Abbott Ruling Prolongs The Insanity

By Diane Gooch

When the New Jersey Supreme Court recently ruled that the state must increase funding to 31 school districts in the amount of $500 million, it was both a gross display of judicial activism and worse, it perpetuated a bad public policy.

The Governor and Legislature, not the courts, should be deciding spending priorities, and while it is tempting to oppose this ruling on that fact alone, it is not the ruling’s most fatal flaw. That is why you see the Governor avoiding a confrontation with the legitimacy of the court’s action. Turning this into a battle over “separation of powers” will divert too much attention from the main event, which is how to change the state’s arcane and ineffective school funding formula to maximize the benefit to our students. Abbott districts were created by a court ruling in 1985 to mitigate the inequity in school funding between urban districts with higher poverty and suburban districts with more wealth. Subsequent court rulings and governmental actions have followed, all in an effort to equalize funding discrepancies. Since wealthier districts were able to benefit from significant stronger property tax revenue base, the Abbotts needed the state to compensate for their lack of funding with more education aid. In the mid-90s, attempts to equalize the districts included things like capping how much wealthier districts can spend on education and changing the spending ratio based on student population. Eventually, equalization in spending was achieved by the latter part of the decade. However, the inertia behind increasing funding to the Abbotts and limiting spending by wealthier districts became uncontrollable.

A tectonic shift occurred in the completely opposite direction. The more urban districts began spending more than the suburban districts at a growing and alarming rate.

For example, the average per child expenditure on education in New Jersey is roughly $12,000. Looking at Monmouth County, a wealthier school like Rumson spends roughly the average of $13,188. In Asbury Park, an Abbott district, it is $24,428.

We don’t ever think of public policy as having an expiration date, but it seems as if our funding formula is far past its optimal effectiveness. Included in that should be the notion that money solves the problem when it comes to education. This is evidenced by the continually poor performance of the Abbott school districts, despite sharp increases in education spending and a virtual monopoly of state education aid. That is why the most recent ruling by the New Jersey Supreme Court is so flawed. It props up a system that not only fails the state’s taxpayers, but more importantly our public school students. Real education reform has to be student-centered and get greater accountability for the millions of dollars invested in our schools.

Unfortunately, it seems the New Jersey Supreme Court has come down on the side of those who believe foolishly that we can just throw more money to ‘at risk’ districts to get results. In short, this court action is best defined by Albert Einstein’s description of insanity: “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

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NJ’s Supreme Injustice

Court feeds political machines

By Steven Malanga, In today’s NY Post

New Jersey’s Supreme Court ruled last week that the cash-strapped state must send another $500 million in aid to urban school districts — the latest in a long series of decisions disconnected from economic reality and wise public policy.

Over the last 40 years, Jersey’s high court has commandeered tens of billions of dollars of state tax money that has largely been wasted on schools, forced taxes higher and undermined the tax base of whole communities — in the process, driving the state to the verge of insolvency.

Basing its original decision on a vague clause in the state Constitution that says the state must ensure “a thorough and efficient system of free public schools,” the court made the state responsible for funding urban school districts — regardless of whether the money was well spent.

 Courts in other states, including New York, have interpreted similar language to mean that states should provide more aid to urban districts. But Jersey’s high court essentially ruled that schools in 31 poor “Abbott districts” should be funded at a level equal to the states’ wealth iest school districts — making Jersey’s among the most expensive urban school districts in America.

Newark spends $23,000 per pupil; Camden, $22,000; Asbury Park, $27,000. Most of that money comes from the state — 82 percent of Newark’s school budget, for instance.

So residents in many suburban towns essentially pay for two school systems: their own, through local property taxes, and urban schools, through their state taxes — costing state residents a staggering $37 billion since 1998, according to estimates in The New York Times.

Even if this spending produced stellar results, it would be hard to justify this system: The steep property taxes it requires have helped make homeownership unaffordable even to many middle-class residents. But the results have been the opposite of stellar. As the education reform group E3 observes in a study of Newark, “Money For Nothing”: “Given the extraordinary expenditure on schooling, students are not receiving a meaningful education.”

