Posted: March 2nd, 2011 | Author:Art Gallagher | Filed under:Chris Christie | Tags:Chris Christie | Comments Off on Correction? Did Christie say he “will not” or “may not” be governor in 2014?
Will Attempt to Force Senate Consideration of Governor’s Conditional Veto
Trenton— In an effort to offer relief to property tax payers and prevent public safety layoffs, Senator Joe Kyrillos (R- Monmouth/Middlesex) will attempt to force consideration of the Governor’s conditional veto of S-2220, which eliminates payouts of unused sick time for public employees, at tomorrow’s Senate session.
“Rather than trying to override the Governor on bills the Majority cannot find the funds to support, the Senate should be passing unfinished toolkit legislation that will help avert public safety layoffs and property tax increases,” Kyrillos said. “Sick leave cash outs present an enormous strain on local government budgets that must be stopped. The Governor is absolutely right in requiring that these cash outs be phased out for all employees, current and future, in his veto message. Sick leave should be used when you are sick, not as a cash gift upon retirement.”
Kyrillos will motion that the conditional veto be taken up as the Senate’s “Order of the Day”. It is up to the Senate President to decide whether or not the motion is in order.
“I hope that the Senate President will hear, as I have, the call of police and firemen who are concerned about the impact of layoffs on our communities,” said Kyrillos. “We need to make tax dollars go farther by giving towns and counties the tools they need to reign in unnecessary costs and fund priorities that matter. Unused sick leave is a perfect example of a cost to local government that no longer needs to exist.”
The National Review’sRick Lowry met with Governor Chris Christie last week. Here’s what the governor told Lowry about his non-candidacy for president:
Yes. Believe me, I’ve been interested in politics my whole life. I see the opportunity. But I just don’t believe that’s why you run. Like I said at AEI, I have people calling me and saying to me, “Let me explain to you how you could win.” And I’m like, “You’re barking up the wrong tree. I already know I could win.” That’s not the issue. The issue is not me sitting here and saying, “Geez, it might be too hard. I don’t think I can win.” I see the opportunity both at the primary level and at the general election level. I see the opportunity.
But I’ve got to believe I’m ready to be president, and I don’t. And I think that that’s the basis you have to make that decision. I think when you have people who make the decision just based upon seeing the opportunity you have a much greater likelihood that you’re going to have a president who is not ready. And then we all suffer from that. Even if you’re a conservative, if your conservative president is not ready, you’re not going to be good anyway because you’re going to get rolled all over the place in that town.
I just see how much better I get at this job every day, and I do, and I learn things. If not every day, at least every week. And my wife and I were actually talking about this last night. We had dinner together with the family after the [New Jersey budget] speech and she was saying how much better she thought I was yesterday than I had been before in my speech. She said, “You are getting better.”
That’s just the nature of life. So, I see the opportunity, I recognize and understand it and I’m really flattered that people think of me that way. But, if I don’t believe it in here [pointing to his heart], I’m not going to be a good candidate on top of everything else.
And remember in the context of sitting there on election night 2009, and my wife and I were convinced we were going to lose. It is a bit to get your arms around, too. You’re a successful United States attorney and then within a year of that time you have people talking about you and I was running around campaigning for folks. All of these handmade “Christie for President” signs in the crowds when I was in Michigan and Iowa and all the other places that I went, Ohio and Pennsylvania and Florida. It’s also been overwhelming, too.
Like I said before, I am who I am and people have to trust, they don’t have to but they should trust, my instincts on this. I know me better than anyone else knows me. If I felt like I was ready, I’d go, but I’m not. But I’m also not going to go if I don’t think I’m ready.
When I walked into the Governor’s office last January there have been some difficult days in the job. There has never been a day where I’ve felt like I’m over my head, I don’t know what to do, I’m lost. I don’t know whether I’d feel the same way if I walked into the Oval Office a year and a half from now. So, unless you get yourself to the point where you really believe you have a shot to be successful, then I don’t think you have any business running for it.
Lowry noted that Christie is better prepared than Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama were when they took office. I would add Truman, Kennedy and Carter to the not as prepared as Christie list of modern day presidents. Since FDR, the only prepared chief executives America has had were Eisenhower,Johnson, Nixon, Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
Unless a Republican leader emerges in the coming months, the “readiness” argument will become weaker and weaker to a country hungry for leadership. Unless that Republican leader emerges the pressure of Christie to fill the leadership vacuum will increase.
