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ROBERTS UNVEILS 'CORE' REFORM PLAN
Multi-Prong Package Would Remove Obstacles to Service Sharing, Tie Aid to Efficiency, Create 'Super' County School Superintendents, Consolidate School & Fire Elections

(TRENTON) - Assembly Speaker Joseph J. Roberts, Jr. today announced a package of bills aimed at shaking up the status quo by giving citizens and local officials new tools to cut waste and duplication in government.

The legislative initiative is entitled the CORE Reform Plan - "C" for clearing hurdles to shared services, "O" for overriding waste in schools, "R" for reining in pension abuses, and "E" for empowering citizens.

"This plan is based on a simple tenet: We need to begin to get rid of the avalanche of overlap, waste, and abuse that serve as obstacles in the fight to down New Jersey's property taxes," said Roberts (D-Camden). "These measures will help ensure that when we identify new means of property tax relief - as we must - the money won't vanish into our current backwards and bloated structure."

Roberts announced the plan at a State House press conference with Majority Leader Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Mercer), Assembly Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nellie Pou (D-Passaic), and Assemblyman Upendra Chivukula (D-Somerset), whose home county has a strong record on encouraging regionalization and shared services.

Watson Coleman and Pou will play key roles in the implementation of some of the plan's elements.

Watson Coleman will chair a new, bipartisan School Aid Reform and Accountability Task Force that is charged with recommending a new public school funding formula for the state. The task force would consist of seven legislators and six public members, and would begin work this month and conduct hearings and meetings through the summer so that it can present recommendations in September.

"Despite the admirable efforts of educators, administrators, and other public education advocates, our state's school funding system fosters inequity instead of excellence," said Watson Coleman. "The fact is that we don't fund education as effectively as we should, and when we do provide money it doesn't get used as efficiently as it should."

Pou's assignment is to oversee an Assembly Appropriations Committee examination of abuses and questionable practices that are eroding the integrity of the public pension funds that are supposed to provide secure retirements for career state, county and local employees.

Citing the instances of school administrator pension abuses uncovered earlier this year by the State Commission of Investigation, Pou said her committee would pursue recommendations to prevent pension abuses. She said the changes would be aimed at preventing political appointees, elected officials and various others from exploiting the state's benefits system through pension padding, tacking and other maneuvers that might best be described as legalized thievery.

Pou said her committee also would work through the summer.

"Our public employee retirement system was set up to ensure that the hard-working men and women who provide nuts-and-bolts government services are provided for in their retirements," said Pou. "We must return the system to the career employees by constructing new safeguards to impede individuals who view the pension system as a license to steal."

The plan's other significant elements include:

• Streamline the state's labyrinth of laws governing regionalization and shared services: Currently the state has 337 confusing, contradictory and counterproductive statutes spread over a variety of code books.
  
  
• Remove civil service barriers that obstruct service sharing by local governments: Currently, if a non-civil-service community wants to enter into a cost-saving service-sharing agreement with a neighboring community that operated under civil service rules, the non-civil service municipality would need to switch to a civil service operation.
  
  
• Tie local aid to efficiency: This would create a "stick" approach to state aid distribution by disqualifying inefficient municipal operations for money from the state's Legislative Initiative Municipal Block Grant program.
  
  
• Create "super" county school superintendents: This is an ideal year to pursue this because the contracts of 15 of the 21 county superintendents will expire this year. This measure would give county superintendents broad authority to eliminate administrative waste and overhead, including direct authority over approval of local school budgets and the ability to eliminate unnecessary state mandates and non-operating school districts.
  
  
• Move school board elections to November: New Jersey should join the majority of other states that allow November school board elections. Electronic voting machines can display separate partisan and non-partisan ballots. Meanwhile, school budget votes would be eliminated except in instances where a district sought to exceed state spending caps. County superintendents would have greater power to cut administrative costs in all school budgets.
  
  
• Move fire district elections to November: Fire districts currently attract less than 2 percent of registered voters.
  
  
• Mandate "truth in budgeting" reforms: Measure would implement disclosure recommendations recently put forth by the SCI. Require municipal and school budgets to be displayed on Web sites in user-friendly formats; require contractual details governing salary and benefits to be made available in easy-to-understand format for public inspection.
  
  
• Direct democracy on shared services: Empower citizens to identify and implement opportunities for shared services by allowing municipal governing bodies to put forth binding referendums through which voters could authorize shared service agreements with multiple communities.

Roberts said the reform package is the culmination of months of intensive work, including research on the history of local units in New Jersey, a thorough review of existing laws, meetings with a wide array of groups, and input from mayors, school officials, academics, experts and lawmakers and staff from both sides of the political aisle.

"The plan is designed to shake up the status quo and give our residents and local officials new tools and strategies to cut waste, create efficiencies, and drive down local costs," said Roberts.

The Speaker said the plan would strike at the structural problems that drive up costs of government at the local level in New Jersey.

"This plan is not the Property Tax Elimination Act of 2006 and it is not an unrealistic effort to force consolidations and mandate local mergers," said Roberts. "This is a significant building block to fix a variety of the laws and systems that drive up costs in this state. Rest assured this won't be the last word on property taxes by any stretch of the imagination."

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Click here to download information on the CORE Reform Plan.