Financial Terms Recognize Fiscal Realities and Limitations as New Jersey Emerges from Recession
Trenton, NJ –The Christie Administration has reached a four-year contract agreement with a state employee collective negotiations unit representing more than 5,000 employees. The financial terms of the agreement, which provide for no across the board salary increases in the first two years and small increases in the third and final years, are a practical recognition by both the negotiations unit and the Christie Administration of the strains on budget resources and state revenues and the continuing need to restrain costs as New Jersey emerges from recession.
The agreement, which requires ratification by the union memberships, was reached with the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), AFL-CIO Local 195, and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Local 518. Both union locals are covered under one contract, and the new agreement will succeed the prior agreement which expired June 30, 2011. The agreement was reached last week and is expected to be voted on by the locals’ respective memberships in the coming weeks.
The across the board salary increases in the agreement are as follows: July 1, 2011 – 0 percent; July 1, 2012 – 0 percent; July 1, 2013 – 1 percent , and July 1, 2014 – 1.75 percent.
“The financial terms of this agreement are, at best, similar to what most New Jerseyans in the private sector have experienced in recent years. The same can be said for non-union state employees in the executive branch who have not seen a raise in over four years,” said Governor Christie. “I thank both union locals for their recognition of the reality we all confront and for their honest and fair negotiations with my administration. I can tell you that we have the same expectations for our other public employee contracts still being negotiated.”
IFPTE represents approximately 4,900 state employees throughout departments in the executive branch and at state colleges, with job titles falling into the categories of operations, maintenance and services; crafts (mechanics, engineers, plumbers, etc.); and inspection and security. SEIU represents approximately 190 employees at the state Motor Vehicle Commission. Together IFPTE/SEIU represents the third-largest state employee civilian negotiations unit.
The Christie Administration continues negotiations with 12 other public employee unions, the largest being the Communications Workers of America, representing approximately 35,000 state employees.
State Senator Joe Kyrillos (R- Monmouth/Middlesex) issued the following statement congratulating Governor Christie for coming to a contract agreement with state employees represented by the IFPTE and SEIU:
“The Governor promised that there would be someone fighting for the taxpayers at the negotiating table, and this contract makes good on that promise.”
“Through a commitment to collective bargaining, the contract agreed to by the Administration, SEIU, and IFPTE is fair to employees and taxpayers alike, and reflects the economic realities facing private sector workers across our state.”
“This approach to labor negotiations is a model that I hope future Administrations will follow, as it puts taxpayers’ interests first.”
Governor Chris Christie will hold a town hall meeting meeting on Wednesday December 21, 2011 at the Spotswood Knights of Columbus, 30 Crescent Ave, Spotswood, NJ 08884.
Doors open at 11:45 am for the noon meeting.
Seating is on a first come first served basis, but the Governor’s office requests that you RSVP here in order to ensure adequate seating.
The Borough of Oceanport, home of Monmouth Park, 1/3 of Fort Monmouth and 6,000 residents has offered to serve as a temporary landlord and transitional vehicle of the racetrack, according to NJ.com.
In a letter to Governor Chris Christie , Mayor Michael J. Mahon offered the borough’s resources and commitment to resolve the current differences and provide a new model for sustainability for the park.
The deal to transfer Monmouth Park from state control, under the auspices of the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, to a private management by developer and casino investor Morris Bailey fell apart earlier this monthover a dispute between the state and the New Jersey Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association over racing date licenses. On Monday, Christie said the horsemen had a week to come up with an acceptable proposal or risk the park’s closure.
Governor Chris Christie will be named one of the Top American Leaders of 2011 by The Washington Post and Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership tomorrow morning at Ford’s Theater in Washington.
The other honorees are Jared Cohen of Google Ideas, Michael Kaiser, president of The Kennedy Center of Performing Arts, Sheila Bair, former Chair of the FDIC, Freeman Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Ahmed Zewail, Nobel Prize winner and professor of chemistry and physics at the California Institute of Technology, and Nicholas Kristof, New York Times columnist.
The Washington Post’s profile of Christie is here.
