newjerseynewsroom.com

BY BONNIE WATSON COLEMAN

COMMENTARY

The numbers are sobering.

New Jersey closed 2010 with unemployment at 9.1 percent. The state lost 16,300 jobs in December, including 13,300 private-sector jobs. When all was said and done, New Jersey lost 30,700 jobs last year.

With numbers like that, one would think that every elected official in New Jersey would be focused on trying to find ways to create jobs and economic development for our state, but despite the best efforts of Democratic lawmakers, that wasn’t the case.

In fact, flip-flop season started early in the Legislature, and the Republicans jumped into it headfirst.

Now, sadly, politics have pervaded everything in New Jersey since Chris Christie took office 14 months ago. As a Democrat, I know it will be easy for people who read this to think this is nothing more than another political tussle, but I ask those people to pause for a moment and take a hard look at what can happen when partisan politics rules the day.

Nobody can debate whether New Jersey has many serious issues that it must tackle, but nothing is more important at this moment than finding ways to spur job growth and jump-start our economy. Nothing else much matters to working class New Jerseyans if they’re not bringing home a paycheck to make ends meet.

That’s why Democrats late last year pushed forward more than 30 bills to create economic development in New Jersey. These bills spanned a wide range. Some gave job training to out-of-work New Jerseyans. Some eased access to unemployment benefits. Others gave tax credits and incentives to businesses for creating jobs. Some streamlined our corporate tax and regulatory system to spark economic development.

In public policy, not everyone agrees with everything, which is exactly how democracy is supposed to work, but fortunately several Republicans saw fit to support these bills when they came up for a final votes in January. It was the right thing to do.

Assemblyman Dominick DiCicco of Gloucester County, for instance, approved three bills to provide job training, spark environmentally friendly building construction and create a new fund that would be used by the governor to attract and retain economic development projects.

But then the governor vetoed many of these bills. He claimed the state couldn’t afford them, even though one job training bill would cost $2.12 million per year, compared to his plan to give the wealthy a tax break through an $11.5 million estate tax cut. Others had no immediate cost.

Democrats, though, were not about to give up the fight for our working class. The green buildings bill (A-2215) for instance, passed 75-2-1 on Jan. 6, more than enough votes to override the governor’s veto, which requires only 54 votes. The bill also, by the way, had no budget impact at all.

So it seemed sensible to move forward with the vetoes to continue our fight, but that of course presumed Republicans would do the right thing and stick to the principles they used when the voted on the bills the first time.

Disappointingly, that was not the case. Every Republican who had supported the bills flip-flopped their votes during the March 3 voting session, doing what the governor told them to do. That meant that nine job creation bills vetoed by the governor were dead. New Jerseyans looking for a job would not get the help they needed. It was the wrong thing to do.

Assemblyman DiCicco, for instance, changed his votes on all three of the bills he had previously supported. In response, he tried to compare the job creation bills to some sort of tax increases, which showed a severe misunderstanding of the legislation.

I guess the Assembly Republican Leader wasn’t kidding when he said job creation was on the “back-burner.” And I guess he really meant it when he implied that the unemployed – or as he called them “these people” – enjoyed living on unemployment benefits.

Sadly, this wasn’t the first time Republicans failed to stand for their beliefs. Many changed their votes after the governor vetoed a bill to provide health care to working class women and their newborn babies.

It’s been said it’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.

Well, the Republicans must still be searching their souls for those values, unless they’ve already completely sold them to the governor.

Assemblywoman Bonnie Watson Coleman is a Democrat who represents the 15th Legislative District in Mercer County.

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