Essex county
I wish we could find a way to keep it public. We would never tolerate this in our school district or municipal government. How can we get the press to keep shining a light on it?
FilmCarp said:
I wish we could find a way to keep it public. We would never tolerate this in our school district or municipal government. How can we get the press to keep shining a light on it?
What Press?
There isn't much anymore. Village Green? Patch? I think the Star Ledger used to be excellent at this, but they have all but quit.
FilmCarp said:
There isn't much anymore. Village Green? Patch? I think the Star Ledger used to be excellent at this, but they have all but quit.
Or we quit on them. People stopped buying newspapers and now everyone is like "where'd the newspapers go?"
Matt Katz from WNYC would be great at this. WNYC is one of the few places left for long-form journalism. Or it would lend itself to a podcast series I suppose.
I wonder if most people would have the attention span to follow such a story.
will we be eligible for Newark’s “guaranteed basic income” payments? considering we’re paying for it?
Sounds like someone who’s no longer paying AMT is feeling a little undercapitalized.
Using this logic someone owes me an A10 Thunderbolt. I've been paying for them for years.
The loophole that allowed DiVincenzo to collect his pension in 2010 while he was still working was closed in 2011, but a grandfather clause allowed him to still collect his pension. But what Fontoura is doing remains legal.
(Originally posted in the BOT Election thread.)
Rob_Sandow said:
mikescott said:
Rob, The Abbott decision was poorly thought out and absolutely needs to be revisited. It is insane that Jersey City is still getting so much of that money.
Mike, the original Abbott decision has been revisited several times by the NJ Supreme Court, which is why I refer to it as the "Abbott Decisions". It's not only Jersey City, but Hoboken, Long Branch, Asbury Park, and even East Orange and Newark, where gentrification has been hidden under PILOTs which remove the most valuable new developments from the tax rolls, so they don't factor into the state aid formulas.
The NJ Supreme Court absolutely hijacked state aid is is one of the biggest culprits behind New Jersey's property tax and debt crises.
First of all, Abbott is "judicial law," not "constitutional law."
Ten other state constitutions use the words "thorough and efficient" in the context of education. Every state constitution has some equivalent generality. But even of the states using "thorough and efficient," no other state supreme court interpreted those words as extravagantly as the New Jersey Supreme Court did.
As @robert_sandow says, the NJ Supreme Court has revisited the original Abbott II decision of 1990, but primarily to expand it, through the mandatory provision of two years of "free" PreK for all 3s and 4s in the Abbotts and then 100% construction funding for Abbott capital projects.
The "free" PreK was forced on the state despite the NJ Constitution saying that the "thorough and efficient system of free public schools" was for "the instruction of all the children in the State between the ages of five and eighteen years.
The bonding for Abbott construction was also done without any approval of New Jersey's voters, despite the NJ Constitution having a clear-as-day Debt Limitation Clause. "The Legislature shall not, in any manner, create in any fiscal year a debt or debts, liability or liabilities of the State, which together with any previous debts or liabilities shall exceed at any time one per centum of the total amount appropriated by the general appropriation law for that fiscal year, unless the same shall be authorized by a law for some single object or work distinctly specified therein."
The Debt Servicing for school construction borrowing (70% of which has gone to the Abbotts) is now $1.1 billion a year and that is paid out of the Property Tax Relief Fund.
Although the state's pension funding would also have been better if the Whitman income tax cuts hadn't happened and DiFrancesco (with nearly-unanimous support from the legislature) hadn't hiked pensions by 9%, the money for Abbottism was taken from money that had hitherto gone to TPAF.
This is especially hard to deny when you look at the worst years of pension funding, from 2001-2005.
In those years NJ hiked education spending by hundreds of millions per year (much of it for PreK).
This is education spending on PreK and K-12 opex aid in the early 2000s (the years of $0 pension contributions.)
FY2001 $6.8 bil
FY2002 $7.4 bil
FY2003 $7.7 bil
FY2004 $8.2 bil
FY2005 $9 bil
FY2006 $9.4 bil
Even the problems of NJTransit and NJ's public higher ed aren't unrelated to Abbottism and the gigantic state education spending.
When Jon Corzine proposed hiking NJ's sales tax to 7% he originally wanted all of that to go to the General Fund, which could have been used to support NJTransit and higher ed. However, the legislature insisted that half of the increase go to the "Property Tax Relief Fund," ie, school spending.
Had all of that sales tax increase gone to the General Fund, I think NJTransit would be in better shape and maybe NJ's per capita support for higher ed might be better than Alabama's.
Interestingly, the introduction of free pre-K in Washingon DC ended up financially challenging early childcare centers. The less-expensive-to-care-for 3 & 4 year olds were no longer subsidizing the more-expensive-to-care-for infants and toddlers. It brought into clearer focus our country's broken childcare system.
DC is looking to try a 10% of income cap for care of 0-3 year olds to address this:
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The issue is that as soon as anyone becomes a threat to the machine, the machine finds a nice job for them in government or appointed to some 'independent' commission.