There is a moment in the life of any new governor, a sort of civic christening, when the high-minded campaign speeches must be set aside and the actual business of governing must begin.
For Rebecca ‘Mikie’ Sherrill, the freshly seated chief executive of New Jersey, that moment arrives this afternoon in Trenton, when she steps before a joint session of the legislature to present her first state budget.
It is a document that will do more than merely tally numbers; it will serve as a mirror, reflecting the true nature of her priorities and the measure of her mettle.
And the portrait reflected in that mirror, at least from where we sit today, is not a pretty one. The lady governor has inherited a machine that has been running on fumes and borrowed time.
The blunt truth, as she herself warned the good people of the state just a fortnight ago, is that the treasury is on a path to spend a cool three billion dollars more than it expects to take in over the next few years. That’s billion with a B.
The federal life support that kept the state afloat during the plague years has been unceremoniously unplugged, and the new administration in Washington is already sharpening its knives, with cuts to health care funding promising to carve another hundred-million-dollar hole in the budget by this time next year.
Washington, she said with a candor that deserves some respect, isn’t coming to save us. It’s a stark admission, and a true one. The party is over. The hangover has arrived.
Now, the governor is expected to walk into the Statehouse and lay out her cure for this fiscal ailment.
She has already pointed an accusing finger at the ghosts of administrations past, decrying a historic spending problem and a capital city that has been too comfortable with business as usual. This is a fine and familiar political posture.
But the thing about pointing fingers is that when you’re standing in a hall of mirrors, you’re likely pointing at a lot of folks from your own party. And in Trenton, the Democrats have been looking back at themselves from those mirrors for a very long time.
The budget she will propose, reportedly a hefty $59 billion affair—a figure that has nearly doubled in the span of a half-dozen years—will be the opening salvo in a long, hot summer of negotiation with a legislature full of her own allies, who are already bracing themselves for the unpleasant task of having to trim the fat from their favorite programs. You can almost hear the sharpening of pencils and the clearing of throats.
One can expect the new governor to talk about slowing the rate of spending. And in the same breath, her office has already leaked a list of new initiatives that would make a sailor blush: historic levels of school aid, a nine percent hike for preschool, a fresh youth mental health program, a center for the study of social media, millions for a state innovation authority, and new teams at the Department of Environmental Protection to speed up permits.
All of it, no doubt, worthy stuff. But it’s a curious way to treat a fiscal diet by ordering a seven-course meal.
The most immediate target for the budget scalpel, and the one that will cause the most political heartburn, is likely a popular tax break for the state’s seniors, the StayNJ program.
It promises a $6,500 cut to eligible homeowners over 65, and it’s set to kick in this very year. But it is also enormously expensive.
The question hanging in the air is whether the governor will dare to take away a promised treat from the very voters who just put her in office. That is the kind of choice that defines a leader.
The Republicans in the minority are already saying, with a smugness that must be terribly satisfying, we told you so. They have been warning for years that the spending under the previous administration was a runaway train heading for a cliff. They now put the gap at four billion, not three.
A billion here, a billion there, as one of them noted, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. They are demanding cuts, a shrinking of government, and a reformation of the school funding formula that for years has picked winners and losers based on politics rather than need. They are calling for a reckoning.
And at the heart of it all is a simple, immutable arithmetic. The state has a $7.2 billion rainy-day fund, a nice little nest egg. But if the governor and the legislature decide to simply paper over the gap with that fund and avoid the painful work of cutting, that nest egg will be cracked and scrambled in just two years. Then where will they be? Facing the same gap, but without a penny to their name.
The governor has promised a new era of transparency, with an online tool for the public to watch the sausage-making in real time. It’s a fine notion, letting the sun shine in. But sunlight is a terrible disinfectant when you’re trying to hide a three-billion-dollar mess.
The truth is, New Jersey has been living beyond its means, kicking the can down a road that has now run out. The new governor has a decision to make. She can be the one to finally stop the can with her foot, or she can be the one who hands it to the next poor soul who has to carry it. We will know her answer later today.