More three-card monte from Corzine

Gov. Corzine touched on most of the right themes in his address to the Legislature today, but the speech was nonetheless disappointing. I was hoping to hear more specifics on how he intended to provide short-term property tax relief - along with dollar amounts for each recommendation.
All I heard about immediate tax relief was more of the same - shuffling the money around. He talked about eliminating property tax rebates and instead using the money for property tax credits. That's tax relief? The other major component of his plan was applying a portion of the sales tax increase to property tax relief, although the specifics on how that would be done have yet to be spelled out. All told, those two proposals would provide $1.6 billion in tax relief, he said. No, they wouldn't. They would simply redistribute $1.6 billion.

Sweeney and Moriarity...They're back

In the weeks leading up to approval of the state budget, Democratic Sen. Stephen Sweeney, chairman of the Senate Labor Committee, and Democratic Assemblyman Paul Moriarty angered state workers and some of their colleagues in the Legislature by arguing for union benefit givebacks. Most of their recommendations made perfect sense. The Legislature, naturally, ignored them.

But now, Sweeney and Moriarity, in the context of the special session on property tax reform, are again calling for major modifications to public employee compensation plans. They unveiled a package of reforms today designed to "bring state and local government closer to 'real world' employment standards." If approved, it would provide significant tax relief.

Among the suggestions, most of which the Press has been pushing for the past three years: requiring 40-hour work weeks of all new hires; prohibiting unused vacation, sick and personal time from being carried over from one year to the next; requiring cost sharing of employee health benefits; raising the minimum retirement age from 55 to 60; abolishing longevity payments; eliminating health and pension benefits for anyone working less than 30 hours a week; and prohibiting overtime or other compensation from being included in pension calculations.

Sweeney and Moriarty lost round one. Round 2 promises to be nastier and bloodier.

Modest expectations for special session

Will the Legislature's special summer session eventually lead to substantial tax relief? Don't bank on it.
The cast of characters in the Democratic-controlled Legislature - a Legislature that has done nothing to address the state's financial or ethical problems for the past five years - hasn't changed. There's little evidence it has the will to implement the major changes needed to provide significant tax relief. Changes to the school funding formula. Civil Service reform. Changes in the way public employee contracts are negotiated. State-imposed mandates requiring reasonable employee contributions for health insurance. Pension rule changes. Forced consolidation of municipalities or school districts. County-administered government and schools. True pay-to-play reform.
The Democratic leadership also has stacked the deck to ensure the recommendations the special-session committees make will have a distinctly Democratic flavor. Unless the leadership changes its mind before Friday, each committee will consist of four Democrats and two Republicans - a ratio ill-suited to achieving political consensus.
There are two reasons for guarded optimism, however. Legislators are feeling the heat from their constitutents; many are actually starting to act as though they are fearful for their jobs if they don't act. And if Gov. Corzine is indeed planning to use New Jersey as a steppingstone to a run for the presidency, as many observers believe, he needs to turn this state around. He has no shot at becoming president - let alone being re-elected to a second term as governor - if he can't deliver on his promise to reduce the tax burden and transform the state's corrupt political culture.

Public advocate on beach patrol

One of the priorities of the state's new public advocate, Ronald Chen, is making certain New Jersey's beaches are accessible to the public. Toward that end, the advocate's office has published a 2006 beach guide, http://www.state.nj.us/publicadvocate/reports/pdfs/BEACH_GUIDE.pdf, that opens with an overview of the history of beach access issues.

The guide includes information about beach fees, parking, restroom and changing facilities, and disability access for beaches in Monmouth, Ocean, Atlantic and Cape May counties.
It also includes an e-mail address, where comments about the beach guide or concerns regarding beach access should be sent: beaches@advocate.state.nj.us.

Here are our two suggestions for improving next year's guide: Make it available before the summer begins rather than halfway into the season, and make it clear on the first or second page of the guide, as the press release announcing the guide did, that the public advocate is committed to ensuring compliance with beach access regulations and that he encourages the public to inform him about problems with beach access, ranging from inadequate parking, to excessive beach fees to inadequate facilities.

