What happened with the PERC nominations....The Senate confirmed Adrienne Eaton, Paula Voos, and Sharon Krengel in the last day of Corzine's term to the Public Employee Relations Commission (PERC). Corzine withdrew Ira Stern's nomination I believe, in part, because of the letter writing campaign promoted by Council President Cunningham asking our legislators to block the nominations.
This is good and bad. A) we won't have a union rep as the Chairman (Corzine nominated Stern, a union rep, for the role of Chairman). Christie has to appoint a union member to the panel but he can appoint the union rep to a regular Commissioner's role and head the panel with someone with a more balanced view. B) By appointing 3 not 4, Christie can appoint 3 rather than 2 now as there are 3 others in holdover status. The term of the last Corzine appointee on the panel of the 7, expires in March 2011. We will just have to wait until March of 2011 for Christie to be able to put in his 4th appointee to create a Christie taxpayer friendly panel.
We should get Christie to make appointment ASAP ie not sit on it as Corzine did. By doing so, we would have a taxpayer inclusive view for Hoboken's next round of contract negotiations.
We will have a chance to get to know who ever Christie appoints -observe their POV regarding the burden of proof needed to change the pattern of bargaining. We can watch appeals and have an idea if we should try to immediately push our next set of contracts to arbitration or not.
I got the list of how those on the Judiciary Committee voted. All appointments have to go through the Judiciary Sub-Committee before going to the Senate for confirmation. The Judiciary Committee could have held these nominations in sub-committee until after Christie's inauguration and in my opinion that was the ethical thing to do.
The reason why a Governor gets to make these appointments is so that he has appointees in policy positions to help him deliver his platform and vision. This is presumably why people voted him in. So denying a Governor this ability in my opinion is denying the will of the people.
One would hope that if a Governor is over stepping his bounds, the Senate would step in and stop him. Let’s be real about what Corzine did. Three nominees were confirmed and they were in office for a total of 7 days of Corzine’s term. It meets the letter of the law but not the intention. He artificially extended his failed platform into Christie’s term.
Six out of seven PERC Commissioners were in holdover status which means their terms had expired already. Almost all of them had terms that expired in late 2007 or early 2008, so Corzine’s statement that he couldn’t put these appointments through earlier because the legislature was stymied for 6 months by the election process is as my Father would say is bolderdash. If Corzine appointed these 6 when their terms expired they would have expired in the first 6 months to a year of Christie’s term. This action was undermining of the will of the people.
Senator Stack abstained from the vote. I spoke with him at length about the importance and impact of the PERC on property taxes - how public employee costs constitute 55% of local budget, Police and Fire constitute 70% of the employee base so contracts under the PERC constitute 38.5.% of our municipal taxes. I asked him to not only vote against moving these nominations to the floor, I asked him to make a passionate plea to his Judiciary Committee colleagues. 7 votes were needed to hold these nominations in the Judiciary committee. By abstaining, Stack sat there idle not helping the cause even though he absolutely knew the consequences. The purpose of sub-committees is to vet issues and to make sure they can bring the facts to the floor. Abstain? Why? He acted in cowardess! In my opinion, this is a serious failure to lead. Isn't that we elect people - to lead?
Here is the vote breakdown:
Cowards (those who voted to allow these nominations to go to the floor):
John Girgenti
Nia Gill
Ray Lesniak
Bob Smith
Bill Baroni
Chris Bateman
Gerald Cardinale
Those who abstained
Brian P Stack
Lorretta Weinberg
Statesmen (those who voted no):
Jen Beck
Absent (someone too busy to do the job he was elected to do):
Joe Kyrillos
Senators Buono and Smith could have blocked these through senatorial courtesy once they got to the floor but they did not.
Please spread the word. Everyone should know who is responsible for selling NJs future.
- Donna Antonucci
Steering Committee Member of Hoboken Revolt on her own behalf and not that necessarily of the entire committee
Note- the article is also on the Hoboken Revolt website; link is below:
http://www.hobokenrevolt.com/forum/topics/corzines-11th-hour-public ◦