I don’t know Christie that well, but I don’t think the question of seeking the presidency is truly a matter of readiness for him. I think it is a matter of calling. A truly great president is called to the office, as Reagan was.
Christie is conducting his governorship as a mission he is called to. He is in the process of becoming a transformational governor. His leadership is having national consequences. He appears to be called to the work that he has started in reducing the size and cost of government on the state and local level.
If Christie is called to a higher office, like the presidency, such calling will probably not happen until there is significant progress in New Jersey and elsewhere throughout the country where his example is making a difference.
For Christie to seek the presidency because of the opportunity when the level of accomplishment in his current calling is far from complete would diminish his current work and the future opportunity. Christie frequently says “I know who I am.” Who he is is someone who doesn’t leave a job undone to take a “better” opportunity.
If Christie stays on his current course as governor and a national leader in bringing fiscal sanity to state and local government he has the potential of making a bigger difference, domestically, in the quality of life and freedom for Americans than any modern day president.
Trenton— Senators Jennifer Beck (R- Monmouth/Mercer) and Steve Oroho (R- Sussex/Hunterdon/Morris) have submitted legislation aimed at ending abuse of the state’s pension system. The bill, S-2716, would prohibit retired public employees that return to government service from collecting pension payments while on payroll.
“Pension payments should only be collected by those who have left the government payroll,” said Senator Beck. “Public employees who game the system by collecting a paycheck and a pension check simultaneously commit the worst kind of double dipping. New Jersey’s taxpayers are tapped out, our pension system woefully underfunded, and neither can tolerate this sort of abuse. Nobody should be able to line their pockets in this manner at public expense.”
The bill prohibits any public employee in the state retirement system from collecting a pension if he or she resumes public employment and is compensated more than $15, 000 annually. Those returning to service after retirement would not accumulate additional pension credits. The bill applies to all state pension plans.
“We must protect New Jersey’s pension systems and it is critically important that we protect the qualified status of those pensions, as well as end any unnecessary strains on the funds,” Oroho added. “There are a variety of good reasons retirees may wish to return to the workforce. However, for the purposes of collecting a pension, and to protect the qualified status of the plans, retired means retired.”
In a column published in The Star Ledger and at NJ Spotlight, Mark Magyar says no. Magyar says that like all the governors before him, except Florio, Christie is simply tinkering at the margins and that whether Christie serves one term or two, New Jersey’s property taxes will still be the highest in the nation.
Magyar, who was a policy advisor to Chris Daggett’s Independent gubernatorial campaign against Christie and Jon Corzine, makes the case that unless New Jersey increases income taxes and sales taxes with the State taking over a higher burden of education funding, that property taxes will continue to be a dispropotionate and inequitable source of funding for education and government services.
A good tax system is generally considered to be one in which income, property and sales taxes are in some rough balance, with each providing somewhere between 30 percent and 40 percent of total revenue for these three major taxes. That is the case in most states, but it is not the case in New Jersey, where property taxes actually make up 58 percent of the income/property/sales tax pie, with income taxes accounting for just 24 percent and sales for the remaining 18 percent.
The only way to actually lower property taxes in New Jersey to a competitive level with other states is to shift billions of dollars of the cost of K-12 education or municipal or county services to another major tax or taxes — with the income and sales taxes being the most logical choices — while simultaneously making sure that an effective cap prevents any new increase in school district and local government spending.
That is what Democratic Gov. Jim Florio tried to do in 1990 when he dedicated half of his $2.8 billion tax package to property tax relief, but most of the money was quickly eaten up by school districts and municipalities for new spending, and by the second year property taxes were rising again as rapidly as ever. Voter repudiation of Florio led to the election of a Republican legislature and GOP Gov. Christie Whitman, and scared politicians in both parties away from any meaningful attempt at overall tax reform.
However, Magyar’s argument is a non-sequitur to the current debate happening in Trenton (and nationally).
Even if Christie and the legislature were to institute Steve Lonegan’s flat tax, increasing income taxes on the poor and middle class while reducing them on the rich, and even if they instituted Chris Daggett’s $4 billion sales tax increase, and used the new revenue to reduce property taxes, the problems that Christie is addressing would remain. They would just be paid for differently.