Despite claims that it wanted to ensure “thorough and efficient” schools, the court has done nothing but feed dollars to a patronage-laden Jersey political culture.

For example, when the court ruled that Jersey had to spend heavily to build schools in urban districts, the state floated billions of dollars of debt through a construction authority it created to get around the requirement that voters must approve all borrowing. The court not only allowed the scheme — but when the construction authority proved so corrupt and inefficient that it only finished half the job with the money it got, the court forced the state to spend billions more.

The court has also reshaped the state’s map with decisions known as the Mount Laurel cases, by taking local zoning powers away from towns and cities and requiring municipalities to build affordable housing, often at great cost.

In one infamous case, it ordered the tiny township of Greenwich, with only 520 housing units, to add 810 homes, sending property taxes soaring. The burden fell especially hard on middle-income residents; later court rulings gave big property-tax breaks to the lower-income units.

The latest ruling has spurred Gov. Chris Christie in his pledge to remake the Supreme Court. Last year, he outraged the state’s political establishment by refusing to renominate Justice John Wallace, breaking with a tradition in which Supreme Court justices are automatically reappointed. The Democratic-controlled Senate refused to consider Christie’s nominee for the job, allowing Chief Justice Stuart Rabner to appoint a temporary replacement judge, who was the key swing vote in the decision to spend $500 million more in school aid.

That’s money the state doesn’t have — Jersey can’t even afford to contribute to its severely underfunded state pension system.

New Yorkers, beware. In 2007, the Empire State agreed to boost state education spending by an unrealistic $7 billion over four years in response to a lawsuit brought by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity. But facing a $10 billion budget hole, Gov. Cuomo has cut education aid by $1.5 billion, prompting threats of another CFE lawsuit — even though New York still leads the nation in per-pupil spending.

The courts shouldn’t become a permanent substitute for our elected officials in managing state spending. As Jersey has taught us, when judges seize that power, taxpayers wind up big losers.

Steve Malanga is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute; his new book is “Shakedown: The Continuing Conspiracy Against the American Taxpayer.”

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School Funding Is Thorough, But Certainly Not Efficient

By Andrew Bruck

Forty years of school finance litigation – and we still can’t agree what it means to provide a “thorough and efficient” system of public education.  The latest Abbott v. Burke ruling didn’t distinguish between the two parts of New Jersey’s most famous constitutional phrase, but it seems unlikely we’ll ever get to thoroughness without efficiency.  In the real world if not in the courts, there’s no separating the two, and it’s time for the legislature to give both their due. 

The system for funding and operating our public schools is hopelessly wasteful: a fractured, Byzantine system that allows good money to be wasted on redundant programs and unnecessary bureaucracies.  The problem lies with New Jersey’s overabundance of local government.  With 566 municipalities and 616 school districts, we simply have too many administrative entities trying to do the same thing.  New Jersey taxpayers elect mayors to govern towns with fewer than 25 residents and pay superintendants to oversee districts with fewer than 50 students. 

The waste is remarkable.  Consider Mendham, home of Gov. Chris Christie.  It’s a single community, but the town is split into two local governments:  Mendham Borough and Mendham Township.  Each municipality has its own K-8 school district, each with fewer than 1,000 enrolled students and each with a superintendant making more than $150,000 per year.  The two municipalities are also part of the West Morris Regional High School District, which includes Chester Township, Chester Borough, and Washington Township, and which pays its own superintendant $192,000 per year to watch over the five towns’ high school kids. 

It’s an elaborate – and expensive – mess.  It’s no surprise that, at a spring 2009 town hall meeting, Christie called the divide between the two Mendhams “crazy.”

There’s a better way.  Representatives from the Mendhams, the Chesters, and Washington Township are discussing several cost-saving measures, including a consolidation of the various school districts and, more boldly, a consolidation of the five municipalities.  A recent study commissioned by Courage to Connect NJ, the only statewide non-partisan, non-profit organization devoted to consolidation and shared services, found that multi-town municipal consolidations could lower property taxes by up to 40 percent in some cases. 