The event, which will be webcast here at 9AM, will consist of an awards ceremony followed by a discussion moderated by David Gergen, Director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School, Mary Jordan, editor of Washington Post Live, and Steven Pearlstein, columnist for The Washington Post’s On Leadership website.
Governor’s Recidivism Initiative Builds on State’s Strong Record with Expansion of Successful Drug Court Program, Improved Program Management and Coordination and Accountability for Results
Trenton, NJ – Taking action to build on the nationally recognized success of New Jersey’s prisoner re-entry, rehabilitation and prevention programs, Governor Chris Christie today outlined an initiative to help even more offenders get the support they need to successfully re-enter society, break the cycle of criminality and lead productive lives.
Governor Christie outlined this cross-departmental Administration initiative at Cathedral Kitchen, a community service organization that serves meals to those in need in Camden. Cathedral Kitchen operates a culinary arts program which gives job training to unemployed, unskilled, homeless citizens, re-entering prisoners and parolees, helping them transition to a successful, productive life once they are out of prison.
The Governor’s re-entry initiative includes the expansion of the state’s successful Drug Court Program, the appointment of a Governor’s Office Re-entry Coordinator, the creation of a Governor’s Task Force on Recidivism Reduction, an ongoing program assessment, and the development of a real time recidivism database. These changes will allow New Jersey’s re-entry and rehabilitation efforts and programs to work together, to be guided and properly resourced based on results, and to ensure effective programs are expanded to serve as many individuals as possible.
“New Jersey has a strong record of helping rehabilitate offenders and providing the services they need to be successful in society, significantly decreasing their likelihood of reoffending and improving public safety,” said Governor Christie. “But we can do better to make our re-entry programs more efficient, successful and effective – helping even more individuals get the support they need to change their lives for the better and break the cycle of offending and reoffending.”
Today, New Jersey is widely recognized as a national leader in reducing incidents of recidivism and reducing its prison population. The Pew Center on the States’ State of Recidivism report, “The Revolving Door of America’s Prisons,” identified New Jersey’s 11 percent recidivism decline as among the steepest declines for any state during the report’s study period, from 1999-2002 and 2004-2007. Since 1999, New Jersey’s prison population has declined more than 20 percent.
New Jersey spends over $225 million, not including over $40 million for the Drug Court Program, on its system of various re-entry and prevention programs across state government, but it is done in a decentralized manner with no mechanism to implement these resources strategically or measure program performance. The Governor’s initiative builds on the relative success of New Jersey’s existing system of re-entry programs in breaking the cycle of criminality and helping offenders lead successful lives after prison by addressing existing shortcomings and expanding those programs that are getting results.
Existing programs like the Drug Court Program, which serves as an alternative to incarceration for drug-addicted, nonviolent offenders, have already been effective in reducing recidivism rates among those they serve.
According to their October 2010 Drug Court Report, the rate at which drug court graduates are re-arrested for a new indictable offense is 16% and the reconviction rate is 8%. This is compared to re-arrest rates for drug offenders released from prison that stands at 54% with a re-conviction rate of 43%. According to that report, an average institutional cost per inmate is approximately $38,900, whereas the cost for an active drug court participant is roughly $11,379.
The Governor’s initiative will focus additional resources on this successful, demonstrably effective program and allow others to be similarly identified and prioritized to further reduce recidivism with programs that work.
Connecting offenders with the services they need to be successful back in society, whether it is recovery from substance abuse or the need for official identification, is critical to ending the cycle of crime. At present, a joint program between the state Department of Corrections and Motor Vehicles Commission (MVC) identifies qualified offenders on a quarterly basis, who are taken to MVC offices to obtain a driver’s license or non-driver identification card prior to the completion of their sentence. This program takes down impediments to successful re-entry resulting from the lack of official identification, which is often necessary to apply for a job, obtain housing, or connect with critical services like Medicare or food assistance.
“This initiative will build on our strengths by expanding highly successful programs like the Drug Court Program to get addicted offenders the underlying help they need, while also measuring and reforming or eliminating ineffective programs, and directing our resources in a smart, strategic and coordinated way to those programs that are making a positive difference in changing lives,” said Governor Christie.
