Republican candidates for governor, Sen. Jon Corzine interview

I was at the sportsman's dinner in Morris County, and this was a topic of discussion. I can guarantee you that under my administration, the Supreme Court will have nothing to do with it. While we should and the D.P. won't either, we should appoint people to the Fish and Game Council that know what they're talking about, that are experts that represent different sides of the equation. In addition, we should remove the politics, we should remove the emotions. The fact of the matter is, as we had a 30-year moratorium, this is a safety issue. This is an issue where people from other areas of the state who are down in the urban areas are getting everybody all riled up. When in this county and in my county, we've seen bears. They're in our trash. They're after potentially our children. And there's thousands of bears out there. They need to be called in a responsible way. I have no problem with the bear hunt. All right.

Now, how does that deal with the state of New Zealand when we're being told is that we have to stop the debate, take a quick break, two minutes to work out the microphone problem to make sure that every candidate can be heard, and that's the only fair way to go forward. So we're going to take a two-minute break. The authority is being taken away from the citizens. It is being taken away from the bodies that citizens sit on. And it is being absorbed into bureaucrats and more and more of the state judiciary. I believe it is wrong, the long-term health on the Jersey requires a change with regard to our attitude toward the judiciary. We have to pull back the authority of people. I can hardly wait. I will make four Supreme Court appointments. During the first 15 months of my office, I can hardly wait. OK, we're good about to try to do that. Thank you. There's no doubt that Fish and Game will have the final say in my administration. They have the most experienced working in this area up in Sussex County here. Will not be the DEP or the New Jersey Supreme Court.

But the Bears have lived up here for many, many years, hundreds of years with the fine folks up in Sussex County. And it seems like the problems are out in the urban areas where the Bears are now going down into Lower Morris County and Bergen County. And that's where mostly outreach in the screen is. Thank you. I'll leave that authority with the Fish and Game Council. The Council is filled with people who are actually experts in wildlife management. And we ought to leave the decision about the best way to manage our wildlife in the interest of both of the wildlife itself and the people of New Jersey in the hands of the experts. What you have with the DEP is you have political decision being made. Now, the DEP makes almost all of its political decisions now on a political basis. Not too long ago, we had a very large landowner who wanted to give 400 acres to the state of New Jersey for open space. And the DEP was excited. We've been spending all this money

and here they're going to get 400 acres for free. But then you had a developer who was contributing to the Democrats get George Norcross, the political boss in Camden County, to intervene. And suddenly the DEP commissioners decided that we don't want that acreage. We want that land for development. Well, here they're coming to Sussex County. And they're telling you where you have to develop and where you can't develop making all these decisions, taking them away from you. While they're making all these decisions purely based on what seemed to me to be pay-to-play considerations. We don't want these kind of politicians, basically, controlling these decisions in Sussex County should go to the council. OK, just a reminder, we're asking to keep the microphone close, and we speak into it, and pass it behind the stage. If I don't get elected, you'd be OK. I'll cast a card. Steve, that's a great job. I agree that the decision should be made by the people who have the most expertise. I'm tempted to say that growing up bears were some

of my best friends, Yogi and Smoky. We're near and dear to my heart. But when it comes to public safety, the interests of the bears just have to give away, because we have to protect people first and foremost. Thank you. I think it's clear that we all agree that the Fish and Game Council is the only body that has the authority to make this decision. It should have been easy to figure out that bears and humans and our families can't inhabit the same space safely for either one. But it seems to be lost on some. As a matter of fact, they would like to have families locked up in their houses and allow the bears to run freight. I think the only way to restore the natural fear that bears should have of humans is to allow the hunt. And I have always supported the hunt.

