New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced a plan Tuesday to freeze his state’s pension plan and replace it with a less costly alternative, a proposal Christie said New Jersey’s teachers union has agreed to in principle.
In his annual budget address Tuesday, Christie called the deal “unprecedented” and lauded it as a “national model.”
“The numbers do not lie, and we don’t need any court to tell us we have a serious problem,” Christie said, acknowledging a court ruling Monday that faulted the state for having failed to fully fund pensions last year. “I have stood behind this podium for five years speaking candidly about this problem. We acted in 2011 to acknowledge and begin to repair this serious problem. We now have a bipartisan reform plan which can, once and for all, fix this problem.”
Christie’s administration said it will appeal the court’s decision, which puts the state on the hook for $1.57 billion that was not funded in 2014, in addition to the funding for this year. An aide to the governor said the appeals process would not affect the pension freeze, and that the decision would be moot if the pension replacement is successful.
There might still be hang-ups between Christie and the unions, too. Although the teachers’ union agreed to the basic “roadmap” proposed by Christie, it objected to some details of a more comprehensive set of recommendations put out by the state’s pension commission.
“While we believe some of the concepts in the report are worth exploring further,” the union president, Wendell Steinhauer, said in a statement to the New York Times, “we have not yet agreed to anything in the report and we will not agree to some of what it contains.”
Sticking points on healthcare and other issues will need to be hashed out for a new pension plan to come to fruition.
Christie stressed in his speech that the stakes are high for the state, and failing to drive down pension costs could mean New Jersey is not be able to fund education priorities or keep taxes low.
“This is the cost of inaction. This is the cost of doing nothing. This is the cost of pushing this off to somebody else,” Christie said. “There is no one else. There is no one else but us.”
The stakes are also high for Christie as he moves toward a bid for president. Christie has tried to build a national brand as a problem-solving Republican governor able to win in a blue state, but the state’s budgetary woes, coupled with low approval ratings for Christie at home, have put that appealing narrative in jeopardy.
Other Republican governors, meanwhile, have been eager to snatch that mantle. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican who also hails from a Democratic-leaning state, has gained momentum in recent weeks with staff hires and donor outreach in some of the same political space as Christie would occupy.
But whereas Walker has built his brand around a fight with teachers’ unions in Wisconsin, Christie now finds himself touting his deal with New Jersey’s teachers on pensions.
