NJAS Opinion: Spring, 1990

Sometimes a vote on a particular piece of legislation at the state house in Trenton will tell a citizen very little about the attitudes of their elected representatives. At other times, a vote can be very revealing. Such is the case with the New Jersey senate's action late on the afternoon of 14 August 1989, when it failed to pass the funding portion of the Natural Resource Preservation and Restoration Act (AKA to the environmental community as the Natural Resources Trust Fund bill). The vote was 15 yeas and 17 nays, only 6 votes short of the 21 needed to pass in the forty member senate. This was a bill the environmental community in New Jersey said it had to have; we made it a test case for just how seriously elected officials took our members, our organizations, and our legislative priorities. Different versions of the bill were tinkered with and worked on for over five years. It became an obsession with some of us. The heart of the bill, what mattered the most to us, can be summed up in just one paragraph taken from the bill itself:

"To finance projects to acquire, restore, rehabilitate, and develop State parks, State forests, State wildlife management areas and historic site grant programs of the Office of New Jersey Heritage and other preserved lands, and appurtenant facilities, under the jurisdiction of the Department of Environmental Protection...."

Within state government, some programs have their own revenue sources. Other programs and their administering agencies are forced to rely upon access to general revenues. Success at getting access to general revenues depends on agency and program clout, which, in turn, depends largely on the actual or perceived clout of the constituency that the program serves.

The environmental community turned to the Natural Resources Trust Fund bill, because in the annual budget competition "Environment" repeatedly came up short. In the eyes of budget-power brokers, running and enhancing the parks and wildlife already in the public domain turns out to be a low priority. They felt the environmental community within state government (and without) could be safely ignored and pushed out of the budget picture when financial times were tough, and allowed to creep back in only when times were flush. Inside key state conservation departments, it was impossible to do effective planning with such funding uncertainty, and even harder to run a specific park.

The key to a successful legislative remedy, while avoiding yearly "trough" battles, lay in working out a method for a permanent, or at least ongoing, funding source. The solution presented to the senate on August 14 was for a combination increase in the realty transfer fee (25 cents per $500 sale price, or about $100 on the sale of a $200,000 home), plus a 2 percent increase on already existing statewide hotel/motel room tax (about $1.40 on a $70 room).

Although that doesn't sound very offensive, getting to the final arrangement was anything but easy. Let's step back a bit and look at just where New Jersey was In 1988 - the summer before the disastrous vote - the summer that inspired nothing but giddy optimism in the environmental camp.

The summer of 1988 represented the high-water mark for the Kean administration. Here was the "environmental" governor who had signed the toughest freshwater wetlands protection law in the nation and was also, simultaneously, presiding over a booming economy and a "projected" substantial state surplus. At the same time citizens were basking in New Jersey's enhanced national stature, polls were disclosing the public's increasing self-consciousness of the price they were paying for the new-found publicity. Poll after poll was showing that citizens believed that protecting their rapidly diminishing environment was now a top priority, and that they were willing to ease upon the growth rate and even pay more to protect the peace of mind represented by saving the environment that remained.

Given this political climate, it was no wonder then that the environmental community had dreams of seeing an $800 million Green Acres bond issue for 1989 and high hopes for the Natural Resources Trust Fund of between $25-$40 million. And more and more, the success or failure of the Natural Resources Trust Fund was being seen as a test of whether the informal state political mood that "we're all environmentalists now" could be translated into even a modest budget permanence.

And then, like the passage of a dramatic cold front, the economic tune changed. Between July 1988 and spring 1989, the state, whose economy had been heralded as a new national model, found its revenues dropping; instead of owning a big surplus, it was staring at a serious deficit of between $500-$700 million. Perhaps this is the best way to summarize the change of situation: a government, whether in New Jersey or Massachusetts, that cannot project its revenues with accuracy and that operates at the same time under a constitutional restraint of a balanced budget, simply cannot carry on a realistic political dialogue about its goals and policies, much less achieve them legislatively.

A government that cannot determine within the boundary of less than a year, whether it is the Union's shining "state on a hill" or a struggling deficit-hobbled one, is a government not in control of its present, much less its future. But it has gained the tremendous tactical advantage.

Magical swings in budget projections can become a tool for yanking legislative rugs out from under people and programs. It becomes a useful weapon for controlling the terms of debate. It was such a budget swing that turned the legislature's debate over the National Trust Fund bill upside down in spring and summer of 1989. What seemed possible in summer of 1988, looked improbable less than a year later.

If one looks at the period from 1985-1988 through economic eyes alone (always a dangerous oversimplification and distortion of reality), it is hard to imagine that there was ever a better time for New Jersey to act serious about protecting its natural resources. NJAS has no doubts about the way the voters feel but it does have grave doubts about how elected officials will act.

New Jersey is an affluent state. Its per capita income places it second only to Connecticut. There's not a lot of room for improvement there. And despite the drop in budget revenues, we still have not suffered a serious recession like the one in 1982-83. That is a sobering thought to keep in mind. If we couldn't pass a Natural Resources Trust Fund bill during the rosy years of 1985-88, when will the chances be better?

NJAS looks to a new administration from a different party with hopeful but skeptical eyes. We pledge to our members to continue to press for this key legislation and to maintain a critical scrutiny on the gap between easy environmental rhetoric and actual performance. In this spirit we now offer you a detailed breakdown of that devastating senate vote of 14 August 1989 (as well as the earlier vote), the day when the shelter of environmental rhetoric crumbled and our marginal and disposable political standing in certain legislative circles was brought home for all to see.