By Samantha Marcus, NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
TRENTON — State Sen. President Stephen Sweeney introduced legislation Monday that would cement state officials’ promises to fund government workers’ pensions in the New Jersey constitution.
Such a constitutional amendment requiring the state to make payments into the public retirement fund was expected to be the next step after the state Supreme Court this summer dismantled a 2011 pension law that established a pension payment plan to strengthen the system.
“Each year that we fail to make the required pension payments, the crisis gets worse and the future cost to taxpayers grows,” said Sweeney (D-Gloucester), who is considered a likely candidate for governor in 2017. The public employee pension system is underfunded by about $40 billion.
Short on cash, Gov. Chris Christie fell behind on payments promised in the 2011 law within three years, and labor unions took him to court. The state Supreme Court ultimately sided with Christie, sparing him from scraping together billions of dollars in the coming years.
That case turned on whether the law created a contractual right to pension funding for 770,000 current and retired workers. The justices said the law does not create a “legally binding, enforceable obligation” for the state to make payments into the system and the state cannot be bound to such large future payments without voter approval.
Labor leaders said they would seek the Legislature’s help in securing the constitutional protection that has eluded them.
The announcement immediately drew praise from the union leaders who’ve condemned Christie’s cuts and protested and sued for full pension contributions.
Charles Wowkanech, president of the New Jersey AFL-CIO, said the union considers a constitutional amendment “the only way to force the state to abide by the law and fully fund pensions.”
“When the (New Jersey) Supreme Court allowed Gov. Christie to break both his word and his own law by refusing to fund the pension, we said our union would never permit the destruction of the pension system and New Jersey’s economy,” said Hetty Rosenstein, director of the Communications Workers of America, the largest state public worker union.
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