Gormley and O'Toole Ask Governor to Save Residents From Property Tax Debacle

October 31, 2006

Honorable Jon S. Corzine
Governor of New Jersey
Executive Chambers
State House
Trenton, New Jersey 08625

Dear Governor Corzine:

We want to begin by commending you for the leadership you demonstrated in pressing to end legislative inertia on the property tax issue by calling for the current special session on property tax reform.

Regrettably, we believe your strong intervention will again be required if New Jersey residents are to get the long-promised and much needed property tax relief that you spoke of in your July 28 address to the Legislature.

You convened the special legislative session to address property taxes with a call for action – “comprehensive and transformative action� that would put the needs of the property taxpayer first. Unfortunately, your mandate for action has been effectively abandoned.

Simply put, the session has become alarmingly stagnant and there is little hope that it will produce the bold action needed to alleviate New Jersey’s oppressive property taxes. The committees’ calendar of activities so far has been a blueprint for failure; they have devoted weeks to assessing the problem, retracing the well-worn paths traveled by 20 years worth of study commissions, blue ribbon panels and task forces. Minimal time has been spent reviewing and evaluating proposed solutions, steps that are a necessary prelude to the type of action you rightly demanded.

As members of the Joint Legislative Committee on Public Employee Benefits Reform, we have developed and pushed for reforms that would reduce costs and protect the fiscal integrity of those programs, while maintaining fairness for public employees. Our proposals incorporate the recommendations made in the December 2005 report of the Benefits Review Task Force led by your former colleague Philip Murphy. Despite the fact that our committee was directed to use that report as the basis for its work, the committee did not take testimony from Mr. Murphy until last week.

We have received no assurances from the co-chairs that our proposals will get an up-or-down vote from the committee. Co-Chairman Scutari told us last week, “We’ll discuss it.� He said, "I'm not certain we'll have bills come out of this committee or potentially a task force report." As you said in July, the last thing we need is another task force report.

Several of our colleagues on the other committees are also exasperated by the lack of action. Throughout this process Republicans have put substantive proposals on the table that would result in real savings, which have been ignored by the committee co-chairs. This week, roughly two weeks before the end of the special committee process, three of the four committees are not even meeting.

In your July speech to the Legislature, you said that “if we fail to take the necessary steps to achieve sustainable relief and reform by January 1st, then I will call and press for a Citizens’ Convention to be on the ballot in 2007.� We suggest a different approach which would lead to property tax reform much sooner.

The deadline for the special committee reports is November 15. If, as we fear, those November 15 reports do not propose an aggressive action plan that would provide New Jersey’s citizens with property tax relief that will endure, we suggest you call the full Legislature back into session on December 1, and make us meet every day until the task is completed.

A Citizen’s Convention won’t produce relief until 2009 or 2010, if ever. The people of New Jersey have suffered long enough. There are already plenty of proposals before the Legislature that would address the root causes of our property tax crisis. There is only a lack of will to act. Your intervention may well be the impetus needed to produce real results.

Sincerely,

Senator William Gormley Assemblyman Kevin O’Toole