First Lady Mary Pat Christie has made re-entry and prevention programs that help ex-offenders and recovering addicts return to normal life a priority. New Jersey’s innovative prevention and re-entry programs aimed towards at-risk populations have been highlighted by Mrs. Christie for their work in providing the building blocks to self-sufficiency and a pathway to achieve life success. Several of the initiatives have brought recognition to the Garden State as a national model for the progress made in this area. An overview of Mrs. Christie’s efforts in this area can be foundhere.
The Governor’s initiative includes the following components:
Expansion of the Drug Court Program
The drug courts presently accept approximately 1,400 new participants per year. Those new participants must volunteer for a sentence of drug court as opposed to incarceration. The Christie Administration initiative seeks to expand the drug court program by identifying eligible drug addicted non-violent offenders, providing them with clinical assessments to determine their suitability for drug court and sentencing those offenders to the drug court program regardless of their desire to enter the program.
This approach recognizes that one of the main impediments to treatment for addiction is the denial of addiction. Treatment systems that address the denial issue can ultimately be successful in treating a larger population of appropriate offenders. The Governor’s Re-entry Task Force will be tasked with working with the judiciary to facilitate a suitable expansion of this program beginning with two vicinages to be determined through this effort.
Governor’s Office Coordinator for Prisoner Reentry
A collaborative vision is necessary to improve what is a comparatively successful system of re-entry services. That vision includes, as a first phase, centralizing and providing a formal management structure on the current, decentralized system.
Governor Christie today announced that Lisa Puglisi, an attorney with more than a decade of experience with the Attorney General’s Office representing the Department of Corrections and later the State Parole Board, as his Coordinator for Prisoner Re-entry to convey and implement the Governor’s vision for an improved prisoner re-entry scheme. The Governor’s Coordinator for Prisoner Re-entry will co-chair the Task Force for Recidivism Reduction and serve as the principle policy adviser to the Governor on re-entry and recidivism reduction policy.
The Governor’s Task Force for Recidivism Reduction
There are more than just Corrections and Parole pieces to maintain and improve on the state’s public safety and prisoner re-entry mission. To address the current lack of coordination among the many treatment and reentry programs across state government, Governor Christie today signed Executive Order 83, creating the Governor’s Task Force for Recidivism Reduction.
The Task Force will be led by both the Chairman of the State Parole Board, James Plousis, and the Governor’s Coordinator for Prisoner Re-entry. Its members will include representatives from:
·Department of Corrections
·State Parole Board
·Motor Vehicle Commission
·Department of Human Services
·Department of Health and Senior Services
·Department of Military and Veterans Affairs
·Department of Law & Public Safety
·Juvenile Justice Commission
·Department of Community Affairs
The Task Force will develop recommendations for the Governor regarding how best to ensure the effectiveness and success of New Jersey’s efforts towards recidivism reduction, including an initial benchmarking study of existing program effectiveness and performance, and the development and implementation of a system to measure program effectiveness in an ongoing, real-time way.
Day-to-day implementation of the Governor’s initiative will be led by the State Parole Board Chairman Plousis, including the ongoing elements of the proposal such as collecting and analyzing performance data from various state departments for budgeting, programming and procurement purposes.
Ongoing Program Assessment and Measurement
The Governor’s Re-entry Coordinator and Task Force will work to facilitate a professional benchmarking assessment that will evaluate the effectiveness of all re-entry programs offered. The path forward to improve prisoner re-entry requires the Administration to gauge the successes, failures and the depth of gaps in program delivery – inside and outside of prison.
Programming gaps will be rectified by expanding existing, successful programs and hitting capacity thresholds, particularly relating to program delivery within prison. With the parallel development of the real-time recidivism database, this assessment will remain an ongoing accountability tool, allowing the Administration to identify and remediate or eliminate poor performing programs, ensuring that resources are directed to the most effective and successful programs.
Real-Time Recidivism Database
After the program assessment is completed, that data will be used to populate a database, which will allow the Administration to track outcomes for individuals and trends and level of effectiveness in programs in a real-time manner.