Another happy ex-pat

Thanks to the Internet, we get lots of feedback from former Press subscribers who have left New Jersey in search of a better quality of life and a lower cost of living. Most have no regrets about having pulled up stakes, including this ex-pat, Richard Coda, now living in Arizona.
His note, and his multimedia swansong, follow:

''I consider myself lucky to have left NJ in 2005 for Arizona. I can honestly tell you I will never come back. And I encourage all my old friends to do the same.

And, as we sold a house in NJ last year we were supposed to get a nice tax refund this year. Nope... Jersey's holding it hostage for some reason. Figures... the one year they OWE ME money, they won't give it to me."

The swansong: http://www.pctype.com/flash/priceless.html.

Any questions for governor, Sen. Lance?

The Asbury Park Press editorial board will be hosting Senate Minority Leader Leonard Lance and new Monmouth County Republican Chairman Adam Puharic next week. The following week, Gov. Corzine will be coming here to meet with our board.
If you have any questions you would like us to ask any of them, please pass them along, via a blog response, an e-mail, rbergmann@app.com or by phone, 732 643-4034.

Oyster Creek opponents seeking donations

Activists fighting a 20-year license extension for the Oyster Creek nuclear plant in Lacey have limited financial resources. The legal bills are mounting, and they will continue to mount in the year ahead. They have held fund-raisers and have received some sizable individual contributions. But they recognize the need to broaden their campaign. To that end, one of the coalition's member groups, the New Jersey Environmental Federation, has put together a brochure it will be sending to its members throughout the state. Anyone interested in contributing can do so online at www.cleanwaterfund.org/contribute.html. Be sure to designate it is to be used for Oyster Creek.

Best/safest places to live

These "best city" and "safest city" rankings have really gotten out of hand. Money magazine has come out with rankings for both in the past week, and several New Jersey towns have fared well in them.
Middletown was ranked the 50th best "small city" in the country, Howell was the 11th safest small city and Toms River - presumably Dover Township - was the 14th safest.
Other New Jersey small cities in the Top 100 nationally were Edison, Cherry Hill, Parsippany-Troy Hills and Wayne.
Middletown's a fine place to live. And there are good things to be said about the other Top 100 New Jersey towns as well. But to compare what are essentially suburban communities to places like Camden, New Brunswick, Jersey City, East Orange and Irvington is silly.
That's particularly true when comparing crime rates. Howell, whose population barely exceeded the 50,000 needed to quality it for consideration as a small city, was ranked 11th safest nationally on the basis of its 2004 violent crime rate, which was low, but not as low as 20 other suburban towns in Monmouth County.
Money magazine's earlier list of Top 100 small towns seemed to have more merit. Included in the list were Moorestown, Chatham and Princeton. But using arbitrary statistical data to rank order "best places to live" has little value, beyond that of stimulating conversation and debate.
My choices for best towns in New Jersey, other than beach towns in Ocean and Monmouth counties? All of them have several things in common: train stations, central business districts, good schools and nice, walkable/bikeable neighborhoods - Princeton, Westfield, Summit, Madison, Morristown, Chatham, Cranford, Ridgewood, Hoboken and Millburn.
Which towns do you think are best, and why?

Finding a new doctor

Back in the old days, before you were forced to switch doctors every time you switched jobs or your employer switched health plans, life seemed much simpler. You found a doctor you liked and you stuck with him or her until you, or the doctor, died. Today, people change doctors as frequently as light bulbs. That makes it even more important that consumers have good information about doctors - family doctors and specialists - at hand.
Things have improved on that front in the past few years. The state has a useful Web site, www.njdoctorlist.com, that provides current information on doctors' medical training, certifications and hospital affiliations The site also includes malpractice payments paid out by the doctors in the last five years, and how that number compares to the specialty average, and disciplinary actions that have been taken against them.
The site does not tell you anything about doctors' bedside manners or how they run their offices - important considerations to many patients. A new Web site, ratemd.com, http://www.ratemd.com/index.jsp, has been created to help fill that gap. Similar to the ratemyprofessor.com Web site, http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/index.jsp, which allows college students to evaluate their professors and read comments from other students about them, ratemd.com lets patients rate their doctors. Unfortunately, unlike ratemyprofessor.com, the site doesn't have enough traffic yet to make it terribly useful. Many doctors aren't rated at all, and most have generated only a handful of comments. The concept is workable, however, and if more people participate the site will be a worthy adjunct to those that focus on credentials.