And it should always be the purview of the Fish and Game Council. All right, now we're going to go to Mac, open space and affordable housing or competing interests. How would you balance them? And what role should the state play? The state should play little at no role in all of those areas. Local control and local elected officials of know what's best for your communities and what people in these communities of Lafayette or Sparta would go to want. Highlands bill should be overturned immediately. The Mount Laurel Act being forced down on a throw spy or a left wing liberal supreme court should be overturned. And the concept of open space, I think we should stop using state money to buy open space until we have a balanced budget and until we cut taxes and until the people in New Jersey vote to fund those kind of acquisitions. I believe in local government. I believe in local control. That's where decisions are best made. Not in the hands of bureaucrats in Trenton and not in the hands of a legislator say from Newark, a canton who wants

to decide what's best for Sussex County. This is John Murphy. I'm going to have to give the names each time because we do have a radio audience just to keep it clear for them. This is John Murphy. Thank you. The Highlands bill on the surface seems to be a good bill. Who could be against the protection of watershed property that provides drinking water for 10 million or so people? The fact of the matter is, is that it was basically a political deal, a land grab, if you will, with no attention paid to the property owners, the farmers, and the people who use their land, in some cases, as they're 401K, as their retirement. And the Highlands bill needs to be changed so that there's a dedicated stream of income, not just to the property owners whose land is now worth, perhaps, 90% less than it was months ago, but also to the officials in the communities that need to expand their tax base in order to keep property taxes low.

As far as open space, I believe we've got maybe a 10-year window. We need to act now. I have no problem with prioritizing and having to stay money for open space. Proper true. As a local elected official in Bergen County, I want to have control over my town. And I do not want state government telling me how I can develop Washington Township. The Highlands bill has to be reviewed. And we need to have more local input of the local officials in developing their property. On FastTrack, I received between 15 and 20 letters a day from all over the state. The residents asking that the FastTrack bill be repealed. And I support repealing the FastTrack bill. Thank you. Appreciate it. I think there are problems with time and legislation. I think you have decisions made to try

to meet a political time table. And the result was that many of the requirements are not necessarily based on real science, relative to what will preserve the water. But they were based on a need to get something done. Now, I think if you involved the county officials and also local officials, and you took some time working on this, you could end up with regulations that achieve the goal of keeping our water resources clean, but also respect the property rights that people have. John Murphy mentioned an extremely important point. We have a lot of folks who have had the entire economic value that they're properly destroyed. Because I don't know if any one of you have seen it, but I haven't seen the state actually put up any money, even though it was guaranteed as part of this deal. So you're going to see their entire savings are tied up in that land, utterly destroyed. And you're going to see other communities version of being mandated to take enormous amounts of construction and housing. And you don't see the state coming up with money for school districts and municipalities. You actually see them cutting suburban school aid this year.

I think this legislation has many problems. Go to a ton, Calibur. Thank you. I mentioned before that we live in one of the most densely populated states in the country. An open space is a critical natural resource. It's a legacy that we need to leave to our children and our grandchildren. We're losing it very quickly. 5,000 acres per year, I'm told. It should be a priority. I know that we need to cut government spending in so many areas. And I've made recommendations to do that. But open space preservation is one area where I think we should devote our state's resources. However, it should be done through green acres bond issues, which have been very popular in the past, have been supported by the people of the state. They should have the chance to vote on those issues and decide whether they want to spend that money. I believe they will support it. We should be paying fair market value to preserve the open space we need to protect.

We should not be confiscating people's properties. Paul, do you guys own it? Steve, the Mt. Marl decision was a bad decision. The Highlands bill was a bad bill. Watching this happen in the legislature, it became clear to me that there was a singular purpose in the McGreeview administration pushing that bill. And that was to buy Fiat immediately devalue a million acres of developable property in this state. I believe in property owners' rights. I believe in local control. The town fathers should be and mothers should be the ones who decide what the public support, how the community is developed. In addition to that, anyone who owns property in this nation and especially in this state is entitled to be compensated for taking away their development rights. And just simply saying, you have to sell your development rights, but you can't develop it. If no one is willing to buy those development rights,