The real question is whether Christie and the State Legislature are committed to fixing the problem.  The state’s fiscal 2010 budget eliminated virtually all funding to study consolidating municipalities and other local districts.  Now that Trenton must come up with an additional $500 million to comply with Abbott, it’s going to be even harder to convince politicians that consolidation is worthy of additional funding.  But a small increase in state funding for consolidation could save tremendous amounts of money in the future – and make it easier for New Jersey to provide the “thorough and efficient” system of education that the state constitution requires. 

A good first step would be to reform the way that New Jersey funds consolidation studies.  Across the state, there are scores of local officials and grassroots community groups that want to know whether their towns could save money and lower taxes by merging local governments or school districts with neighboring communities.  But these studies require towns to shell out between $30,000 and $70,000 for private outside consultants to perform relevant financial analyses. State law obligates Trenton to help towns defray the cost of these studies, but it has long since given up funding these projects.  Cash-strapped towns wind up abandoning study proposals because they can’t afford the up-front cost.

The solution is simple:  Trenton should take over the study process.  Remove private “consultants” and assign two or three non-partisan experts in municipal finance to examine the various proposed consolidations – which they could do for far less than $30,000 to $70,000 per study.  At long last, weary taxpayers can finally figure out if consolidation is the answer.

Making it easier to consolidate towns and schools won’t magically solve our budget problems.  But a short-term investment now will help communities find new ways to fund local services – including public education – without bankrupting taxpayers.  More money for New Jersey’s schools won’t do any good unless we create a system that is both thorough and efficient.  Here’s hoping Trenton makes the best of this opportunity.

Andrew Bruck is a former law clerk to Chief Justice Stuart Rabner.  He is the co-author of the Courage to Connect NJ Guidebook, a citizen’s guide to municipal consolidation in New Jersey, and “Overruled by Home Rule,” a legal and historical overview of consolidation.

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Racial Segregation In A Northern State. A Challenge To My Governor Christie

By Tommy DeSeno, Originally published on ricochet

I’m a bit moved today that an issue I’ve been hammering away at by my lonesome for a decade is finally getting some attention.

New Jersey is racially segregated.   Some of it is naturally occurring or of personal economic genesis. The birth of that kind of segregation requires no immoral act by mankind, though whether something should or can be done about it I leave for another debate.

Some of New Jersey’s racial segregation is state sponsored.  State sponsored racial segregation shouldn’t be, from both moral and economic perspectives. Something must be done about it.

New Jersey has the highest incomes in America, but Camden is the poorest city in America. The only way to have the highest incomes and the poorest city is to have a segregated poor.   Some of that segregation might have to do with the way public housing is built.   That might be a real issue, but that is not my issue today.

My issue is education, where state sponsored segregation is a certainty in New Jersey.   Brown v Board of Education may as well never have happened as far as the racially segregated City of Asbury Park is concerned. That is ironic since Asbury Park has a school named in honor of Thurgood Marshall, who was lead counsel on Brown v Board of Education.  Thurgood Marshall and its sister schools in Asbury Park, the High School in particular, are some of the most racially segregated schools in the country.

Let’s talk about how that happened.  Asbury Park is home to some of the poorest people in New Jersey, and while it is racially diverse, it is majority Black.  It’s only a little bigger than a square mile.  It is surrounded by other small towns, some of which rank as the wealthiest in New Jersey.  They are super-majority White. They are all tiny towns, too small to have their own High Schools. So for about 100 years, children in all the rich surrounding towns attended Asbury Park High School.

Asbury Park High ran well as a racially and economically diverse school.

In 1996 state action occurred.  New Jersey’s Commissioner of Education ruled that 15 miles away, another public school in very wealthy and very white Little Silver, NJ had a better music program than Asbury Park. Therefore, anyone who wanted to study music could be bused past their home school in Asbury Park and go to Little Silver, at taxpayer expense.

