I like Jon Corzine. Seriously, I do. I met him once, way back when he was running for Senate in 2000. He was shaking some hands at a Rock the Vote event at Rutgers (there’s a wonderfully funny picture of me walking around that day with a Gore/Corzine sign taped to my back that I should find and scan in, it makes for a good laugh). He seems like a guy who knows what the hell he’s doing, and I’ll even buy that he’s sincere about fixing some of the more glaring money problems that this state has. But, seriously, leasing our toll roads to pay down debt? That’s just another shell game designed to look like someone is doing something to fix the problems that we have in New Jersey. It’s just like when Whitman brought in that Parsons company to do the state’s emissions testing modernization in the late 90s or the state’s original plan to fund the construction of EZ-Pass with revenues from toll violators. It just doesn’t make sense at all. We need some real fixes here, not giving up our toll roads to a private company that will only want to raise tolls without any increased service or maintenance on them.
What we need are some leaders who are unafraid to do the things that will get the money issues in NJ fixed for good: consolidate government services into 21 county governments (and no more), and then allow for the counties to charge a municipal sales tax (say, cut the state sales tax back down to 6% and then let the counties charge at most 1.5% extra on top of it) to offset the need to lump so much property tax on people to pay for things. Oh, and also set one statewide number for how much it costs to educate one kid in school and adjust state funding to allow for that to be met (meaning that rich towns should get less funding, or shares some of theirs if their funding exceeds the cap). Can you imagine if we did these simple things? Even in corrupt, off its nut NJ, things are bound to be better and cheaper in the long run. Mark my words on that.
