Republican Steven Lonegan, mayor of the New Jersey city of Bogota (emphasis on second syllable, unlike the Colombian city) told NewsMax.Com Saturday he will file a lawsuit next Thursday in Bergen County, N.J., Superior Court to block the sale of $8.6 billion in bonds to finance school construction, mostly in the inner city.
Lonegan says Whitman is selling the bonds illegally and in violation of the New Jersey state constitution. Article 8, Section 2, Paragraph 3 reads, "The Legislature shall not, in any manner, create in any fiscal year a debt or debts, liability or liabilities of the state" unless the people of New Jersey approve the sale in a referendum. No such proposal has been submitted to the voters.
"The irony," says Mayor Lonegan, "is that no bond issue has been rejected by the voters of New Jersey in modern times. Every time they’ve been approved." He figures the reason Gov. Whitman avoided getting the school bond issue to the ballot box is that she and her advisers were afraid the voters would not buy it. Gov. Whitman, he charges, is using a perceived "loophole" to go ahead and do it anyway.
"This is going to do irreparable harm," he added. "She’s leaving us holding the bag."
Columnist Paul Mulshine of Newark’s statewide Star-Ledger, writes, "Like a dinner companion who goes to the rest room just before the bill shows up, Christie Whitman seems prepared to take off for Washington just as New Jersey’s residents are getting stuck with the bill for the biggest state bond issue in American history."
Mayor Lonegan says he is not a one-man show. His suit is backed by a group made up mainly of fellow Republicans.
"This is going to cost the taxpayers of New Jersey," the mayor declares. Using the loophole to get around voter approval "has been going on since 1986," but because of its size, this latest huge plan apparently was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
He also says that when Christie Whitman ran for governor in 1993 and slammed then Democratic governor Jim Florio for the state’s $3 billion indebtedness, no one dreamed that on her own watch, the state’s indebtedness would climb to $15.7 billion, where it is now. And that is before the $8.6 billion in school construction bonds are added.
Whitman’s departure for Washington, assuming she is confirmed for her federal job, will leave Senate President Donald Defrancesco as acting governor.
"And when he runs for governor next year, he’s going to have to [support this lawsuit or] explain why he wants to deny the people of New Jersey the right to have a say" in mortgaging their future. "The legislature is equally to blame," the mayor says.
Lonegan claims to have the support of Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler, Defrancesco’s likely opponent in the 2001 GOP gubernatorial primary.
State Sen. Jim McGreevey, the front-running Democratic candidate for governor, has already made it plain he will make an issue of excessive bonding. But Lonegan says McGreevey will have to explain that to his backers in the teachers union and the AFL-CIO who back the school construction.
Until Friday of this past week, this controversy, which was growing long before Whitman was tapped by President-Elect Bush for the EPA post, was strictly a New Jersey matter. Lonegan and his supporterss suit, being filed on Dec. 28, will make national headlines. It will spotlight a charge of excessive spending of taxpayer dollars by a Bush appointee at the very time the incoming administration is promising to "give the people their money back and let them decide how they want to spend it."
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