Suddenly, an unexplained outbreak of the desire to learn the oboe developed among the White students, who were instantly so musically gifted that they all passed the required audition and were accepted into the other public high school’s music program.

Over the past 15 years, they quietly allowed the rich surrounding towns to peel away from the Asbury Park School District to join districts geographically further away.

That took from Asbury Park it’s economic, cultural and racial diversity.  It left Asbury Park with just he lowest income students in the state, who for whatever reason you may wish to ascribe, happen to be Black.  To look at the class pictures in Asbury Park, you would think that in 1996 aliens abducted all the white kids, because they just suddenly disappear.

Some may not have a problem with this, but that’s only because I have yet to tell you about the money side.   If it is activist courts, social engineering and throwing money at poor schools as a magic elixir that stirs your emotions, behold:

New Jersey had a Supreme Court case called Abbott come down.  It stands for this proposition:  Poor school districts must be funded to the same level as the richest districts in the state. 

Thirty-two of the State’s 500+ school districts are identified as poor “Abbott Districts” and they receive billions of dollars in extra money from the State, because the Supreme Court says they have a “right” to everyone else’s money for being poor.

Asbury Park is one of those “Abbott” districts. It is one of the lowest performing school districts in the state.   Its budget?  About $90 million yearly.  It’s High School graduating class?  About 90 students. 

However, if we didn’t bus all those kids past the Asbury Park district and brought them back home where they live, Asbury Park would lose it’s “Abbott Designation” and taxpayers would save about $60 million in Abbott funding yearly.

Such an easy fix!  Now brace yourself for the ugly side of politics to learn why it isn’t done:

Most of the suburban White people will complain to high heaven about the money Asbury Park gets each year.  But ask them if they are willing to send their children back to their geographic home district, and they will say, “On second thought, why don’t you just keep that $60 million.”

The urban Blacks in Asbury Park are just as guilty.  While they may claim to abhor racial segregation, ask them to desegregate their school and their answer is, “And lose $60 million? No way!”

The children are caught in the middle.  They are racially and economically segregated by state action, and they know it.

Since no one’s hands are clean here, there is no reason to waste time with allegations that this happened because the White towns acted racially or the Black school was greedy.  Just fix it for the children, and the taxpayer.

I have been calling on every politician since 1996 to change that awful “music ruling” and bring the White children back to Asbury Park, or close Asbury Park and send the children to the surrounding High Schools, where each school would have to take only 15 students per grade.

I’ve never gained any traction, because no one wants to admit that Abbott funding is “segregation hush money.”

Until today.  I’m delighted that Art Gallagher, who runs New Jersey’s most prolific center-right blog More Monmouth Musings, has taken up the cause.

Art notes today that David Sciarra, Director of the Education Law Center who was responsible for bringing those Abbott cases, gave a speech yesterday lamenting the racial segregation he suddenly sees throughout New Jersey schools.

That is huge news.  I don’t care if Mr. Sciarra sees racial segregation as his organization’s fault or not.  I’m just glad he sees it.  He, of course, is on the left.  Mr. Gallagher is on the right.  For the first time in 30 years, New Jersey’s left and right identified the same problem with education: Segregation.

Art Gallagher has gained enough gravitas through his blog that he has been granted one-on-one interviews with Governor Christie himself.

I hope Art and Mr. Sciarra can get the Governor’s attention to tackle racial segregation in New Jersey schools.

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Education Inequality Is Not About Money. Its About Racial Segregation

Want lower property taxes?  Desegregate New Jersey Schools

By Art Gallagher

Finally!  Someone other than our friend Tommy DeSeno is speaking the truth about what is the real source of New Jersey’s highest in the nation property taxes and universally failing urban school districts: State sponsored racial segregation.

That’s right.  The reason our property taxes are so high and the reason urban school districts are falling is that New Jersey spends billions of dollars per year to educate white kids while spending even more, per child, to warehouse black kids and hispanic kids.

We make racial segregation sound virtuous by using terms like “home rule,””school-aid equity,” “thorough and efficient,” and “Abbott.”  Then we go to court and argue over how much money the state should send to Newark, Camden, Asbury Park and the other 27 Abbott Districts.   We don’t talk about the racial makeup of those districts, or we use the exception, Keansburg, to argue that the segregation is not about race….its about economics.

