Gov. Jon Corzine appears at Budget town meeting

We need to talk about it, have to get ourselves into a place where current revenues match, recurrent expenses. And so while I would like to deal with this problem, I know three or four of them kind of pressure. And some issues, we have where we have to make choices. I think our child welfare system, where I think we would say there is a moral obligation, as well as we. There's a moral obligation as well as a legal mandate from the courts to spend money to improve the ratio of the number of case workers to the children that are in our welfare system. And that the mandated increase of that is almost $180 million next year. And we're just about to have our system taken over by the federal government because we haven't done our job appropriately. And if we don't do that, the federal government then will be mandating what our increases in expenditures are, not the people of the state of New Jersey.

And I don't think that's a good idea either. So we've got some real challenges and choices. And actually we have very few places to make those choices in meaningful ways. We talked about, I think, we'll probably end up with flat funding. Thank you. Ronald West. Mr. West? I'm going to ask this question anyway. How aggressively will cuts and restructuring be pursued in the state health benefits and pension plans? My pleasure. The answer to that is not straightforward. That is that we do not have the unilateral authority to make those changes. They've been those benefit programs have been either agreed to by contract and or through legislation. The state operates a number of different health and benefit programs. All of them will be under review.

And one of the answers consistent with what the governor just said to the last question is, some things we'll be able to, we will aggressively look at everything this year. And some things we'll be able to act on this year, but some things we will take more time before we're able to act on. So again, we will be looking at those categories of expenditures. You saw that they're meaningful. Fundamentally, we're looking at every expense, and we're looking at pennies, not just at the ones that are big, but it will take time to see all of those things come to fruition. Thank you, Brian. Peggy McHale. Thank you, Peggy. Governor, how do you plan to help women and minority owned businesses? And that's an economic growth question. Well, there are, there are some things that you can do on this without spending money. One is you can make sure that disparities in contracting are actually understood and that you require that there are serious elements of participation in the contracting that goes on with the state.

It's one of the more important ways that you can address this directly. Second way, which is already a lot of foreign, we've already raised funds for through our lending support agencies. We've used the EDA being one example is with fully disciplined lending arrangements, make sure that you are reaching out to women and minority in that process. I have many ideas in the long term on how we can approach this. I talked about urban investment banks and other things. One of the very frustrating elements of this first 49 days is most of the things that I would like to be working on are really blocked in a serious way by our inability to have the resources to be able to put money where the dreams are. I believe, and this is why I'm so fired up about making sure that we actually deal with this problem and get it fixed so that that natural growth that's going on will actually allow us to have resources to invest back in those things that will make difference in our society.

I believe if we have the fortitude to be able to make those adjustments appropriately, we can get back on a track that is sensible and allow us to have additional resources to invest in other ways. But we will look to make sure that we are serious about our affirmative stance in making sure contracting, which the state has relatively large elements on, on all kinds of things, technology, healthcare benefits, areas to make sure that we are contracting in a way that women and minority firms have access at those opportunities. Thank you. I sort of knew this question was going to come under one. First of all, we have a series of issues that need to be dealt with with regard to gas taxes.

I want to talk about this in the context of the transportation trust fund. I want you to understand may disagree, but I want you to understand what my thinking is. First of all, we have to deal with the transportation trust fund in the short run, or we will lose federal matching dollars, large amounts of federal matching dollars. This is a cross-road state. I was at our ports today. The growth has grown 15% in volume this year. We have to be able to distribute that if we are going to have those jobs. Those are all above average paying jobs in America, and well above average here in the state of New Jersey. We have to protect that asset. If we'd raised the gas tax five cents or ten cents, it would not solve the problem. It would only lead to us going out and borrowing in the short run. The only thing that the gas tax, in my view, should legitimately be used for is actually for roads and transportation.

Shouldn't be used for other purposes. We're on the track to get into that mode. One of these days, I think we need to revisit it, but we have to understand it in the context that I can't tell you as I stand here tonight that I'm not going to have to stand tall 14 days from today, and say we're going to have to raise taxes to fill this budget gap. I don't feel that we ought to be imposing first the gas tax, then talking about other things, the gas tax only going to transportation issues, and saying it's more important than making sure that our pharmaceutical assistance for the aged and disabled is less important. It doesn't seem to me that that was a decision that we ought to be taking, and we have to be convincing to the federal government that we're going to have a long-term program in place. We put that in place. We can come back if we get our house in order on our finances on an ongoing basis, and deal with the gas tax, if that's the appropriate thing. It is hard to understand when people's heating bills at home are off through the roof, so to speak, and we're having real challenges in people's day-to-day budget lives, but this is one of those places where when we had another alternative to fix the transportation fund that we should take today.

