|
Interview with Bret Schundler
Originally appeared in the Bergen Record on Sunday, November 4, 2001
THE RECORD: If you're elected what's the one thing you want to be remembered for?
SCHUNDLER: I'd like to reform our public schools so they work to educate children and actually are more efficient also. The thing I'm proudest of in my time in Jersey City is I proved I could do it. We created a brand new public school. The children who went into that public school had the lowest reading scores of any school in the district, and we're talking about a big district with 40-plus schools, so these were the lowest reading scores in the whole district, struggling kids, very low-income households. Now you have those children reading at higher than the district average. Last year their reading scores went up 40 percent alone. And the school spends about half as much as other schools in the district.
There's been a lot of attention paid to my belief that would also allow families to look at private school options and home schooling, but the biggest significant reform that I would put into place would be reforming our public schools.
The two key dynamics here are allowing educators to act as professionals, instead of treating them as wage laborers with no opportunity to innovate or take initiative. And secondly, having the schools be directly accountable to parents.
The last time you were here you talked about vouchers as the fundamental reform you would make in the public schools, and the public schools would save money that way because significant numbers of kids would be taken out of the public school to private school. This time you seem to be talking more about choice within the public schools?
Well I talked about the other before also. I have found the newspaper coverage of my educational proposals only talks about charter schools and vouchers; it doesn't talk about my public school reforms. If you look at my five-step plan for public school reform -- we had a press conference in the primary and it's on my Web site as well -- you'll see all the public school reforms there and they are the first several points. The vouchers are further down the list.
Now the bottom line is what this whole reform is about. You take board members, who are not educational professionals, they're representatives of the community. You should have the people's representatives be there, making sure that the school is meeting the people's goals and, I might add, obeying the law. Then the local administrative support staff would be there. It would be much smaller than it is today and it would be there supporting educators.
So what happens is you get rid of the manager and you make the teachers accountable to parents. You still have an accountability system.
But the parents ask for more than managers do, frankly, because they want the very best for their child. You create a competitive system which creates a real significant amount of accountability. And you've also got the interesting fact that parents work for free. So it's very cheap accountability system and it allows more money for teacher pay, for computers in the classroom.
You waged a tough campaign. Nobody has ever accused you of shying away from an issue and you've picked up a few enemies along the line. How do you bring the state together after you get elected?
I would ask that you look at my record as the mayor of Jersey City. I got such high margins of victory from people who were Democrats and independents and from people who were African-Americans and Hispanics. We brought them together in a meaningful way where we were actually able to overcome very pitched special interest opposition to our reforms, because of that great public support. The fact is I unify people. And one of the reasons I'm able to unify people is I focus on issues that everyone wants to address.
I haven't focused on the divisive issues in this campaign. It's my opponent who focused on divisive issues in this campaign. I focused on common ground issues that everybody wants addressed in this campaign. And I laid out specific positive solutions that will work and that aren't theoretical. The solutions I propose are based on actual empirical data on what has worked.
My opponent did not focus on common ground issues that everybody wants addressed. He focused on deep religious questions that divide people. And then he tried as much as possible to divide and conquer. And that has been what the Jersey City Democratic machine always does.
How do you bring the Legislature together to get behind some of your reforms? Do you think the Legislature is going to buy into what you want to do with education, for example?
I think my challenge is not to persuade the Legislature, it's to persuade teachers. If the teachers are on board, the Legislature will be on board, too. Someone may contest me on this point, but I believe legislators will go wherever the wind's blowing.
The people in New Jersey were really in favor of auto insurance reforms, but when you get down to the legislators actually writing the law, they tended to gut it.
Here's why. See, with the auto insurance reforms that are necessary, they actually do take money out of lawyers' pockets. So they fought them in a pitched way, and they have huge clout. You know they're the biggest contributors McGreevey has and the Democrats have, and there's fairly substantial contributors for the Republicans also. And a lot of those Republicans are lawyers themselves. So you really did have opposition from the rank-and-file special interest members, including those who happen to be legislators.
