March 16, 2009
After the Democrat-controlled Legislature approved Gov. Jon S. Corzine’s scheme to put off government’s pension obligations today, Assemblywoman Caroline Casagrande and Assemblyman Declan O’Scanlon said public officials should be moving in the opposite direction.
“This plan makes no sense,” Casagrande said. “Governor Corzine and his Democratic allies in the Legislature want to stop investing when the market is at its lowest. This means that when the economy rebounds, our dwindling pension funds won’t have the benefit and property taxpayers will be stuck with higher bills because their government once again pushed its problems to the future without thought of the consequences. The financial predicament that Governor Corzine and the Legislature are putting our future generations into is shameful.”
Casagrande and O’Scanlon, both R-Monmouth and Mercer, were rebuked in their effort to amend the legislation so that the pension deferral could be limited to one year.
“A one-year deferral can do enough damage,” Casagrande said. “We offered a one-year sunset but the Democratic majority wanted more.”
Casagrande and O’Scanlon also sponsor a measure, A-204, that would ask voters to change the constitution to require all levels of government to make full actuarially-sound payments to retirement systems and prohibit early-retirement incentives that would create an unfunded liability.
“This was one of several recommendations that came out of the Legislature’s special property tax session three years ago, which the governor ignored,” O’Scanlon said. “Perhaps if the Governor enacted some of the reforms that came out of that session, he would not be supporting a plan to defer pension payments – a practice even he has criticized. We need leadership to confront the state’s fiscal problems – not push them to the future or completely ignore them.”
