Tomorrow, I’ll be heading up to Trenton for Gov. Murphy’s budget speech. We’ll have some coverage then, but I wanted to share a little bit of what I’ll be looking for. After years of Gov. Chris Christie using cities either as scapegoats or laboratories, I want to see where cities (and Camden specifically) play into Gov. Murphy’s vision of a healthy New Jersey.
Here’s an excerpt from Gov. Murphy’s op-ed framing the speech that piqued my curiosity:
For the eight years prior to our administration, New Jersey’s middle class was nearly written out of our story. Our middle-class families – and those who worked hard in hopes of joining the middle class – bore the brunt of years of disinvestment, poor fiscal management, and underwhelming economic growth. Instead of expanding, our middle class was hollowed out.
Over the past year, through historic investments in education and workforce development, in infrastructure – including NJ TRANSIT – and with a renewed focus on righting our fiscal house through responsible planning, we have begun the hard work of turning New Jersey around. The promise of this work is evident in the fact that in 2018 the statewide average property tax grew by less than 1 percent, the smallest rate on record.
This is, in many ways, a really standard New Jersey framing for fiscal issues. It focuses on the middle class — which is often good politics because many people either consider themselves middle class or aspire to be middle class — and property taxes are central to how many of those folks engage with the state’s fiscal health.
It’s also silent on many of the issues that city residents face. That’s one danger of the wider, and somewhat standard, Democratic framing of fiscal issues as middle class issues. It may be good politics, but it also doesn’t speak directly to the experiences of many key constituencies in the Democratic base.
There’s no clear vision for how racial justice, suburban/urban divides, development or other issues fit into this fiscal discussion.
In some ways that’s refreshing. Early in the Gov. Christie tenure, cities were an unfortunate scapegoat, and cuts to municipal funding (on the grounds that cities needed to stand on their own two feet) were devastating and led to dramatic increases in crime.
Later in Gov. Christie’s tenure, cities like Newark and Camden were cited as laboratories for conservative ideas — whether they be development like the Economic Opportunity Act, or in education with the Urban Hope Act.
Gov. Murphy’s vision is yet to be as clear. Where do cities fit into this discussion of fiscal health? It’s particularly important because cities are central to modern thriving economics, and New Jersey’s history of sharp suburban/urban segregation has likely kept the state’s cities from playing the same role in a fiscal revival that they are playing around the country.
It’s possible to imagine a budget speech that specifically tackles these challenges in a way that speaks to critical constituents in the Democratic base, while also addressing key challenges that could make the Murphy administration a leader on these challenging questions.
I don’t think the Murphy administration is quite there yet — but I’ll be looking for kernels of ideology, language or policy that can start to tackle these challenges.
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