Now with the teachers, my opposition is from the teachers' union. Because if you have educators who run their own programs and they actually control the dollars, they're not being paid a paycheck anymore under this scenario. What happens is they control the dollars and what's leftover they pay themselves. Now with that scenario, they make a lot more money and they have professional autonomy, so they're happy but they're not negotiating with anybody. They're their own boss. So they're not going to take money out of their paycheck, you know, what they're paying themselves and give it to a union when they're not really operating as a wage laborer anymore. So the union sees this as a direct threat to their existence, what I'm proposing.
But if the teachers favor the bill, don't you think they're going to persuade their union to get behind it?
The point I'm making here is that the union is going to try to dissuade them from supporting this by immense amounts of propaganda and I haven't had the chance to really spend a lot of time with teachers on this issue, because in the course of an election I'm trying to deal with 2.5 million likely voters and 8 million New Jerseyans, and with the very limited resources you have here you can only really communicate one message.
My message is we can lower your taxes and provide better services.
How about when you were mayor? Did you focus on teachers there and try to get them to go along with your program?
I spent some time with teachers. But typically what I had to do to pass bills in Jersey City was get constituents to call their council members and support the different initiatives we had.
It sounds like you're almost running for education commissioner. Whom would you choose for the job?
You asked me what I want to be remembered for more than anything else. I didn't dream of being governor when I was 6 years old like the other guy did. I come from a faith perspective. And my basic faith perspective doesn't have any policy details. It is that you are responsible to try to do what you can to make the world a better place. That's all I come in with from that background.
From there forward it's all empirical. You know you have a sense of responsibility. You say rather than being an ideologue where you subscribe to an idea in spite of all research, what you actually do is you search out, you know, what the real empirical data tell you in a scientific method. You know you change a hypothesis if it doesn't really explain the data and you come up with a new hypothesis, which is basically you can say a working model, how the world works, based on the best data you have until such time that you get a new model.
Until such time that you get new data, which lead you to say the old model is not fully explaining the phenomenon properly. That's why we went from Newtonian physics to let's say relativity and then to quantum mechanics, because you have new information that forced us to expand our understanding as to how the world works. That's what I try to do with policy.
When Jim Florio ran for governor, he had tons of ideas about education and then he hired basically a puppet to execute his plan. Do you have a good choice for education commissioner?
I'm very close with The Manhattan Institute. For many public policy wonks in state and local government, it's our favorite magazine. It's Giuliani's favorite magazine. They have what they call the Center for Educational Innovation. A lot of professionals in this state work through them. There's also something called The Education Commission of the States, which is created by the chief education officers of a number of administrations throughout the United States. What I'm proposing in terms of education reform is right out of their handbook.
Should we require school districts to consolidate? I mean we have 600-plus school districts in New Jersey, I think more than a tenth of them in Bergen County alone.
I would say the way to answer that question, that's a good question to ask, and the way to answer that is to do some empirical research as to whether that results in greater efficiency.
Talk about the environment for a minute. What are your top environmental priorities?
I think No. 1 is water. A lot of that has to do with not making mistakes that can dramatically decrease our ready resource. You know water can be clean and purified but it's highly expensive. If you want to have inexpensive water, you've got to make sure cheap water sources are preserved, so you don't destroy aquifers.
I think everybody would agree that the shore is a big priority to preserve and let's say the pristineness of the Atlantic Ocean.
I would also say the open space.
Now air is important, but I think we made a lot of progress on air pollution. I think we will continue to. Every year the federal government does tighten up standards on emissions and that will continue. But I'll argue what's under a greater stress and threat here in New Jersey is open space.
McGreevey wants to cut farmland preservation money and he wants to put it into more park creation in the cities. I don't think there's any need to cut it. Again I find so many savings in other areas I think there are a lot of programs that I can just maintain in a very healthy fashion, farmland preservation being one of them, and I can still do urban parks.
My programs would revitalize our cities. And by having people move into them by choice because they're attractive places to live, you reduce the abandonment of our cities, which is chiefly responsible for the sprawl we've had. If you look at New Jersey's population it's the same as it was a generation ago. But we have had a million people move out of the urban areas into the suburban/rural areas and that's what facilitates the sprawl.
How do you get people to move back to Paterson?
