A good idea that won't go away

Thursday, September 15, 2005
BY EDITORIAL

It's good to see that the coalition of groups that toiled in vain for a citizens' tax-reform convention to be held next year hasn't given up on its mission. At a press conference Tuesday, the advocates, including the New Jersey State League of Municipalities, the League of Women Voters, the Black Ministers' Council, AARP-New Jersey and the Sierra Club, formally shifted their goal to holding a convention in 2007, promised to keep pressing the Legislature to act on the plan when it returns from its recess, and called on the candidates for governor and the Assembly to take a stand on the issue.

It has long been clear that a convention offers the only real hope for ending the state's overreliance on property taxes to fund schools and county and municipal government - an overreliance that distorts local planning decisions, has produced the nation's highest per-capita property levies and is literally driving residents from their homes. Decades of inaction by legislators and governors, whose job it is to make the state's laws and policies, have demonstrated that too many of those politicians lack the courage, independence and imagination needed to create a balanced tax system over the opposition of special interests and opportunistic demagogues. The proposed convention, on the other hand, would be immune to most of these destructive pressures. It would be made up of delegates elected on a one-time basis for the sole purpose of devising a package of statutes and constitutional amendments that collectively would constitute true and sustainable tax reform. That package would be submitted to the voters of New Jersey, who would have the final say.

Earlier in the legislative session, the Assembly approved a bill that would have asked the voters this coming November whether such a convention should be held next year. The Democratic Assembly majority's action was given impetus by the fact that its members are running for re-election this year and felt a need to show that they had done something meaningful about property taxes. But the Senate Democrats, led by acting Gov. Richard J. Codey as Senate president, refused to act on the proposal. The senators aren't on the ballot this fall, and their indifference to the property-tax crisis has been as transparent as it is deplorable. The crumb they have offered property owners is to talk of a special tax-reform session of the Legislature sometime in the future. History and common sense suggest, however, that such a session would be formless, aimless, beset by partisan political wrangling and, in the end, nonproductive.

U.S. Sen. Jon Corzine, the Democratic candidate for governor, supports a tax convention, but he also wants to call a special legislative session on tax reform early next year to "frame choices and make recommendations" for it. Why that would be necessary or even helpful is far from clear. GOP candidate Douglas Forrester still seems to think that the Legislature can fix the tax problem on its own, which represents the ultimate triumph of hope over experience.

The pro-convention coalition says, and we agree, that there's nothing inherently wrong with letting the Legislature hold its special session and go through the motions - as long as it acts FIRST to guarantee the people of New Jersey a chance to vote on the convention question. The lawmakers then would have until Election Day 2006 to convince the public that they had solved the problem. If they amazed the skeptics and cynics by doing it, more power to them; no convention would be needed. If they couldn't, then the people could make certain that there would be one.

Link to this Trenton Times newspaper atricle on www.nj.com