ALLENTOWN – The Borough Council is on board with and supports recommendations that have been made by the New Jersey Economic and Fiscal Policy Workgroup.
The workgroups’s report is known as the Path to Progress recommendations.
According to the website http://pathtoprogressnj.org/the-process, the workgroup “held its initial organizational meeting on Jan. 30, 2018. Over the course of several months, the workgroup held seven meetings that included presentations by policy experts on critical issues and robust discussion of the pros and cons of potential solutions.
“Eventually, each member of the group was asked to submit policy recommendations based upon those presentations and discussions.
“The recommendations were shared with the workgroup and aggregated into five categories: pensions and benefit reform; leveraging assets to stabilize the pension system; education reform at the administrative level; county and municipal government reform and shared services; and state and local government tax structure,” according to the website.
The workgroup’s report, in its entirety, represents the consensus of its members and “represents the first step in what we anticipate being an ongoing process in the months ahead that will expand to involve stakeholders and the general public in an informed debate about how to put New Jersey on the path to progress,” according to the website.
In passing a resolution which supports the Path to Progress, Allentown council members made the following observations:
• New Jersey faces a daunting fiscal crisis;
• For two decades, while county and municipal governments made the proper pension payments, New Jersey governors from both parties severely underfunded the pension system for teachers and state government workers;
• While local government pension systems are funded at the national average, the state’s
unfunded liability for pensions and retiree health benefits now tops $150 billion – four times the size of the state budget;
• Actuaries project the state will have to increase its pension contribution from $3.2 billion in this year’s budget to $6.7 billion to reach the actuarially required contribution by Fiscal Year 2023;
• Health care costs continue to rise and New Jersey and its local governments cannot sustain the unparalleled platinum level benefits they provide to their employees;
• The state must bring pension and health care costs under control before they crowd out all other important spending needs, such as reinvestment in NJ Transit, making higher education more affordable and properly funding state aid to school districts to hold down property taxes.
Through the resolution, the council members expressed their support for the recommendations of the Path to Progress report issued by the workgroup. Voting to pass the resolution were council President Thomas Fritts and councilmen Robert Strovinsky, John A. Elder III, Rob Schmitt and Michael Drennan. Councilwoman Angela Anthony was absent.
