New Jersey Survival

What’s going on at the State House these days makes it hard to be an optimist. New Jersey’s problems are huge, but the same old politics and paralysis endure.

We finally elected a governor, Jon Corzine, who was willing to tackle three of the biggest of those problems: runaway state debt, a growing pile of unfunded obliga tions for public-employee pensions and health care, and a transportation system that’s deteriorating and going broke. Corzine even vowed to risk his re-election chances to try to solve them. That kind of talk has been rare in Tren ton since Woodrow Wilson worked here.

Well, the governor seems to have damaged his political prospects, all right — but without improving anything.

The program Corzine proposed to replenish the Transportation Trust Fund and reduce the $32 billion state debt by one-third was overly complicated. It depended on additional borrowing, a paradox he never could adequately explain. And it distributed its burden unequally, extracting most of its cost from the pockets of regular users of the state’s three toll roads.

The public never bought into the scheme, and it quickly became a target, not only for opposition Republicans but for many of Cor zine’s fellow Democrats as well. As usual, of course, the antis offered no alternative ideas that would have produced comparable benefits. Too many folks at the State House have made it clear that they didn’t run for office to solve problems.

The governor has faced political reality and scrapped Plan A. But Plan B, which he now is working on, is modest, according to insiders, and would address only the state’s transportation needs. It would leave untouched the debt and the benefits obligations that will gobble up ever-increasing por tions of future state income.

Corzine is said to be focusing on smaller toll hikes. He has rejected an increase in the state’s 14.5-cent-a-gallon gasoline tax — even though it’s one of the lowest gas taxes in the nation and much of it is paid by out-of-state motorists who traverse New Jersey — be cause of soaring gas prices.

What a shame. And how well it illustrates the irresponsible way New Jersey has been governed in the past.

Back when fuel was cheap, the state’s taxophobic legislators and governors refused to increase the tax by even a few pennies to pay for highways, bridges and mass transit. Now, prices at the pump are rising by multiples of the 14.5 cents every few days, and the money goes into the pockets of oil companies and foreign rulers who couldn’t care less about Americans’ well-being.

Corzine’s toll-hike plan might have had a marginally better chance if it had avoided borrowing and had included both a gas-tax hike and the imposition of tolls on the free interstate highways, such as I-78 and I-80, as Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell is seeking to do. That would have spread the burden more equitably among New Jerseyans and at the same time would have extracted larger contributions from out-of-staters.

But Corzine already has ruled out the gas tax, and Senate President Dick Codey, D-West Orange, has smacked down any talk from fellow Democrats about putting tolls on the interstates. The Legislature won’t accept it, Codey told Gannett Newspapers last week. “To add tolls where they’re not, it’s a very tough pill for legislators to swallow,” he said.

Whether the legislators will swallow any pill at all is the question.

Transportation Commissioner Kris Kolluri described his own piece of the dilemma in Senate tes timony last week. In addition to finding a source of money for the Transportation Trust Fund, he pointed out, New Jersey must hike Turnpike tolls 45 to 50 percent simply to pay for bridge repairs and the widening of the Turnpike that Codey approved when he was governor three years ago. The state also must commit $1 billion in long- term revenue by the end of this year or risk losing $2 billion in federal aid for the new commuter rail tunnel to New York City that’s es sential to the regional economy.

“It would be irresponsible for us not to respond to the overwhelming infrastructure needs that exist,” Kolluri said.

Before the Legislature can de vote its full attention to being irresponsible on that issue, however, it must deal with another task: approving a budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1. Under the constitution, the budget must be balanced. With revenues from existing taxes declining and all the traditional one-shot budget fixes exhausted, Corzine has recommended cuts in spending. These, too, have drawn complaints from lawmakers, some of them well founded.

Meanwhile, forget about another of New Jersey’s chronic needs: finding a way to reduce property taxes that are the highest in the nation and are forcing many residents to look for sanctuary in more affordable states. The Legislature refused to do that job when good options were available, and now has placed the issue so far on the back burner that it’s over the horizon.

In his discussion of putting tolls on I-78 and I-80, Dick Codey said: “It’s not going to happen. I think it went the way of the Titanic.”

The Titanic analogy is an unfortunate one, senator. It makes people think about where New Jersey itself is headed.

At the Times >>>>> http://www.nj.com/news/times/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/1209960311324240.xml&coll=5&thispage=1