Daggett’s Plans:

Chris Daggett is the only candidate to offer New Jersey residents a plan for the future, and the only one with a plan for Tax Reform.

The policy papers can be found by clicking on THE TAX REFORM PLAN, Education, Environment, Ethics, Societal Issues, The Energy Policy, Housing Policy and Transportation Policy.

Overview

Below is a general overview of the problems facing New Jersey, and what we need to do as a state to fix them.

New Jersey faces serious problems, the most pressing of which is how to create jobs and stimulate the economy. But if we are not careful, we may be lulled into the false belief that our problems will be fixed by Wall Street and Washington wizardry — some combination of stimulus money and tax cuts. There is a serious danger that the vast sums of stimulus money will be used simply to paper over the underlying structural problems of New Jersey’s state government. If we let that happen, we will pay an ever steeper price in the future as further remedies become increasingly more costly.

We need to act on our state’s serious underlying problems now. In the months ahead, we will provide specific proposals to address each of these issues.

Make New Jersey Competitive - Rein in Property Taxes and the State Budget - Invest in New Jersey’s Future - Provide a Healthy Environment - Find Practical Solutions for the COAH - Improve the Quality of Education - Implement Regulatory Reform

Make New Jersey Competitive

In a world of increasing competition, New Jersey is simply not competitive. We were not competitive before the national economy crashed, and we are not doing what we need to do to make New Jersey competitive in the new economy that will emerge one, two or three years from now, when this Great Recession finally ends.

We not only have to worry about losing jobs to China and India, but to New York and North Carolina. We must make the investments needed to create high-paying jobs, cut the high cost of living in New Jersey and doing business here, and reform a regulatory climate that makes relocation firms rank New Jersey near the bottom as a place to start or expand a business.

This isn’t just about jobs — it’s about people.

We keep losing middle-income families to Pennsylvania because our property taxes are too high, retirees to Florida and Wyoming because of high income and estate taxes, and young people because they cannot find jobs or afford homes. We need to cut the size and cost of government at all levels, dig our state government out of a deep financial hole created by both political parties, and make our tax structure competitive with other states.

It’s not going to be easy, but as New Jerseyans, we all have a stake in our mutual success.

Rein in Property Taxes and the State Budget

There is no magic here. We have spent and borrowed our way into a deep hole, partly due to the national financial crisis, but in even greater measure due to failed state and local budgetary policies of several administrations and both political parties. Our governor and legislators seem to have forgotten that the state was in terrible financial straits before this national financial meltdown.

Between federal, state and local taxes, New Jerseyans probably bear the most punishing tax burden in the nation, especially when you factor in the high cost of living. As difficult as it is to fill a $5 billion budget gap for the budget that begins this July, it will be that much more difficult the following year for the next governor. What happens when the $2 billion in federal stimulus money is gone? What happens when Governor Corzine’s “temporary” surcharge on the income tax goes on and on? What happens when the “one year only” elimination or reduction of property tax rebates ends? And where will we be when the savings from the givebacks demanded from state workers all disappear?

We need permanent solutions to fix a state government that is perpetually too broke to make the investments needed to make New Jersey competitive. Our state is about $38 billion in debt and we will eventually have to come up with more than $80 billion to fund the long-term health benefit and pension obligations for teachers, local government employees and state workers. Combined, that comes out to about $15,000 in debt for every man, woman and child in New Jersey – rich or poor, employed or unemployed, retired on a fixed income or just beginning preschool.

But the state budget isn’t even the biggest problem. Every year, local officials demand that our state budget put more and more money into funding state aid to schools and towns, property tax rebates, and senior citizen property tax freezes just to hold down the annual rate of increase in local property tax bills.

Property taxes, not state taxes – local spending, not state spending – are the biggest problems. These are self-inflicted wounds, and we need a governor willing to start talking seriously about reducing the real cost drivers of ever-rising salary, health care benefit and pension costs and the price we all pay to fund 566 municipalities and more than 600 school districts in the name of home rule.

Invest in New Jersey’s Future

The problem with being broke is that it prevents the state from making the investments needed to create high-income jobs in New Jersey.

We rank first in the nation in per-pupil spending on K-12 education, but near the bottom in supporting our universities and colleges and in building research centers to retain and attract the cutting-edge companies that create the high-paying jobs that must be the cornerstone of New Jersey’s economy.