This project is currently in development through the efforts of the State Parole Board, Department of Corrections, the Juvenile Justice Commission, Department of Law & Public Safety, the Office of Information Technology and Rutgers University.
Governor Chris Christie: I believe that the Occupy movement and the Tea Party movement come — their genesis — is from the same feeling, which is an anger that government can’t get things done. And so, now, that is the last similarity between the Tea Party movement and the Occupy movement. But I believe that the cause for their anger comes from the same place. They look at Washington D.C. and they look at a president who is a bystander in the Oval Office. You know, I was angry this weekend, listening to the spin coming out of the administration about the failure of the Supercommittee. And that the President knew that it was doomed for failure so he didn’t get involved. Well then what the hell are we paying you for? It’s doomed for failure so I’m not getting involved? Well, what have you been doing exactly? I mean, I will tell you that I think both parties deserve blame for what’s going on in Washington D.C., both parties do. They’re spending more time talking at each other than talking with each other. We all know what the solutions to these problems are, we’ve done them in New Jersey in many areas, but we don’t have the political will to get them done. And in New Jersey, the reason why they got things done is because I called people into a room and said we’re going to solve this problem and I had people of good will on the other side who said they believed it was their obligation, regardless of party, to get done things like pension and benefit reform. That Mayor Redd can tell you personally how it’s helping her and her budget situation in Camden. Why the President of the United States refuses to do this is astonishing to me. I mean, you know, if he wanted to run for Senate again and just be 1 of 100, I’m sure he could have gotten reelected over and over again in Illinois. When you’re president, it’s kind of what I was talking about before, you know 41, 21 and 1, well he’s the one in Washington. And he’s got to get something done here. And it’s not good enough just to say well, I’ll get it done after the election.
Transcript From Governor Christie’s Inaugural Address On January 19, 2010
Governor Chris Christie:
The greatest thing about New Jersey has always been New Jerseyans themselves. To truly understand this, you need only look at the New Jersey heroes we have with us today.
There is Carolyn B.T. Wallace of Newark. Forty years ago, she and her late husband James founded the international youth organization as a way to help kids in Newark. She has dedicated her life to transforming lives through education and community service.
There is Dave Girgenti of Cherry Hill, who three years ago began the wish upon a hero website. Using the power of the internet, he brings wishers and granters of wishes together. In these three short years, the power of Dave’s idea has made the wishes of 48,000 people come true.
Tammy Evans-Colquitt of Pennsauken created “image and attitude” in the year 2000 to help improve the self-image of disadvantaged men and women in Camden county. She helped women transitioning from welfare to work and men from incarceration to the workplace. Tammy’s hard work has proven once again that no life is disposable and that everyone deserves a second chance.
Jim Benedict of Freehold started and runs a lunch kitchen out of St. Peter’s church, serving hot meals to 200 people, three days a week. With no formal funding from Government, Jim calls on the generosity of New Jerseyans to feed the hungry. (Benedict told him it was four days a week. Christie said his administration goal would be to make it five)
Finally, Chip Paillex of Pittstown is the founder of America’s grow-a-row, a non-profit that feeds the hungry by encouraging the donation of fresh produce to food banks all over new jersey. He started in his own garden and last year, over 700 volunteers donated 225,000 pounds of produce to area food banks.
These folks are just a few examples of what New Jerseyans are all about. When faced with tough problems, you choose hard work over giving up. You rise to the challenge, not shrink from it. For all of us on this stage we must now resolve to use all of you as our example. We in office must not shrink from the challenge, we must rise to it.
Posted: November 23rd, 2011 | Author:Art Gallagher | Filed under:Chris Christie | Tags:Chris Christie | Comments Off on Governor Christie: Service Is What Makes NJ Great
Governor Chris Christie held a press conference this afternoon in Trenton to announce DCA Commissioner Lori Grifa’s resignation, effective January 2, and his nomination of Richard Constable, the deputy commissioner of the Department of Labor and Workforce Development as Grifa’s replacement.
During the Q&A with reporters, Christie discussed fracking, telecommunications regulations, Newark’s concerns about the merger of UMDNJ and Rutgers and the politics of the state budget.
