Days of Reckoning

The Legislature is voting this week on the State’s Budget for the fiscal year that begins on Thursday. This is going to be one dynamite budget. Dynamite in the sense that it will blow up lots of things.

Under the cover of a genuine financial emergency, Governor Christie’s administration is attempting to implement a wholesale transformation of how government in this state works, based on a political agenda that’s hard to see in the sea of red ink around it. The Governor just about openly declared the state’s public school teachers and public employees to be public enemies, and has gone after other targets not with a scalpel but a guillotine.

His budget for next year drastically reduces funding for items such as schools and universities, psychiatric hospitals, after-school care, and property tax rebates. The budget eliminates ALL state funding for items as varied as reproductive medical clinic services for lower-income women, the Film/TV Incentive program, the Old Barracks and the State Commission on Investigation (SCI). In many cases, eliminating state funding creates a double whammy effect, as those entities and programs lose opportunity for federal matching funds with the loss of NJ funds.

There has been some political pushback on the last couple of items, and today there are some reports of partial restoration of funding for a few of those budget lines, such as the SCI. Whatever restoration there is will come as the result of a lot of work and concerted by groups of affected constituents working with state legislators over the last few months. This has been the time that friends of these affected programs have come out and fought, however mixed the results seem to be so far.

I sure wish the city of Trenton had more friends. The Capital City Aid program that this year just finishing on Wednesday provided nearly $35 Million in support for the city’s budget, along with another $9 Million of support, is due to disappear. With a hole about $50 Million in our budget for the new year, the city faces the prospect of massive service cutbacks and a layoff of perhaps a quarter of the city’s workforce.  This will be a true disaster. I’ve heard no reports that any of this aid will be restored, and last minute appeals from our outgoing Mayor and from the Trenton Times are likely to fall on deaf ears in the Capitol. We certainly have friends in the Legislature: I expect Assembly members Gusciora and Watson Coleman, along with Senator Turner, to work for us. But there are a lot of other worthy causes speaking up for whatever crumbs of additional funding are left over during this endgame, and the city of Trenton doesn’t have many more friends that I can see.

I don’t know if things would have turned out any differently if there had been more of an effort, but I feel that we wasted the last three months. On St. Patrick’s Day, the day the news broke about the budget,  I wrote to the Mayor offering my support in any effort he undertook to rally support from every candidate and every one in the city to fight the cutbacks and help save the city from the train wreck we now face. When I spoke to the Mayor that day, as he was in Washington for another of his meetings, he sounded motivated to do something. As it turned out, he convened a City Hall press conference for the sole purpose of asking everyone in the city… to write their legislators.

From that time to last week, the only substantial communications from Mayor Palmer on public matters were mostly confined to his Ahab-like quest to pass the Water Deal. At the time I thought that the scale of the state cutbacks dwarfed any effects, pro or con, that the Water deal presented for the city’s operating budget, and I think that’s still true.For the most part none of the city’s candidates for mayor and council had much to say about the budget. And they weren’t exactly pressed with questions by the electorate, either. Those of us who tried to, didn’t find much traction at the ballot box.

We’ve been sitting in our house for the last three months, watching the river rise up to our windows. All we’ve done during that time is watch TV, occasionally arguing during commercial breaks whether we should take down the curtains and move them upstairs to keep them dry. We should have been filling sandbags and yelling to the neighbors that our flooded house would affect them, too. It might not have made any difference in the end, but we would have gone down fighting.

The truth is that no one will fight for Trenton if we don’t fight for ourselves. And for the last hundred days, we have done nothing to avert this or reduce the pain we face today.

So now the days of reckoning are here. I don’t expect any positive action from the Legislature, and certainly not as the result of our city’s leadership. The incoming Mayor and Council will have a cutback and layoff contingency plan ready to review and implement as they take office on Thursday. This city and this state will face at least one hellish year, if not more.

I wish Mayor Mack all the best of luck as he takes office Thursday. May he find a way to work productively with the Governor that no one else has so far. I wish luck to the Council, as well, as they face the tough decisions that will cause pain for the people of this city. Whatever I can do to help, I will.  It may be too late to do any good, but I’m going to start making sandbags.