New Jersey, and many other states, has too much government. There are too many government employees making too much money and getting benefits that are too generous to sustain regardless of how the revenue is generated.
It is only by reducing the size of government on all levels, which means less government employees making less money with less generous pensions and benefits, that our overall tax burden will decrease. That is what Christie’s reforms are designed to do. By forcing the downsizing within the current system, rather than radically changing the way New Jersey taxes its citizens and then implementing cuts, Christie is demanding that municipal, county governments and school boards make the hard choices now. If Christie did it Magyar’s way, government and taxes would continue to expand.
Let’s first reduce the size of our governments. Once that is done we can address the way we pay for them.
While criticising President Obama’s comments to the nation’s governors about public employee unions and health care, Governor Chris Christie told reporters that he will not be governor in 2014, according to Herb Jackson of The Record.
“I’m not going to even be governor in 2014, so the fact that he’s offering flexibility in 2014 is really of no moment to most governors who need to balance their budgets this year,” Christie said.
If reelected in 2013, Christie would be sworn in to his secord term in January 2014.
Middletown- In response to an apparent ‘sick-out’ staged by Monmouth County SCAT bus drivers, Senator Joe Kyrillos (R- Monmouth/Middlesex) called for the immediate firing of the 17 CWA workers involved:
“It is outrageous that 174 disabled and elderly clients who depend on SCAT were stranded by what appears to be a coordinated effort by employees to disrupt service without notice,” said Kyrillos. “The actions of these workers is completely unbecoming of any public servant, and should make every taxpayer in Monmouth County furious. CWA, the union representing these employees, needs to denounce their members for putting the well-being of these vulnerable individuals at risk, and the employees in question should be fired.”
Seventeen SCAT workers, including fourteen bus drivers for the developmentally disabled and senior citizens, took sick leave with no notice on Friday, February 25th- the same day as a coordinated demonstration organized by labor leaders at the State Capitol. Service was disrupted for 174 clients who take SCAT buses to medical appointments or work.
“The rights of workers to demonstrate, protest, and take appropriate leave from work for personal purposes are not disputed,” Kyrillos stated. “However, it is not their right to abuse sick leave and disrupt a system many people have come to rely on. In fact, it is a breach of contract and should be punished to the fullest extent possible. This type of behavior not only hurts the people SCAT serves, it harms the reputation of all public workers.”
If politics were a schoolyard fight, the most notorious bullies would be the leaders of the influential public sector unions. Their weapon of choice: the power to collectively bargain on behalf of their members, with absolutely no consideration for the taxpayers who actually pay the bills. The expedient alliance between the union leadership and politicians of both parties has built and enabled a system that has always been unfair, but today is unsustainable. Taxpayers have been beaten up for too long, with little to no help from the elected leaders whose job it is to protect the money used to finance government functions and services.
At the end of President Obama’s first year in office, the White House released a visitor’s log that identified a prominent union leader as its most frequent visitor. Andrew Stern, the president of the Services Employee Union International (SEIU) represented one of the country’s largest public employee unions. After his organization spent nearly $28 million to elect Barack Obama president in 2008, it was clear he would have a prominent voice inside the White House at a critical time.
Stern’s 22 listed visits came as the President was considering an auto bail-out that paid for the bad deals car companies made with the unions, the stimulus package that included payments to states to fulfill their obligations to public employees and a health care overhaul that ultimately exempted the unions’ “Cadillac health insurance plans” from the same mandates and scrutiny that every other American was subjected to.
In fact, of the over 200 entities that received temporary waivers from provisions in the new healthcare law, 45 were granted to union organizations. It is no wonder that the SEIU spent $44 million in the midterm elections in 2010, exclusively on behalf of congressional Democrats. Including spending by two other labor behemoths, the AFL-CIO and the American Federation of State Counties and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), big labor spent nearly $150 million dollars to preserve the Democrats majority in Congress. The taxpayers and an overwhelming majority of the American people had a different idea. With the results of the 2010 elections came a realization that the American people understood the challenges facing our states and nation better than most of the politicians and special interests that have dominated the political discourse for far too long. Newly elected reform minded governors, such as Scott Walker in Wisconsin and John Kasich in Ohio, also benefited from the example of a fellow reformer elected a full year ahead of them, and who had made a decade’s worth of progress in addressing his own state’s challenges; Chris Christie.
