Answers Coming This Friday
Just a reminder that the second installment of Q&A Fridays will be out this Friday. There is plenty of time left to get your questions in, so please send them to me at AsmPanter@njleg.org with your name and contact info. I won't give out any personal information, just identify you by your name and hometown. Please be sure to include "Q&A" in your subject line so I know you want to be included.
posted by Mike Panter at 4/12/2006 11:40:00 AM
1 Comments:
I saw you on Comcast Newsmakers with Jill Horner. You addressed the inequity issue associated with the funding of Abbott schools.
However, you seemed to hint that your idea of a solution would be shuffling the deck chairs around --i.e., removing a few schools (from other Legislative Districts) that are currently designated as Abbott schools, and including a few districts from your Legislative district. Sadly, if every Legislator thought in such a parochial a manner, nothing would ever be solved. The problem is that there is just not enough money to go around to meet everyones demands.
I posted a question a few weeks ago on your blog which you have not even attempted to answer, and it relates to this issue and the Transportation issue. Have you given any consideration to my question, and if so, what did you come up with? Here it is again --
Steve said...
Assemblyman, you have also said:
“My hope is that a permanent revenue source which assures that expenditures do not exceed recurring revenues can be put in place – and that some of the debt can be retired short of maturity.”
In conjunction, you cited only two possibilities – a phased in “significant gas tax increase” or a “one-time assets sale.” But is there not a third possibility?
For years now, including all throughout the McGreevey/Codey Administration, huge portions of the gas tax money everyone thought they had voted to have “dedicated” to the Transportation Trust Fund (TTF), has instead been diverted to other purposes.
The State’s budget mushroomed, and the TTF was intentionally run into the ground. It is now going bankrupt, and the Administration is bonding well into the future, a cynical way that unfairly saddles the next generation with the tab.
If your child came home from school, and told you that a bully had been stealing some of his lunch money for a few years now, you wouldn’t just demand that the bully stop, would you? No, you would want him to make restitution.
The biggest part of the budget is school aid to so-called Abbott districts. The reason is because the State’s Supreme Court now requires additional funding to those districts, to equal the funding to the highest-funded districts in the State!
Why not publicly commit to school aid for Abbott districts, set at a level 10% above the state-wide average, and do it by constitutional amendment? And use the huge savings that will be realized, to repay the Transportation Trust Fund for the rip-off it has been subjected to over the years.
The Court is the least democratic of our governmental institutions. Don’t you believe the Legislature and the Executive branch should wrest back control over setting fiscal policy?
You asked for recommendations. This is a way to do it.
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