Dear Editor:
New Jersey faces a $5 billion budget gap. In response, Governor McGreevey has proposed severe budget cuts including cuts in aid to state colleges that will mean tuition increases, reductions in medical and dental care for the disabled, and level funding of public education, which will continue to rising local property taxes. Speaker Sires has responded to the budget crisis by proposing raising the income tax on wealthy New Jerseyans. Yet, the Governor and the Speaker continue to block the adoption of comprehensive pay-to-play reform even though it has the potential to save hundreds of millions in tax dollars and restore integrity to our broken government contracting system.
To date, Governor McGreevey has put raising contractor cash for himself ahead of meaningful and cost-effective reform for the people of New Jersey. Pay-to-play is the all too common practice of campaign contributions and political connections — not merit and cost-effectiveness — driving the government contract selection process. The result of this pervasive practice is that taxpayers pay more for lower quality services. This happens in three ways: First, when instead of open and fair competition for public contracts, a select few large contributors are rewarded, the price goes up and the quality goes down. Second, government contracts become even more expensive because government contractors charge more in order to recoup the campaign contributions they have made. Third, at the state, county and local level, the pay-to-play practice provides incentives for politicians to issue more government contracts and engage in wasteful spending because it is a way for them to increase campaign fundraising.
The recent Parsons debacle provides a case in point. The Whitman Administration awarded a $400 million single bidder contract to the Parsons Infrastructure Technology group to provide a new emissions testing system. It prevailed by giving hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions and hiring politically-connected lobbyists. The new emissions system project had cost-overruns of over $100 million. Further, investigations have revealed that a good percentage of the services contracted for, could have been done less expensively in-house. And Parsons is just one example of an abuse of government contracting that is prevalent at all levels of government in New Jersey. Given our present budget difficulties, now is the time to sever the link between campaign contributions and government contracts and restore merit, cost-effectiveness and integrity to a broken public contracting system. Ending pay-to-play will not by itself solve New Jersey’s budget problem, but it will save precious tax dollars — dollars that are much better spent restoring needed services to our most vulnerable citizens or providing property tax relief. That is why it is so important to stop delaying and pass comprehensive pay-to-play reform immediately. Fortunately, sound legislation has recently passed the State Senate unanimously. As action moves once again to the Assembly, it is not too late for Governor McGreevey to put the interests of New Jersey taxpayers first.
Heather Taylor