Its about racial segregation.  Liberal Blue Jersey’s schools resemble pre-1963 Alabama schools in their racial makeup.

Tommy DeSeno has been a lone voice on this issue for years.  He has used these pages at MMM for at least three years to tell the truth about New Jersey’s dirty open secret whenever a debate over education funding breaks out.  Read Tommy’s words here and here.  Read the comments.

Here’s a sample from November of 2008 for those of you who don’t want to follow the links:

Now, let’s you and I talk about Abbott Districts.

Asbury Park gets $60 million yearly in Abbott funds. It is per capita the most expensive Abbott in the state.

The district includes rich white towns like Avon, Allenhurst, Interlaken and Deal.

In 1996 they started busing the rich white kids past Asbury up to Red Bank Regional, another public high school about 6 or 7 miles away.

That CREATED Asbury as an Abbott district by segregating just the poorest black kids in the county to one school.

Here is a typical conversation I have with people from the rich towns surrounding Asbury:

RICH WHITE GUY: You know Tom, I resent having to send Asbury $60 million in Abbott funds from my tax money each year.

ME: If you stop busing your kids away and put them back in their home district in Asbury, then Asbury will lose its Abbott designation, and you won’t have to pay it anymore.

RICH WHITE GUY: You know Tom, on second thought, why don’t you just keep that $60 million.

Listen grasshopper, I’m going to teach you a dirty little secret about Abbotts, that the liberal press won’t tell you:

Abbott money in Asbury, is “segregation hush money.” Both sides of it are guilty.

White people will complain about the money, but won’t change anything because they don’t want their kids back in Asbury.

Black people will complain about the segregation, but they won’t change it either, because wasting $60 million a year in other people’s money is just way too much fun!

Meanwhile, Asbury kids are caught in the middle, attending a racially segregated school (and they know it), created by busing white kids away from their home district, as if Brown v Board of Education never happened.

There is a government caused racially segregated school right here where you live, Eric. Just like they had in the segregated south.

Tommy’s words have fallen on deaf ears because even after 30 years of the failed Abbott experiment, we would rather keep pouring money into the failed urban/minority districts and waste generations of minority kids lives than risk the “working” white school districts by regionalizing and desegregating the school districts.  We’d rather find a way to keep our “home rule” and come up with a way to make urban schools work, like charter schools,  rather than desegregate the urban schools with the successful suburban school just next door.  Let’s spend several hundred billion dollars more and waste another generation to see if we can make separate but equal work.

Maybe that will change now. 

The most powerful man in New Jersey over the last 30 years,the man who more than any other caused New Jersey school’s racial segregation, David Sciarra, director of the Education Law Center, seems to have recognised the error of his ways, even if he is not taking responsibility for what his Abbott litigation has produced over the last three decades.

According to liberal Star Ledger columnist Bob Braun Sciarra appeared in New Brunswick this week with NAACP President Benjamin Jealous and James Harris, the head of New Jersey’s NAACP.  He said:

“By any measure, New Jersey has one of the most segregated school systems in the country,” said David Sciarra, director of the Education Law Center, the organization that brought the school aid cases to the state’s highest court.

“We have to reopen that front,” he added. “We have to start to talk about what we need to do to break down district boundaries.”

If Sciarra is serious about making education work for everybody and wants to start talking about breaking down district boundaries he can withdraw his litigation that is keeping those boundaries in place before the State Supreme Court rules that Governor Christie and the legislature needs to flush an additional $1.7 billion into a failed system in the coming fiscal year.

If Sciarra is serious about making education work for everyone, he will stop measuring education equality by dollars spent and work with, rather against, the government to create a system that works.  

I think he would find a willing partner in Governor Chris Christie, who more than any other elected leader in my lifetime has expressed his commitment to quality education for urban children.

