Legislative leaders, unions also argue that Christie’s Lottery plan will go nowhere if it requires more givebacks from public-employee unions
Gov. Chris Christie’s administration has finally detailed how he plans to have the New Jersey Lottery help ease some of the financial burden on the state’s beleaguered public-employee pension system.
And while State Treasurer Ford Scudder labeled the proposal a “true win-win-win” at last week’s briefing, some Democrats are less than impressed.
Phil Murphy, Democratic frontrunner for his party’s gubernatorial nomination, compared it to the boardwalk-arcade game Whac-A-Mole during a gubernatorial debate that was held in Newark last week.
“That’s what this is,” said Murphy, a former Goldman Sachs executive. “You’re going to pile down some source of funding over here, and you’re going to expose another source of expense required over there.”
Democratic hopeful Jim Johnson, a lawyer and former U.S. Treasury official from Montclair, dismissed the scheme as a gimmick intended to distract from Christie’s decision to once again short the full payment. Indeed, Christie is budgeting $2.5 billion for the pension system during the 2018 fiscal year, which is only half the amount he committed to paying in a 2011 deal.
And in a year that will see all 120 legislative seats on the November ballot, lawmakers will also be listening closely over the next several weeks to public-employee union officials, and those union officials are already raising some concerns about the Lottery proposal itself, as well as the threat that Christie will seek a new set of worker givebacks to go along with any asset transfer.
Or as Scudder summed it up, “I’m not going to step out in front of those negotiations to say what exactly we’re looking for, but yes, we’ll be asking for something,” he went on to say.