Gov. Chris Christie still hasn’t declared a thing beyond wishing he’d had weight loss surgery sooner. But between town halls in New Hampshire, the governor sandwiched in a town hall back home. This one in Hasbrouck Heights where more than 100 teachers and NJEA members sent Christie a clear message about his plans for pension reform in the Garden State. NJTV News Chief Political Correspondent Michael Aron was there.
Outside the VFW Hall where the town hall was held, about 150 demonstrators and union officials were there to demand full funding of their pensions.
Inside, Christie delivered a familiar pension proposal pitch that calls for cutbacks in worker health benefits in order to save public pensions.
“For most folks in the private sector who get heath benefits from their employer and pay a good portion of the cost towards it, they get gold level benefits; gold level benefits as defined by the Obama administration. If we did that from the local level all the way to the state level we would save $3 billion a year — $3 billion. We could take that $3 billion and use it to fix our pension problem. Not to spend on other things or not to fix anything else, but to fix our pension problem. That’s what we should do,” Christie said.
After that, Christie got into it for nearly 15 minutes with a man who says his wife has paid thousands into the pension system and she is entitled to a full pension.
“There is money to fund a pension. You wrote the law in 2011 and you bragged about the law and now you say it’s unconstitutional,” said Steve Panagiotou, Waldwick resident.
“We don’t have the money to pay it. We passed that law, not just me. The Legislature passed that law too and we passed it based upon the projections of revenue that were given to us at the time not only by the state treasurer but the Office of Legislative Services. They both said that based upon the projections of revenue increases that we would be able to afford to make the payments. The revenue didn’t come in. So you cannot pay what you do not have. You simply can’t do it. And it doesn’t get to the core problem though. The core problem is this stuff is too expensive. Trust me, I’d rather not have the argument. If I had the money I’d pay it and the proof of that is that I paid more money into this pension system than any governor in history. Anybody. In fact more than the last five combined by $800 million. So what makes me laugh about this, quite frankly, is that you have people out there yelling and screaming. Where were they when Jim Florio wasn’t paying into the pension? Where were they when Christie Whitman wasn’t paying into the pension? Where were they when Jim McGreevey wasn’t paying into the pension? And Dick Codey wasn’t paying into the pension?” Christie rebutted.
There was hardly any mention of New Hampshire and no mention of Christie’s Social Security and Medicare reform plan that he introduced earlier this week.