It is time for New Jersey to confront the painful truth about our education system.  We can no longer afford to pretend that money is what will make education work.  We can no longer pretend that we are spending billions of dollars per year on something other than racially segregated schools.

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Kyrillos Submits “The School Children First Act” Reforming Teacher Tenure and Pay

Trenton— State Senator Joe Kyrillos (R- Monmouth) has introduced legislation, S-2881, aimed at providing all children in New Jersey with an effective teacher in their classrooms. “The School Children First Act” will reform teachers’ tenure and pay structure, and bringing these important protections in line with the state constitution’s mandate of a “thorough and efficient” system of public education. The legislation is modeled after Governor Christie’s teacher tenure and salary reform proposals.

“We cannot, as a state, tolerate a public education system in which some children have access to good teachers while others do not,” said Kyrillos. “We must make the system work better for kids by rewarding excellent teachers and removing those who are not effective in the classroom. In order to meet the state constitution’s requirement of a thorough and efficient system of public schools for all children, we must put their needs above all else in every facet of our educational system. That includes how tenure and compensation are earned.”

The legislation replaces traditional teacher tenure with protections that must be earned and maintained through annual evaluations that rely heavily on classroom observation, making it easier to identify and remove ineffective teachers from the classroom.

The pay structure of the teaching field will be reformed as well. Student achievement will play a role in determining salary awards under the bill, a change from the current system which compensates teachers based on seniority.

“The new system puts students first by protecting and rewarding teachers who are effective, aiding those who need to improve but still show promise and passion, and moving those who are persistently ineffective out of the classroom,” Kyrillos stated. “All the while, this legislation protects educators from arbitrary or politically motivated termination.”

Under the bill, tenure is earned after three annual evaluations of “effective” or “highly effective”. A teacher loses and must re-earn tenure after one rating of “ineffective” or two evaluations of “partially effective”.

“Teachers who are performing well or who clearly will perform well with additional mentoring and guidance have nothing to fear from this type of reform,” said Kyrillos. “However, the new system improves on current practice by stopping the excuses for educators who are clearly incapable in the classroom or have burned out.”

Finally, the bill as drafted prioritizes students’ needs by ensuring that a school’s most effective educators are retained if staffing reductions are made. “I’ll take a great third year teacher over an ineffective veteran of the system any day of the week,” said the Senator. “When staffing decisions are made, our children should have access to the best teachers whether they’ve spent two or twenty years in the classroom.”

Kyrillos said he hopes that the debate over his bill will be based on its merits rather than fear. “Change is always difficult in government, but I hope that those who disagree with this bill do so based on fact rather than fear mongering,” he said. “A system that makes it too difficult and costly to remove teachers who are failing, that unnecessarily creates winners and losers among our state’s school children because of red tape and bureaucracy, is neither thorough nor efficient.”

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Kyrillos Pushes Bill Empowering Parents to Force Education Reform

Hosts Discussion on ‘Parent Trigger’ Legislation Embraced in Chicago, California

Trenton— Senator Joe Kyrillos (R- Monmouth/Middlesex) today joined with the Heartland Institute to host a discussion with legislators and business, civic, and education leaders regarding proposed legislation that would give parents in failing school districts the authority to affect immediate change. The Parent Empowerment and Choice Act (S-2569), dubbed ‘the parent trigger’, would force certain organizational and administrative reforms in a school through community petition.

“Today in New Jersey, parents and students in failing school districts have two choices: move or to pay for a private education,” said Senator Kyrillos. “That is unacceptable to me, and it should be unacceptable to every taxpayer that foots the bill for a system that is too often unresponsive and slow to change. If enacted into law, my bill would give parents in these districts- some of the poorest and most dangerous in New Jersey- the ability to build a better tomorrow for their children by forcing immediate improvements to a school that is failing to educate its students.”

Kyrillos’s bill allows parents in a failing school, as determined by student test scores, to force the following changes through majority petition:

Reorganization as a charter school

Replacement of administrators and/or staff

Establishment of a tuition voucher system for any public or private school in New Jersey

The requested change would be required to take effect 180 days following certification of the petition.

