Wheels are falling off Corzine's plan

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on January 24, 2008 at 9:47 AM, updated January 24, 2008 at 9:52 AM

Have you ever had a clunker, a car that you kept putting money into way past the point where you should have sent it to the junkyard?

If so, you should be able to understand how Gov. Jon Corzine feels.

Corzine's multibillion-dollar "asset monetization" plan is such a vehicle. It looked good at first. As other governors had done, Corzine was going to sell some toll roads, pocket the cash and pass any problems on to his successor.

But protests from the public employee unions made that impossible. At that point, the tow truck should have showed up behind the Statehouse to haul it away. Instead Corzine kept replacing parts. But this heap won't ever be ready for inspection.

If the plan eventually fails, its demise will be traced to the events Saturday at Corzine's "town meeting" at Middle Township High School in Cape May. Until that point, the plan's main opponent, conservative activist Steve Lonegan, couldn't get arrested, as the cliche goes. Though he was taking out radio ads urging people to show up at the meetings to protest the governor's plan, the turnout was meager.

Then all of a sudden the man who couldn't get arrested got arrested. Once Lonegan was handcuffed and hauled off, the nonstory of these dull hearings became the story of whether Corzine was suppressing dissent. As of yesterday, that remains an open question for me. The Republicans in the Legislature are calling for the attorney general to investigate possible violations of the rights of Lonegan and the seven or eight other dissenters who were ordered to leave the school grounds Saturday.

The role of the Corzine administration in the clampdown remains murky. Star-Ledger reporter Deborah Howlett yesterday quoted the Middle Township mayor as saying the decision to shoo away protesters from the meeting site came from "the governor's people." The governor's people say otherwise, as does the township police chief. And the "Jersey Guys" on 101.5-FM radio, who were already rallying drive-time motorists against the toll hikes, are giving Lonegan better publicity than he could ever buy.

Corzine didn't help himself at a press conference Tuesday. I asked him a simple question: Can he guarantee that dissidents will be permitted to hand out leaflets at the rest of his town meetings? I expected a simple answer: yes.

But instead of endorsing the right of the people to speak up, Corzine endorsed the right of the locals to shut them up. He said that it's up to local police to enforce local ordinances.

"What I'm not going to guarantee is that I know what the local ordinances are," said Corzine. "I don't know what the ordinances are, and it is very possible on a school ground in a public facility they don't want demonstrations."

There are a couple of problems with this. One is that Corzine could very easily prevail upon the locals to permit peaceful protest. The other is that from the beginning Lonegan's people had maintained that Corzine had chosen schools and colleges for the meetings precisely because he could let the locals do the dirty work.

On this point, Corzine has united both right and left -- against himself. Right-wingers were already supporting Lonegan, a likely candidate to run against Corzine in 2009. Meanwhile, civil libertarians were solidly supporting Lonegan's right to protest. I asked Frank Askin at the Constitutional Law Clinic at Rutgers-Newark about Corzine's statements.

"As long as he's holding a political meeting there, they can come in and give out their leaflets," said Askin. Askin said the American Civil Liberties Union would be glad to support Lonegan. Sure enough, when I called Deborah Jacobs of the ACLU, she said the group "would be more than happy" to defend the right of free speech in this case.

So the story at the next town meeting, Monday in Camden County, will not be Corzine's plan but whether he suppresses dissent against that plan. Nice work, guv.

As for the issue itself, the more people learn about this scheme, the less they like it. Lonegan claims one of the reasons the Democrats want to shoo him from these meetings is that he's telling people to ask Corzine about "capitalized interest." The plan calls for setting aside up to $4 billion just to make payments on the bonds until tolls begin to rise in 2010. Why don't the tolls rise till 2010? Because the governor is up for re-election in 2009.

And then there's the fairness question. Commuters who use the Turnpike and Parkway are being asked to subsidize a plan that would benefit the entire state. Again, Corzine's plan is a clunker politically. Usually when Democratic governors want to soak someone, they soak Republicans, as with Jim McGreevey's "millionaire's tax." But the counties with the most commuters affected by this plan are solidly Democratic. What was Corzine thinking?

He was thinking like a guy who got stuck with a lemon. Now he's trying to pass that lemon to the taxpayers. But if the polls are any indication, they're not buying.