NJ Taxpayers Still Awaiting Relief

Keep waiting New Jersey taxpayers. You're not going to see property tax relief anytime soon because Gov. Corzine is still holding up signing the property tax "relief" bill that is sitting on his desk since before I went away to France.

It's the centerpiece of the Legislature's property tax relief effort, and it's sitting on Gov. Jon Corzine's desk awaiting his signature.

But the governor is biding his time. He says he'll wait, likely until next month but perhaps even later, to sign the bill that would give most New Jersey homeowners a credit of up to 20 percent on their property tax bills.

"We have to get it signed, but I haven't decided what day," Corzine said following a town hall meeting Tuesday night in Piscataway. And he was vague about his reasons for holding off.

"There are a lot of issues we are working on," Corzine said. "We have a desire to get a series of things done, some of them not legislatively driven."

The regular deadline to sign the bill, 45 days after passage by the Legislature, is Saturday. But Corzine is exploiting an obscure provision in the law that leaves an unsigned bill in limbo when the Legislature isn't meeting. The Senate and Assembly are on a break until May while committees conduct hearings on Corzine's budget proposal.

Corzine indicated he might wait until he appoints a new state comptroller so that he can put a final, ceremonial shine on the six-month special legislative session by signing the tax credit bill.

Let's ignore the fact that the relief plan will simply delay and defer tax increases, and doesn't actually fix the structural problems with the way New Jersey municipalities and the state budgets operate. The plan simply limits the tax increases and provides a variable tax relief plan to certain taxpayers.

The problem is that municipal budgets are strained because of pension plan necessities, union deals that limit how much leeway municipalities can cut, and the bloated state workforce makes matters even worse - you have more workers serving even fewer people than ever in New Jersey. The number of state workers have exploded in the past few years as no one has bothered to put a limit on new hires. New Jersey taxpayers are supposed to pay for it all.

Meanwhile, New Jersey raised the sales tax to pay for the property tax relief - shifting the tax burden, but not reducing it. Expect more of the same as the Governor and Trenton refuse to take the necessary steps of cutting the state budget to make ends meet instead of repeatedly raising taxes and fees to pay for an expanded workforce.