We need to make New Jersey first in the new green economy, and we can start by making our state the center of the offshore wind industry that will soon spring up along the Atlantic Seaboard from Maine to North Carolina.

Because we are the most densely populated state in the nation, we must expand our mass transit capacity and fix our crumbling highways and bridges. We need to give our pharmaceutical and biomedical companies what they need not only to survive but to thrive.

We need to market our natural attractions, beginning with the priceless New Jersey Shore, and that means putting money into tourism promotion – not taking it away.

Provide a Healthy Environment

More than ever before, a strong environment and strong economy goes hand in hand. Protecting our state’s environment and slowing the release of chemicals that increase global warming – which we first warned about and started to address through an executive order issued when I was the Commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Protection 20 years ago – is important to every human being who eats and breathes in New Jersey. The state that creates the research capacity to provide innovative solutions to our environmental and energy needs will be the home of the next Silicon Valley. That state should be New Jersey.

We need to control development in the Highlands and the Pinelands to protect our water supply, and we must live up to the promises made to those whose land value has been significantly reduced as a result. The State Plan makes sense and should be finalized and implemented. It also makes sense to re-think the mandates of COAH that have pushed thousands of units of “builder’s remedy” housing into suburbs without achieving the Supreme Court’s original goals, and we must start building affordable housing in our mass transit served cities and towns where jobs are located.

Find Practical Solutions for the Council on Affordable Housing (COAH)

We have a practical and moral obligation to make available affordable housing for our citizens of limited and modest means. Yet neither Republicans nor Democrats have been able to resolve the issue, and through their inaction, they have forced the New Jersey Supreme Court to issue directives to municipalities. Too often, the party in power has pressed its own agenda without properly engaging the other party, the various constituencies and the general public. The result has been court case after court case and little progress in building affordable homes.

We need to convene an affordable housing task force, led by the governor and including legislative representatives, housing advocates, builders and any other appropriate interest groups, over a specified timeframe to work through the various issues to reach an agreement. It will take months of meetings and a great deal of hard work and compromise, but it is the only way to get the job done. When the work is completed, legislation can be written to formalize the agreement.

Without the governor’s active participation, the problem will not be resolved. The issue is too important and its history too fraught with emotion and hard feelings. It will take calm, measured and forceful leadership, not the polarization of the recent past between the political parties. As with the state budget and the economy, the more nonpartisan the governor, the greater the likelihood of success.

Improve the Quality of Education

Education is critical to the future prosperity of New Jersey. For more than 35 years, in response to numerous New Jersey Supreme Court cases, we have spent billions of dollars on improving urban education, with very little to show for it. Despite spending more than $20,000 per student, high school graduation rates remain abysmally low in Newark, Camden and numerous other urban school districts. Even worse, in some cases as many as 90 percent of the graduates need remedial help in basic skills of reading, writing and mathematics before being able to attend or succeed in college.

This is not just a financial and educational issue, it is a moral issue. Whatever works best for each student should be utilized – public, private, religious, charter, vocational or home-based schools. We must set rigorous standards, improve teaching, and cultivate greater parental involvement, and we must coordinate with social service agencies. We cannot accept excuses, we cannot fail, and we cannot just continue to throw more money at the problem.

Implement Regulatory Reform

We have no choice but to address the burdensome and complex regulatory structure of New Jersey, which is related directly to many of the other problems facing our state. Few, if any, people in or out of government understand the many and often byzantine rules of the various departments of state government. Many hours and much money are wasted with consultants and lawyers trying to understand, or arguing over interpretations of, regulations.

We need to convene widely representative task forces in virtually every department of state government, but especially environmental protection, education, transportation, community affairs, and health and senior services, with the goal of addressing overlapping, conflicting, redundant and contradictory regulations. There should be no intent to roll back or dilute existing requirements, but simply to make them easier to understand and follow. It is a project that will take two to four years, and it will not get much attention, nor have any media appeal, but if we don’t address it, we will never improve the efficiency, effectiveness or costs of government.<

We face many other important issues – the state’s declining infrastructure ; the lack of affordable health insurance and the soaring costs of health care; the protection of the environment and slowing the release of chemicals that increase global warming – the list is long. But the times of greatest turmoil are often the times of greatest opportunity. We must seize the moment to rethink the services provided by government and to make the necessary changes to improve its effectiveness and efficiency. Most important, we must make government live within the means of its taxpayers.