Past N.J. governors on their regrets

The biggest regret former New Jersey governors have is that they couldn't fundamentally improve the quality of urban education during their time in office, despite spending more money per student than any other state.

Thursday's "Governors' Summit" brought together former Govs. Brendan Byrne, Tom Kean, Jim Florio, Christie Whitman, and Jim McGreevey for a rare joint discussion at Newark's New Jersey Performing Arts Center, whose creation was a shared accomplishment of Kean and Florio.

The discussion was an opportunity for the governors to reprise their triumphs and tribulations, as well as one another's accomplishments.

Republicans Kean and Whitman said their biggest frustration was the inability to transform the Jersey City and Newark school districts they took over almost a decade apart.

"I'll tell you what I would do differently: I wouldn't listen to the lawyers," Kean said of the Jersey City takeover. Kean wanted to invoke gubernatorial powers to enforce the "thorough and efficient clause" of the New Jersey Constitution in the same way Byrne unilaterally used executive powers to protect the Pinelands.

"The lawyers said that's completely unconstitutional," Kean said. "So we went through the Legislature and the bill got weakened substantially, and it got challenged by Jersey City in the courts and got weakened some more."

Years later, Kean said, he talked to two retired state Supreme Court justices and asked them what they would have done if he had declared a state of emergency to take over the Jersey City schools. "Both said, 'We would have welcomed it.' That was a terrible missed opportunity," he said wistfully.

Similarly, Whitman said she "wished we hadn't listened to the lawyers in our takeover of Newark. Because the law had been weakened, we weren't able to make the changes needed," she said, citing limits the Legislature put on the number of magnet and charter schools.

Democrats Florio and McGreevey were equally impassioned in their call for increased focus on urban education.

"We now know what 'thorough and efficient' means: It means preschool, it means quality teachers, it means good facilities," Florio said. "We do have to invest smartly. If you think the cost of education is bad, wait until you see the cost of ignorance."

McGreevey, who noted that he counsels incarcerated women who can't read, said: "Frankly, if education was failing so miserably for white affluent children, we would have had a revolution. There are best practices, and we know what works and what doesn't work. The problem is we are tied to a system that is ossified and preserves the status quo at the expense of entrepreneurial efforts."

When NJ Spotlight cofounder John Mooney, who served as moderator, asked the five former chief executives to assess the major accomplishments of their fellow governors, their records on preservation of open space and critical aquifers drew the most praise.

"Gov. Byrne's preservation of the Pinelands was very special," McGreevey said. "It marked the beginning of an environmental stewardship we all adhered to."

Florio singled out the massive open-space preservation initiative Whitman launched early in her second term. "We need to do more," he said, "to preserve open space in the most densely populated state in the nation." He and Whitman praised McGreevey's Highlands initiative as a critical preservation effort.

Whitman shifted from considerations of policy to the personal when she spoke of McGreevey's difficult decision to resign his governorship in 2004 after his "I am a gay American" speech. "I have to applaud Gov. McGreevey for doing what he thinks was right," Whitman said.

"It took a lot of courage for him to do that . . . even though I wish he didn't think he had to," she said as McGreevey choked up and the audience applauded.

McGreevey applauded Gov. Christie for his expansion of drug courts that will provide enhanced treatment for addicts and for his commitment to the restructuring of Rutgers and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey into a single research university.

The Rutgers-UMDNJ merger could "put Rutgers into one of the top 10 research institutions in the nation," said Kean, who chaired Christie's higher education restructuring commission, which urged the merger.

Byrne focused repeatedly on the increase in the state's bonded indebtedness to $34 billion, and the state's passage of a $750 million higher education bond issue last year with no dedicated funding to pay for it.

"Tom Kean and I can brag that we had a triple-A bond rating when we were governor," Byrne noted. "It's nowhere near that now."

Kean said New Jersey's "whole taxing structure is wrong. Everyone knows we have an overreliance on property taxes because municipalities won't share services, won't combine." He added that the state was too reliant on high-income taxpayers to pay the bulk of its income tax. "We now have the highest tax rate in the country, and jobs are moving out," he said.

Florio noted that he recently met with Moody's, and that "New Jersey is not the worst-off state. Illinois and California have real problems" with their pensions and debt, and state governments may not have the resources they need in the future to meet their long-range obligations.

The answer, he suggested, may lie in shifting some of the financial responsibility to the federal government, as other nations do, starting with the Medicaid program, one of the fastest-growing areas of state spending.

Asked what advice they would offer Christie in his reelection campaign, Florio quipped, "I don't understand Democratic politics any more so I sure as heck don't understand Republican politics."

Whitman said Christie "knows what he has to do and that is to concentrate on the job here. If you don't do the job you're in, the next one doesn't come along."

As for Christie's presidential prospects, Kean said: "He's the most popular politician in the country, so if he comes out of this election with a huge majority in a blue state like New Jersey, [the Republican Party] should be coming to him.

"Now, my party is nuts, so whether they will come to him, I don't know," Kean said, provoking a burst of laughter. "But I don't know another candidate in the country with more talent."

Whitman was the only one to offer encouragement to Christie's Democratic challenger, Sen. Barbara Buono (D., Middlesex). Whitman ran against U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley (D., N.J.) in 1990 and came close to defeating him after being given no chance in the race.

"You don't give up because the odds look overwhelming," she said.