it's an uncompensated taking that is unconstitutional. It was a poorly thought up bill. It was a poorly designed bill. It should be repealed. Doug for it there. Thank you. There is a theme here. The Democrat leadership in Trenton. And it is a dangerous theme. And the Highlands bill is a good example of that dangerous theme. I came up here tonight because I had an important meeting at Kate May, so I took a helicopter up so I could join you. I tried to land on the roof in time to get my minute, but fell a little bit short. But I came from an area in the south which had the exact same thing happened to it quite a few, not too many years ago. And they have new the panel exact. It have new the fact that there is this inclination on the part of the Democrat leaders in Trenton to have issues passed, which supposedly benefit the whole state, but the burden of that falls heavily on a few.

I won the Atlantic County Convention last night by 80%. And one of the reasons why is because Eckhart per township is part of Atlantic County and has been crushed by the poorly thought out development program associated with the Pinellas. The same thing is happening here. I'm going to stop that one, I've got him. Doug, I think your helicopter might have had the sound system actually. We're going to go to, sorry. We're going to go to question four, James Green, and we're going to start off with John Murphy for this round. Thanks again, Steve. More than a dozen government officials have been arrested on corruption charges in Mom with County on recent weeks. What one or two specific things do you think should be done to root out government corruption in New Jersey? Well, first and foremost, we need to have the chief executive officer who brought to the people of this great state and not beholden to the governor and then point that person. I think that to our general, working with the governor

general, even though they have separate departments, would work together with one goal in line. And that's the protection of your money, whether it's waste. That's an elected official. OK, we're all not elected officials, OK? I guess five of us are, four of us are. Yes, you are, Greg. You're not as individual. But as governor, I will ensure that the attorney, all contracts should go out to bid. And we need to put an end to the pay to play and wheeling up and down the state between County and County. Thank you. Brett Schumler. I've called for the creation of an independent office one. I've never called for a creation of an independent office in these prosecutions. He's known more, frankly, for dropping cases, as opposed to prosecuting them. And I think that's going to be the case. When you have the governor appointing a attorney general, that attorney general is not going to be inclined to prosecute boss, even if his boss is involved in illegal activity. I think we should have that independent office, only those

duties which have to do with the pursuit or, let's say, the prosecution of these kind of precifications should be in that office. Also, we will have a comprehensive ban on pay to play when you had common calls looking for an official to become the first government official in the state to endorse their reform. They came to me. I was the first public official to endorse it. We made a big issue. It became now a very major issue across the state. I'm happy to see it. And we have to get a comprehensive ban accomplished. Okay, we're going to talk to everybody. I don't believe we need to elect additional statewide politicians to solve the problems of the state, whether it's in the town holding that time. Thank you, folks. Some of the things we've seen recently by local officials taking bags of cash, that has been illegal for longer than I'm alive. The biggest problem here, and most recently,

what this administration is, has titled it, you need to set an example. You need to lead by example. What example was given to the people of this state by the Gregorian administration? One time after time, there was a new scandal, after a new scandal. And therefore, I think makes the argument that we need to be making in court that six out of eight conditions weren't met, and then there is even debate about some of the economic benefits in the other two analyses. You know, it's overruled, the Brown Commission. The Supreme Court could overrule it, yes, is the answer. Senator, your opponent was today at the state chamber of commerce, and the commerce found that three quarters of businesses in New Jersey feel that the state is hostile to business, and your opponent is saying that John Corzine is tied to those same forces that made the state hostile to business over the last four years, that would be democratic control of the state.