These leaders are doing their part to change the way their states do business and are making the tough choices that can come with a significant political risk. The unions are doing their job fighting them every step of the way, attempting to use the bullying tactics and threats that have worked for them for so many decades. For example, the New Jersey Education Association collected roughly $100 million of dues from about 200,000 members last year. How are they spending this money? In a $300,000 per week radio campaign encouraging higher taxes instead of budget cuts. Luckily, the old rhetoric of unions is lost amid the greater noise coming from the taxpayer revolt. It’s that noise that has to continue and convert into a sustained campaign among the taxpayers to counter the voices of a very vocal, and frankly better organized, minority of union interests who have never been faced with the sort of political opposition we are seeing today. When we find political leaders with the courage to do what is right, we have an obligation to back them up, not just stand on the sideline watching them fight the fight for us. We all learn in school that the only way to discourage a bully is to stand up to him. We’ve all seen that Chris Christie has the will and the backbone to endure $300,000 a week of name-calling and taunts from the teachers unions. If we see the same from like-minded reformers in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere, and “we the people” stand with them, we will see the fundamental change we voted for in November, become a reality. If we stand by and allow these leaders to get overwhelmed by an opposition who believes that union workers should remain a privileged class, exempt from sharing the pain of a nation suffering a genuine crisis, than we would have no one to blame for our high taxes and dysfunctional government that ourselves.
The Governor’s announcement today that the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority would issue, in the near future, a Request for Proposals for the lease of Monmouth Park, including assignment of additional off-track wagering operations, comes as no surprise to the Oceanport Task Force. Any operating lease must protect the Borough’s tax payment as this small community of 6,000 works diligently to overcome the approaching closure of Fort Monmouth (September 2011); reinvents local government in response to the Governor’s 2% cap law; and works cooperatively with its largest taxpayer, Monmouth Park.
We believe the Borough and the Thoroughbred Horsemen have similar goals for Monmouth Park and that both have much at risk as the transition takes shape for horse racing. Horse racing is an important and vital cog not only Oceanport’s economy and the economy of Monmouth County, but for the entire State of New Jersey. Horse racing contributes 7,000 jobs, $110 million in federal, state and local taxes, and 57,000 acres of working agricultural landscape and open space to our “Garden State”.
Equally important for Oceanport is the repayment of a $23 million dollar loan made to the NJSEA that brought NJ Environmental Infrastructure Trust funds to protect Branchport Creek from further contamination, which is essential for the continued operation of the racetrack. Oceanport considers the financing an investment in our quality of life through the protection of the Shrewsbury River system that surrounds our borough.A-2926 authorizing “exchange wagering” and S-2229 to permit pooled wagers; we applaud the Governor’s signing of S-11 and await positive action to include the $15 million purse supplement in the live racing schedule with a suitable length of season. As of Feb. 25 no action had been taken on the status of Monmouth Park’s 2011 racing schedule. By law, the New Jersey Racing Commission must award 141 Thoroughbred dates. Last year Monmouth Park’s “Elite Summer Meet” raced 71 days. Purses almost tripled—about $20 million came from a now expired casino purse supplement—and total pari-mutuel handle increased $123 million for the year. This was a significant return on the investment made toward the purses.
Our own Oceanport Task Force on Monmouth Park has continued to maintain the position that VLT’s, slot machines, or an all-out gaming casino in the Meadowlands is the only way to protect horse racing in New Jersey. The surrounding states of New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland now all have some form of gaming at their race tracks. This uneven playing field enables our competitors to lure New Jersey horseman out of State with larger purses and better quality horse racing.
In addition to the enactment of
Oceanport Task Force representatives have maintained an open dialogue with the Hanson Commission, the NJSEA, the Thoroughbred Horsemen and others that will likely play a key role in preserving horseracing at Monmouth Park.Several interested operators have made introductions to the borough and will likely compete to operate the racetrack.
The Oceanport Task Force on Monmouth Park
ChairMichael J. Mahon, MayorCo.-Chair Gerald Briscione, Former Council Member