Kyrillos noted that troubled districts in Illinois and California are embracing similar proposals. “Parents in one of California’s worst school districts, Compton, are already using the parent trigger to affect change, and Mayor-elect Rahm Emmanuel has voiced initial support for this reform in Chicago,” he said. “This is not an ideological issue. This is about rejecting the notion that children in failing schools should be denied a quality education because of administrative hurdles, legal obstacles, and an educational establishment that is resistant to change.”

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Use It Or Lose It

Christie Administration Urges School Districts To Spend $200 Million In Stimulus Funds

There is $200 million in unspent federal stimulus earmarked for New Jersey Schools that will have to be returned to the federal government unless spent by August, according to a report at NJ Spotlight.

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This is a compromise? So much for turning Trenton upside down

By Art Gallagher

Governor Chris Christie and Senate President Steve Sweeney announced that they had reached a compromise over the nomination of Anne Patterson to the NJ Supreme Court.  

Christie nominated Patterson to the court one year ago today to fill the seek of John Wallace.  Wallace’s term was expiring but he had not reached the age of mandatory retirement.  Christie acted within his constitutional authority but broke with tradition by not reappointing Wallace.

Christie’s Democratic critics, in the legislature and the media, charged that the governor was interfering with the independence of the judiciary.   Christie countered that he was fulfilling his campaign promise to reshape the court which has a long history of overstepping its bounds and legislating from the bench, especially with the Abbott decision which mandates education spending and the Mt. Laurel decision which mandates the development of affordable housing.  These two judicial decisions are responsible for New Jersey’s highest in the nation property taxes.

Sweeney pledged that Patterson would not get a hearing in the Senate and that her nomination would not be voted on until Wallace, who hails from Sweeney’s home county of Gloucester, reached the age of retirement; March of 2012.  For a year the Wallace seat has filled by appellate Judge Edwin Stern who was appointed by Chief Justice Stuart Rabner as a temporary fill-in.

As a result of the “compromise” announced yesterday between Christie and Sweeney, the governor will withdraw Patterson’s nomination to Wallace seat and nominate her for the seat of retiring Justice Roberto Rivera-Sota.  Sweeney pledged a fair hearing for Patterson, and that timely hearings will be held for the Wallace seat and the seat of
Justice Virginia Long who reaches the mandatory retirement age in 2012.

I fail to see the “deal” here.  Where’s the compromise?  What did Christie get?   Christie could have withdrawn Patterson’s nomination for Wallace’s seat and nominated her for Rivera-Soto’s seat without consulting Sweeney.  Sweeney keeps the Wallace seat filled by Stern until March.  Was Sweeney threatening to hold up the nominations to replace Wallace and Long beyond their retirement dates?  Would Sweeney allow three seats on the seven member court to be held by temporary Justices appointed by Rabner? 

The other thing I don’t like about this deal capitulation, is that it is an indication that Christie assumes that Sweeney will be Senate President next year.  While that may be a realistic expectation given the new gerrymandered legislative map, it is disappointing to think that Christie, as the leader of the Republican party, has already given up on trying to win control of the Senate in the legislative election this November.

If Christie has given up on winning control of the Senate, who am I to argue that it is possible?

So much for turning Trenton upside down.

Christie has a Town Hall meeting in Manalapan this afternoon.

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Monmouth Voters Overwhelmingly Approve School Spending

By Art Gallagher

Voters approved school budgets in 45 of the of the 54 school district elections held yesterday, according to the unofficial tally posting on the Monmouth County website.

Five of the eight districts that defeated their budgets were in the Bayshore towns of Hazlet, Highlands, Keansburg, Keyport and Union Beach.

Middletown and the Matawan-Aberdeen districts, also in the Bayshore, narrowly passed their budgets.  Middletown’s budget passed 3332-3207. Matawan-Aberdeen’s 898-804.

In Lake Como, voters split 49-49.

The Monmouth results appear to mirror the results throughout the state.  The Star Ledger is reporting that budgets passed in  301 of the 373 elections results that were available as of 12:33 am this morning.

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