Gov. Jon Corzine's Monday visit to WCTC 1450 AM (podcast here) yielded lots of parochial talk about populous Middlesex County, and concerns from host Jack Ellery, relaying what he hears from listeners, about how expensive living in New Jersey has become.
Corzine used a feel-your-pain approach in talking about property taxes and said health care is another economic issue on which his administration made progress by adding 20,000 people from Middlesex County to FamilyCare.
"There is no question that as we are going through the deepest recession since the 1930s that people are under enormous stress right now. The fact is that property taxes are a real issue, and we have to make sure we are doing everything we can. That's why we put a cap on property taxes. That's why we increased the amount of dollars that are flowing into the middle class schools in Middlesex. That's why we are working on shared services and consolidation. We have to make sure that we hold down those property taxes."
Ellery said callers to his show generally ask about the economy and corruption. On the latter, Corzine said there have been no pay-to-play scandals touching his administration and that he's made some headway on ethics in the Legislature and will look to push his latest ethics package, which he unveiled a year ago but got nowhere with, in the lame-duck session.
"The corruption we have in the state is completely unacceptable. I don't know whether we're the most corrupt or not. I actually think what we have is far too many units of government ... and that creates way more opportunity than any of us would like, and it's very hard for anyone to watch over all those units of government. ... We end up with people in these nooks and crannies not having anyone watching them, and they behave in ways that are completely inappropriate and breaking of the public trust."
Asked to give his first term a letter grade, Corzine didn't. But he said he doesn't deserve an A.
"You certainly can't give yourself an A when you have the economic performance that is going on in this country. I can't say that. People are struggling right now, and I happen to believe that is caused primarily by an economic recession that is unseen since the 1930s. And until everybody who wants to go to work has a job and everybody has health insurance and all of our kids are performing at the best possible level in our schools, I give myself less than top grades, because that's what the job of a governor is, is to make sure that we not just get the rate of property tax growth down from 7.5 percent, which is what it was the three years before I became governor, down to 3.7 (%) until it's flat growth and we restore all the rebates. There's plenty of work to be done. We've got a lot done. There's still more to do."