Six weeks ago, Ju-lee Tretter was a laborer on a road
crew, repaving the Betsy Ross Bridge over the Delaware River. Five weeks ago,
the state of New Jersey laid her off.
Now Tretter feeds her two children by visiting food
pantries in three different towns. She couldn’t pay her August rent. Her
landlord is angry, and he wants her to leave.
“Where am I going to go? I can’t pay him, and I don’t
have money to move,” said Tretter, 43, of Ocean County. “I’m broke beyond
broke.”
About three dozen construction workers with similar
complaints protested Monday outside the offices of state Sens. Bob Gordon, D-Fair
Lawn, and Loretta Weinberg, D-Teaneck. Others gathered in front of the local
headquarters of Sens. Jim Whelan and Jeff Van Drew, both South Jersey
Democrats. It was the first day of a larger protest campaign, which organizers
said would target the office of every elected officeholder in the state, to
pressure lawmakers to fix New Jersey’s broken transportation system by raising
the gas tax.
The workers have been laid off since July 8, when
Governor Christie ordered most state-financed construction projects to close
because the Transportation Trust Fund is broke. When Christie issued his
executive order, he told the New Jersey Department of Transportation to expect
the closure to last at least seven days.
Then, last week, State Senate President Steve Sweeney
told the editorial board at The Record that he didn’t expect a fix until after
the November election. That would come too late to help many laid-off workers,
since most construction sites begin to close in November due to cold weather,
said Roger Ellis, a lobbyist for the Heavy and General Construction Laborers
Local 472. An agreement that comes after the election would leave most of the
workers unemployed for eight months, until the construction season begins
ramping up again next spring.
“We can’t just wait for the Senate to act whenever they
feel like it,” said Ellis, whose union is organizing the protests. “We need
action now.”
Union rallies can be boisterous affairs, often featuring
loud chants and a large inflated rat. Monday’s gatherings were civil, even
amicable. The protesters arrived with a truck outfitted with three large LED
screens, which flashed messages to motorists like “Do your job so we can do
ours.”
Rather than chant in the summer heat, the workers stood
quietly, using up what little shade they could find. At one point Gordon came
outside, and the two sides talked.
“If they don’t figure something out until November, most
of us won’t work till March,” said Danny Silva, 49, a road crew foreman. “If
that happens, I could lose my home.”
Under their contracts, most construction union members
must work at least 1,000 hours per calendar year to qualify for health
insurance, Ellis said. Many didn’t start work this year until May, he said, and
were laid off the first week of July.
“Many of these people will have to scramble to get the
hours they need,” Ellis said.
Gordon said he was aware of their complaints, and hoped
for a compromise soon.
“I told them that while I appreciated meeting with them,
they probably should be demonstrating elsewhere, Gordon said, since he supports
a gas tax increase. “I wish I could have invited them all inside for a cold
drink.”
If history is any judge, a solution may not come swiftly.
The state’s gas tax of 14.5 cents per gallon was last raised in 1988. Most of
the money goes to the Transportation Trust Fund, which has been in crisis since
at least 2003.
The problem, transportation expert Martin E. Robins said,
is that elected officials of both parties tried to meet voters’ conflicting
demands. On one hand, everybody wants a safe transportation network that is
well-maintained and gridlock-free. Few people want to pay for it, however.
Polls by the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University over the last
year and a half show a solid majority of New Jersey residents oppose a gas tax
increase.
As residents’ demands outpaced the state’s ability to pay
for them, politicians of both parties filled in the difference through
borrowing.
“It fell apart because of demands for money to be spent
and no willingness to raise taxes,” said Robins, former deputy executive
director of NJ Transit and founding director of the Alan M. Voorhees
Transportation Center at Rutgers University, who first warned of the looming
crisis in a report published in June 2000.
Democratic and Republican leaders later forestalled the
crisis – and exacerbated it – by finding increasingly sophisticated ways to
borrow money, including a major debt restructuring under former Gov. Jon
Corzine. The move freed up cash in the short term, Robins said. But it means
the state will be paying debt for 30 years on projects like resurfaced
roadways, which typically last about five years.
Today the trust fund owes $30 billion in principal and
interest, according to the Transportation Trust Fund Authority, which runs it.
Making payments on that debt now consumes every penny of revenue from the gas
tax and other fees, making it impossible to finance new construction projects.
“Why did the Transportation Trust Fund fail?” said former
Gov. Tom Kean, who signed the trust fund into law in 1984. “Because legislators
are irresponsible, and governors rewarded that irresponsibility.”
More recently, the Democrats who control the Legislature
spent nearly two years calling for new revenue for the fund, while avoiding any
mention of the gas tax, which people like Kean and Robins describe as the most
likely source. Finally, in June, Sens. Paul Sarlo, D-Wood-Ridge, and Steve
Oroho, R-Sussex, introduced a plan to raise $20 billion for transportation over
the next decade by raising the gas tax 23 cents. To make the move more
politically palatable they suggested a series of tax cuts, including phasing
out the estate tax and increasing the earned income tax credit for low-income
families.
Just days before the fiscal year’s end, Christie proposed
a different plan, offsetting the 23-cent gas tax increase by cutting the sales
tax to 6 percent from 7 percent.
Legislators of both parties immediately balked, since
Christie’s proposal would cost the state $1.7 billion in lost revenue,
according to the nonpartisan Office of Legislative Services. Sarlo and Oroho
returned volley by tweaking their plan, including a faster estate tax rollback.
Each side declared the other’s plan “dead on arrival.”
And there, for the last three weeks, the debate has
stalled. Mark Magyar, a spokesman for Sweeney, said Monday evening there was no
news to report.
Meanwhile, Ju-lee Tretter worries whether she’ll have
enough money to buy gas for the eight-mile drive from her home in Manahawkin to
St. Mary’s Parish in Barnegat. She needs to visit the food pantry.
“I think it’s nonsense,” Tretter said. “They should find
an agreement and be done with this. I just want to go back to work.”
Source: North
Jersey.com
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