.
But the car inspection proposal is sure to stir up controversy in a state with a tortured history of privatizing emissions testing.
Read the rest.
Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) on immigration reform: “The federal government has to get in. They have to secure our borders and they have to set up common sense rules to give people a pathway to citizenship.”
Gov. Christie said the state of New Jersey itself can do “very little” to fix this problem, however.
On people who enter legally: “[They] have to be given a pathway to become citizens.”
On those who enter US illegally: “My view is that they need to get on the back of the line.”
Christie says they should return to the country of their origin “if practical.”
“I don’t think that you’re going to be able to say every person who is in this country illegally is going to go back to their country of origin. That’s not going to happen. But, I don’t think, Sean, that people who are here illegally should be able to cut [in] the line in front of people who are doing the process the right way,” Christie said.
