Report Card Day in New Jersey
Posted March 28, 2008

Earlier this month, the Pew Center on the States – an arm of the Pew Charitable Trusts, an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to analyzing and improving public policy – released its 2008 50-State Report Card. Officially titled Grading the States 2008, the report evaluates states in four main areas: information, people, money, and infrastructure.

Unfortunately, report-card day is never good for New Jersey.

Our grade: C

New Jersey shared this dubious honor with six other states (Massachusetts, Maine, Illinois, California, Arkansas, and Alaska). Only two states – Rhode Island and New Hampshire – fared worse, earning a C-minus and a D-plus, respectively. The average nationwide grade was B-minus.

As the overall performance grade sheet notes, “The Project evaluates how well states manage employees, budgets and finance, information and infrastructure. A focus on these critical areas helps ensure that states’ policy decisions and practices actually deliver their intended outcomes.”

While the criteria factoring into these areas numbered many, some of the specifics related to money and information – New Jersey’s two weakest areas – were the following:

Money

• “The state uses a long-term perspective to make budget decisions….
• The state’s financial management activities support structural balance between ongoing revenues and expenditures.
• The state’s procurement activities are conducted efficiently and supported with effective internal controls.
• The state systematically assesses the effectiveness of its financial operations and management.”

Information

• “The state actively focuses on making future policy and collecting information to support that policy direction.
• Elected officials, the state budget office and agency personnel have appropriate data on the relationship between costs and performance and use these data when making resource-allocation decisions….
• The governor and agency managers have appropriate data that enable them to assess the actual performance of policies and programs….”

In each of these measurement standards, New Jersey fell far short. The report notes that “New Jersey hasn’t yet found a way to deal with the long-term imbalance between its revenues and its spending” and states, “The consequences of the fiscal problem hit home everywhere in state government.”

For example, in November of 2007, voters were “staring down a $3 billion hole in a $33 billion budget…. Worse still, New Jersey faces a newly revealed $58 billion long-term bill for post-employment retirement benefits owed to its workers. Many other states are up against big bills on this front, but New Jersey’s is a whopper by anyone’s standards.”

While the Pew Center’s report is new, the story is anything but. Year after year in report after report, New Jersey continues to rank among the worst states in the nation in fiscal health. But our governor and legislators still don’t seem to get it. When Governor Corzine isn’t trying to hike tolls, Senator Joseph Vitale (D-Middlesex) is proposing a universal health plan for New Jersey. (In case you missed it, check out Tom Hester’s article, which shows the plan could cost the state more than $1 billion per year.)

As long as legislators keep advocating feckless ideas that try to put a taxpayer-funded band-aid on a state-inflicted bullet hole, New Jersey will keep showing up at the bottom of the class on report-card day.

 

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