I still fail to see how waging a battle against the worst excesses and lagresse of the NJEA immediately equals that Christie hates teachers and education. There are plenty of teachers out there who disagree with NJEA policies and tactics, but of course those teachers can't "vote with their feet" to leave the union since they are legally required to be members, or at least legally required to pay due's. I also don't see Christie being anti-education, especially when the state is currently spending more on education then it has at any point in the past. The claims that Christie "cut education spending" are based on comparing current to 2009 numbers. In 2009 Corzine infused $1 billion of Federal stimulus money into the education system and that was never more then a one-shot lump of money and even Crozine said there was no way the state could match those levles in the future and that districts should spend wisely.
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Debt is one area that I feel Christie could do a better job on. However, the article only gives passing mentioned to the fact that the current debt increases, at least $5.3 billion of it are tied to pension and retiree benefit debt increases in those systems. The plan put forward by Christie during pension and benefit reform negotiations and agreed to by the Legislature and unions accounted for this shortfall as the state increased it's payments each year before reaching full annual funding by 2018. The plan Christie and the Legislature adopted actually makes the pension system viable and 90% acuarially funded after 30 years. That's how long it's going to take to repair the 20 years of complete mismanagement.
Since the reforms were put in place Christie's budget has fully funded the pension and retiree benefits per the laid out plan. The plan Christie and the Legislature put in place will incur more short term debt on paper, but the plan over the long term will save the state government $80 billion and local governments $43 billion. The local governments are already seeing the benefits and local governments saved $267 million in pension costs in 2012 and another $84 million in retiree benefits costs.
The only added debt beyond what was planned in the pension and benefit reforms was around $760 million in additional bond issues. This is the money that was short changed into the Transportation Fund to balance the budget. As the Transportation Fund can issue bonds without voter referendum this is a common trick used by NJ politicians to borrow money. Basically, take all the cash in hand from the Transportation Fund and then let them borrow what they need. I do fault Christie for using this tactic to plug the budget gap, I do not fault him for the shortfalls in the pension and retiree benefits system as they are following the plan that was laid out to fix those systems.
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As for ARC I think Christie made the right call. It was not the right project in that it didn't work with what was going on within NYC by not connecting to Penn Station or taking into account two other plans (the No. 7 Subway and Amtrak's Gateway Tunnel) that actually provided connections to the existing system within NYC. The cost of ARC was pegged at $500k-$700k per rider and didn't take people where they wanted to go in NYC which is Penn Station or the East Side. The most fervent estimates stated a 15 minute reduction in commute times and an additional 44,000 jobs added within a DECADE of the completion of the project. Total costs were $2.7 billion to NJ already and the strong possibility that NJ alone would bear any costs above the $8.7 billion "paper" total. Those cost overruns were expected to hit $4-$5 billion as the project had already nearly doubled in cost during its planning phase.
ARC was pushed through during the Corzine administration even though it was not the project that any of the actual transportation planners wanted to see happen.
ARC rail tunnel's high price tag, financial impact criticized at transportation forum | NJ.com
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