Well, the state chamber has typically supported Republicans, and that's certainly the case at the national level. There's been good cooperation among business. I think I have good support in the business community. I think you'll see a lot of endorsements coming out by individual businesses, try to work with the pharmaceutical industry, have a very solid relationship. I think most of you know, followed the policy proposals I put down, I've been very aggressive about talking about investing in our future, growing, and working alongside business. I think we can make New Jersey more business friendly. I think sometimes we overlook the good things that are happening. We just went in competition with the state of Virginia on Verizon's headquarters, which came out of New York, came here, we've seen the financial services industry grow about 10% a year for the last four years, including a firm that I know pretty intimately in Jersey City building the single largest structure we have in the state, we have a lot of innovation, a lot of the foreign pharmaceutical industries

are locating here. Yes, there are some things we need to do to make ourselves more business friendly and with regard to regulation. We may have overstepped on some of the taxation issues, but the fact is, as we've got the smartest people, we've got the best transportation network. It needs to be upgraded. But an incredibly, I think, positive environment, overall, to do business. I think people are talking about the change. Two quick follow-ups to that. One, you said we may have overstepped on taxes. Does that mean that you're gonna look to roll back some of the, where, what tax are you talking about corporate business? We'll review certain elements of the corporate business tax. There is a rollback. We'll look at certain elements of it. There is an enterprise tax, which is really a surcharge for people who don't pay taxes in the state, but do business here, that I think was put down fairly indiscriminately. If somebody is investing and hasn't yet generated revenues,

I think that's a different, I don't think they need to be paying the enterprise tax. But if somebody organizes in Washington, D.C., does business in the state, like a well-known pharmaceutical benefit manager who avoid paying taxes in the state? Well, I think there, that enterprise tax ought to apply because the individual company is making its money on New Jersey and paying taxes someplace else, avoiding the responsibility of investing in our infrastructure or schools and other things and raising other people's taxes. Are you tied to the last four years? I believe I'm a lot less tied to what is going on, and some of the things that are going on around here as, and I think the Bush administration is tied to the failure to support our state financially on leave no child behind, on transportation infrastructure, on homeland security. I think there's a lot of blame to go around. It says you're ducking debates, so.

Ducking debates. Let's say we have 10 joint appearances or debates, the way I look at it. We've already got two, three fully televised debates that go across the state. We're willing to do 101.5 for an hour and a half, which I think is a pretty traditional marker, and that's four. We're talking about going in front of all of the various editors of the Gennett papers, which they then publish word for word with the whitest distribution in the state. I think that's a lot, and then we're gonna do a number of other joint appearances, and I think my people are trying to find a place on one of the minority radio stations or television outlets to make sure that we get broad exposure in more than just the general media. So we're reaching out. I'm not afraid to debate. I think we have the right positions. Could you talk about your proposal regarding who's been reluctant to rule out raising the state gas tax, and it seemed that a little contradictory there.

It's not contradictory at all, because I have said this is not the time to be raising the gas tax, the level of gas prices by adding on taxation at this moment, and this market. I believe that we ought to be looking at the federal gas tax and talking about a holiday, and here in New Jersey, if we do that, we will further underfund the state transportation trust fund, which is already desperately in need of refreshing. The fact is in the federal government, I've actually talked about two things. One is, if we do. Human cloning.

I think I'm the only one up here that's actually cast a vote on these issues. I supported the ban on partial birth abortion, and I supported parental notification after a minor receives abortion. On the issue of stem cells, I support stem cell research. As a matter of fact, I was the first one in New Jersey to put money toward that, and to build that set up a bank for umbilical cord blood rich in stem cells in New Jersey. But I do not support the creation of embryos for the purpose of doing research on those stem cells, and I talked to an ephrologist very recently in Northern Jersey who said that that is a red herring. Arbionic stem cell research in his judgment, and he's one of the top nephrologists, is not necessary because science has already identified all the stem cells or T-cells they need to do the research.