$3 a gallon, going on $4

Well, we did it. We hit the $3 mark for a gallon of gasoline again, for the first time since the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. According to the AAA Daily Fuel Gauge Report, http://www.fuelgaugereport.com/sbsavg.asp, a gallon of unleaded gas in New Jersey is selling for an average of $3.01 - 6 cents higher than the national average and only 4 cents lower than the post-Katrina national peak of $3.05.
Gas prices tend to go up during the summer months, but there's more at play here than that. The mess in the Middle East, not just in Iraq, but now Lebanon and Israel as well, has the oil markets jittery. That means more upward price spikes.
It won't be long before analysts start talking about $4 a gallon. In California, the average is up to $3.25; in Hawaii, it's $3.38. One gas station in New Jersey, in Summit, is selling unleaded for $3.48 a gallon, according to http://www.newjerseygasprices.com.
It's long past time to take mass transit and smart-growth concepts seriously in this state.

Sham study on Oyster Creek

If you were worried about the impact a 20-year license extension of the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant in Lacey would have on the environment, you can breathe easy - if you are willing to accept conclusions based on 30-year-old data.
That's right, the portion of the study dealing with aquatic ecology used information dating back to the 1970s because nothing more current was available, the researcher explained at a hearing on the report Wednesday.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says it has no authority to require that current data be used in assessing environmental impact. That's nonsense. The NRC and its industry friends set all the ground rules - all of which are designed to smoothe the way for license renewal.
The draft report on Oyster Creek says far more about the ludicrous license renewal process than it does about the environmental impact of the plant on aquatic life.

Beacon of democracy

A new study by the Century Foundation has come up with a series of recommendations for increasing voter participation in the United States, which ranks 139th out of 172 countries surveyed - the lowest of any industrialized democracy. That's a colossal embarrassment for a nation that fights wars in the name of spreading democracy.
Voter turnouts in the United States typically are far lower than in such beacons of political freedom as Russia, Mongolia, Bulgaria, Iran and Kazakhstan.
Century Foundation's suggestions for improving voter turnout include several aimed at reducing the structural barriers that impede voting. The two most important recommendations, in my view, are taking partisan politics out of redistricting and having the political parties and candidates "do more to personally engage voters."
Unfortunately, the report does little to address the factors that have turned off so many voters in this country - the negative effects of money-driven, TV-oriented campaigns and the sense that there is no room in politics for the average citizen unwilling to sell his or her soul to campaign contributors.

Paying casino workers for not working

Assemblyman Jim Whelan, D-Atlantic, proposed a bill today that would require the state -- i.e., taxpayers -- to reimburse all private-sector employees who were idled as a result of the state government shutdown. Apparently, it isn't enough that taxpayers have to pick up the tab for "non-essential" government workers who were given what amounted to paid vacations during the shutdown thanks to Whelan and his brethren in Trenton.
I feel bad for the casino workers and road construction workers who were idled. But I have no interest in paying them for work they did not do. Whelan instead should pass a bill that would treat the furloughing of state employees last week as unpaid leave.
"Yesterday afternoon Governor Corzine signed an executive order providing full payment and benefits for state employees who were furloughed during the state's shutdown last week," Whelan said. "While this order helps some innocent public-sector bystanders impacted by the shutdown, we need to guarantee parity with the tens of thousands of private-sector employees who suffered from this failed process and are not receiving any back pay. These private-sector workers were innocent victims in a governmental crisis and deserve to be treated as fairly as state workers."
What we need is to get Whelan and every other legislator who voted for the sales tax increase out of Trenton.