So it's lots of nuance to it, lots of turns on it, but I think it's important to put it in the context that we have to fix this budget hole, and by the way, when we get done with a budget, and we will get done with it, it may not be pretty, but we will get done with the budget, then we need to go to tax reform, property tax reform. And then, there are lots of things that are involved in property tax reform, including debates about consolidation, cooperation, and all kinds of things that may save money in how we approach that issue, but there also will undoubtedly be debates about whether we should shift taxes to one place or another. How many things can we change at once in our tax system, and still have people feel that it is all been fully debated, fully explained, and have people feeling that we've actually addressed the issues in a sensible manner?

I believe that gas tax is one of those if you were just going to put it into the general fund, because that was the responsible thing to do. That might have been a good tax to raise, but it is not one that I think should be used for anything other than highways, byways, and mass transportation. Governor, is it okay if I talk for a minute more about transportation trust? Forgive me for going to the office, but my daughter looked at this presentation, I have a 17-year-old daughter, one of my three children, for those of you who have 17-year-olds, you can probably imagine this conversation, she looked at this presentation, she said, but Dad, is it one of the first things that you recommended borrowing more money? That can't make sense, given that you say that borrowing has gotten us into trouble. And I would say to you what I said to her, okay, maybe, but, and the but is a big one. The but is that what's gotten us into trouble is borrowing money for the long term to meet our current needs.

We think, and I think all of us act this way with our own personal finances, that borrowing money is an okay thing to do to pay for long term investments for capital that we're going to be using for a long time. So people ask us, aren't you going to be paying for this for 30 years, won't your children, my daughter, still be paying for these roads? The answer is yes, the but is, those are roads that she's going to be driving on, those are railroads that she's going to be traveling on. And that is a very big and I think important difference as we think about this. What was at the forefront of our minds was the matching funds, and again, it goes back to the questions about how are we going to build an economy so that people have jobs, it is investment that gives us the infrastructure that we need to encourage development in the state. Thank you, Brad. I'm going to ask that, Vincent, Francis, Joel, Joel, the love, is that the love? Did I do that correctly?

Gollum. Gollum, okay. Joel wants to know, will you consider revisiting S-701 legislation on school funding and funding formulas, other words, the school board caps? Sure answer in 2006 in this budget cycle, no, let's make that clear. The answer is not that I wouldn't like to, but I believe that it would be very difficult to say that we're going to make all these other difficult choices and then not ask for discipline where there are large amounts of state aid. It actually is a cap that grows at 2.5% over CPI, and it has what I think are some structural problems with it that limit reserves and where people are doing a good job in holding reserves. It is, I think, a reasonable person's debate about that. I think there are also some exclusions that may need to be considered particularly with regard to energy and the property tax, not the property tax, excuse me, the pension obligations that are flowing through because of some of the other gimmicks that were administrative in other years.

And I am open to a discussion about that, but in fundamental sense, as much as I don't want to disappoint folks with regard to education, because I think it's our most important vehicle for our future, as we go through this period in very challenging times for taxpayers and the state of New Jersey and its openness. For convincing other businesses and people to want to move here and stay here, I think we need to make sure we keep these disciplines on. Thank you, Governor. Carry Hines. Carry any audience? Thank you, Carry.

Carry wants to know, do you think that technological innovation will continue to be a driver for the New Jersey economy? You're getting away with murder, by the way. Yes, is the answer. And I will tell you when I talk about re-engineering the state, what we have in place and our technological framework inside state government is very, very disappointing. I could use other words in other places and other times, but I have places where we don't have voicemail just to give you an example. And I like to leave voicemails sometimes as a management tool to give out your attention. So there is an enormous opportunity for us over a period of time to implement real savings for the people of the state of New Jersey by using technology in the administration of services and activities in the state government. And it's also very hard to effectively manage an institution where you don't have quality, timely information. We still have departments that are batch processing their activities overnight as opposed to being online.

It's very, very difficult to have a strong grip on what's going on when that's the kind of circumstance that you have. So on the state's level, I think there are huge opportunities with regard to technology. I think there will be great opportunities for those people that are strong vendors in a competitive environment to participate in that process. I think that's the great hope. This has always been a state, as I said in my opening remarks, has the highest concentration of PhDs, MBAs. We ought to be driving and our economic strategies, those areas which are right with high-end job growth. And by the way, that doesn't exclude support services that may not be as high-end and actually drive nanotechnology. We can drive biotech, which I've talked about over and over again.

I think we ought to find the investment dollars that allow us to seed even more of that. And I think we ought to be pushing to get the telecommunications business back. It's great to see Verizon move its headquarters to the state. By the way, another positive sign that not everybody thinks the world's coming to an end of New Jersey. Exxon just move 120 of their top researchers in their company to New Jersey just announced it less than two weeks ago. We can drive this industry if we go out and chase it and push it and work it, and we're going to. Thank you, Governor. Stephanie Hoops. How many Stephanie? Thank you. Stephanie is asking the question, how much of New Jersey's increase? Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.