Mayor De Luca and the Tweet Heard 'round the World

I am a little upset now and for good reason. On Wednesday, Mayor Vic De Luca sent a simple enough Tweet with an extremely misguided message: 

"Contact ur assembly members tonight or Thursday mornl to vote no on health benefit package. Destroying collective bargaining is wrong."

Instead of applauding the pension/healthcare legislation, Mayor De Luca is spitting into the wind. 

The current pension system faces a $53.9 billion dollar deficit. Health care costs also have climbed, and there are $66.8 billion dollars in unfunded liabilities. The Christie Administration says the system will face insolvency by 2020.

The legislation that Mayor De Luca opposes is focused on saving New Jersey taxpayers close to 122 billion dollars, with about sixty percent of that coming from the elimination of COLA. That's the automatic cost-of-living adjustment for retired police, firefighters, teachers, state and local government employees in New Jersey's six pension systems.  

The Legislation would also increase health and pension costs for the current half a million state and local government employees and teachers.

Some of you might say the Mayor's argument is not about opposing tax relief, it's actually about protecting public workers who are obviously disgruntled about paying more. On top of that, the public workers are losing their collective bargaining power in regards to their benefits. That's all fine and dandy but the bottom line here is that Mayor De Luca has picked a side and it's not the side of the Maplewood taxpayer. 

Even, Committee member Jerry Ryan took a step back, telling the Patch, "I think that this is really difficult. It is obvious that something has to be done, and that the status quo is not sustainable, but I am somewhat uncomfortable having this just imposed as opposed to having it negotiated." As opposed to Ryan, Mayor De Luca doesn't see both sides of the argument. 

Now, one local government official who does get it is South Orange Trustee Michael Goldberg, who had this to say on Facebook: 

"Please contact your Assembly member in NJ tonight or tomorrow morning to ask that they support the pension and health benefit reform package on Thursday."

Goldberg knows, this legislation is significant to small financially struggling municipalities like Maplewood and South Orange. He is not about to look a gift horse in the mouth.