I believe that the way this bill is written, even though it says it bans cloning, I believe it's designed to have New Jersey be the first state to cloning human being, and that's why I voted against that piece of legislation. Doug Corris, thank you. With regard to our public policy decisions that a New Jersey governor would face, I've been clear, I am in favor of parental notification, I am not in favor of public funding for portions except in high-demandment cases, I'm against partial birth abortion. With regard to the issue of stem cell funding, I am not in favor at this point in time when the state is bankrupt to be developing new institutes. But further, with regard to the issue of stem cell funding, I believe that adults stem cells are the exciting pathway that we should pursue. I don't believe that we should do anything to nurture a mindset which would lead to directly or indirectly

the harvesting of embryos. The president has set aside embryonic lines for research there, but I happen to believe when it comes to adult stem cells, there are great opportunities. We should pursue them vigorously, and this is something which I think New Jersey should offer. Steve Longingan. I've been endorsed by the National Public and Coalition for Life because of my pro-life stand for the past two decades. I believe life begins a conception, and once life begins, I believe it deserves all the protections under the law that any of us do. And as governor of the state of Jersey, I will lead on the pro-life issue. I am opposed to Roe versus Wade. I obviously will line out and veto any government funding for abortions, and I also oppose embryonic stem cell research. John Murphy. I'm the oldest of seven children born to Irish immigrants. My wife Jennifer and I have three children. I'm a practicing Roman Catholic, and I believe in a sanctity

of life. There are certain realities you face as a governor, not the least of which is that Roe versus Wade is the law of the land. What I would look to do as a governor is find people on both sides of the issue and try to find common ground, such as a ban on partial birth abortion, a parental notification bill, and as a priority work grant-nade funding for great organizations that help women who have made a choice to have a child that can't go home for various reasons. As far as embryonic stem cell research goes, to me, it's morally unacceptable. I think this state is also in a fiscal crisis. It's a low priority. And finally, if it was such a panacea, capital ventureist would be all over it, and the state of public funding would not be required. OK, that concludes the questioning from the panel that we're going to open the floor. I think my principal opponent in this primary believes that our focus should be in essence saying

that the Democrats are corrupt, and you should vote for public. I don't think that will persuade Democrats. I think to be somewhat taken aback by it, I think independence tend to think that all politicians are corrupt. But if people see us fighting to pass amendments this year, that will force state politicians to control their spending. And as the economy grows and new money comes into treasure, to send a fair share of that money back to all republic schools and municipalities to lift the burn off of homeowners, if they see us fighting to do that, they'll be on board with us across party lines. Not just in Sussex, but in the cities as well. People in Jersey say what much prefer to see money come back so we can put police on the street in lower property taxes and see more people added to the state payroll. I have amendments. We have Democrats as well as Republican post-ponsors. I'm going to be working to organize people across party lines to pass these amendments now so they can be on the ballot. You can vote them into law this November. Thank you. South Carolina, one minute.

Ladies and gentlemen, our state government is for sale. And the trend politicians have literally bankrupted us. We are a crossroads that's going to determine the future of our state for decades. The obligation of our party is to find the candidate who was best able to clean up the mess and trend base, not only on his rhetoric, but on his record and his ideas. My campaign has offered substantive proposals on modernizing and downsizing government, on cutting taxes, on solving other problems in our state like traffic congestion. I will fight to make sure that state government works for the people who pay the bills, you, the taxpayers in New Jersey. I asked that you go to my website, www.4aBetterNJ.org, for more details about my proposals.

I am Todd Caliguerre, and I'm running for governor of New Jersey. Paul D. Guy-Tana. Thank you. Folks, my degrees in aerospace engineering for the University of Notre Dame and I build buildings for a living. Let me tell you that our state is virtually bankrupt. There are huge deficits and the Democrats continue to spend more. We need a governor that's going to hit the ground running and immediately put the brakes on. We need someone who was there when budgets were passed that actually spent less than a prior years budget. In order to beat the mega-millionaire John Korsner, we need someone a blue collar working class roots who understands the difficulty making a paycheck, cover shelter, food, auto insurance, maybe an occasional trip to the Jersey Shore. We need someone with experience in cutting taxes 52 times and growing the economy while putting more money back in your pockets to New Jersey saver and other programs. We need someone that wins consistently in Democrat areas,

my district's 2 to 1 Democrat, 40% minority by registration. I'm there 16 years. I'm Paul D. Guy-Tana, I'm the Republican that could be John Korsner. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.