Density itself is fun if you do good planning. Newark's downtown is the worst planning I've ever seen. You have what's called tower in a park architecture, where you build a big tower and you surround it with a surface lot, and you have no windows, no retail, no restaurants, nothing to create any vitality. You have very lonely pedestrian walkways that lead people to be afraid. And then you go towards what we're building in Jersey City and let's say Liberty Harbor North ... and what you'll see is the same density as you have on Columbus Avenue in Manhattan in Jersey City with all retail and restaurants. On the first floor is a lot of pedestrian activity, you know, little public parks surrounded by residential and office space. So there are people enjoying those public parks like Bryant Park.
Jersey City is a little different from Paterson.
Just realize Jersey City led the state in job losses before I was elected, not Paterson. Now we're No. 1 in job growth. I just say that there are inherent advantages that an urban area has versus any other kind of context, suburban or rural, and those comparative advantages are what you want to capitalize upon.
Density is one of the them, and you want to build on density as an advantage. You don't want to try to take cities and make them less dense. Good urban planning does mixed-use construction. Then you have accoutrements that make for high quality of life and you plan those into your construction. Now if you did that kind of city planning in Paterson, its inherent urban nature automatically gives it something to sell that you can't get in the surrounding communities, so people who are looking for that come to Paterson.
One of the other things, again, I'm a believer in getting rid of the Mount Laurel decision. I am a believer in building affordable housing. I built more affordable housing in Jersey City than any administration in New Jersey history. I built 2,600 units. I can show other municipalities how to do it.
You can talk about Jersey City because you have the Hudson River, you had yuppies who wanted to live in condos. You had a great economy. How can you possibly compare that to Paterson or Camden?
People don't want to live in Paterson or Camden because of what makes them an unattractive place to live: high crime, poor schools, enormous property taxes. So you deal with those issues.. Paterson now has something that it can offer that nobody else is offering -- which is that they'll allow apartment housing construction.
Why isn't that working now?
Because right now nobody wants to live there because of crime, taxes, poor schools, and no jobs. When I came into Jersey City we were leading the state in job losses. It was not, you know, that we were next to New York that caused Jersey City to turn around on a dime. We turned around on a dime because instead of having property taxes that had gone up by 20 percent a year and more when I came into office we immediately lowered property taxes. We got more cops on the street and immediately reduced crime. That made it so you had a rise in home values. People stopped leaving the city and started investing in it again because you saw appreciating real estate value and you also saw businesses come in because they felt so confident. Now did I go and offer tax incentives like crazy to get businesses in? Yeah. And were they necessary? Absolutely.
A couple of local questions for you. What do you think about any expansion of Teterboro Airport?
We should not allow the expansion unless they negotiate a curfew with their surrounding communities.
What about the Newark arena, the Meadowlands, and the Empire Tract to the north?
There is absolutely no doubt that if I'm governor you may still have the Yankee/Nets teams move to Newark, but you won't have the state issue bonds unless it is approved by the voters. If you have the Yankee/Nets decide they're willing to risk equity and issue bonds themselves, that's one thing. I'll provide the tax increment financing. I support tax incentives for urban redevelopment.
But the key is who issues the bonds?
The key is who issues the bonds.
So you would rather the teams' owner borrow the money, with the state committing some money to paying it back?
Right. The state would definitely get a revenue stream. The state would commit a revenue stream that doesn't exist today. The state would be saying, you know, there's no money being created in this vacant, abandoned land, but if you create something that generates revenue here we won't take it into our general cost. We'll allow you to dedicate it.
The arena in East Rutherford is generating revenue, and people are paying sales tax on all those Cokes and beers ...
Right. But it's operating at a loss.
Not if you include the revenue from the taxes that go to Trenton. It operates at a loss within Sports Authority books. But they don't collect the sales tax. When you move it to Newark, the authority or whoever builds it would collect the sales tax.
Well here's the thing ... I mean what I'm told by the people at the Meadowlands is if you lost the current lease you could get concerts in there that would be more profitable.
But the Yankee/Nets want a no-competition clause so that you couldn't do that.
You shouldn't give the Yankee/Nets everything they want.
Okay, so you're telling them to take a walk.
The bottom line is I'm not telling them to take a walk. I didn't tell any one of the firms that came into Jersey City to take a walk when they asked me for stuff. If I didn't want to give them, I just said no. They still came. Negotiating a good bargain doesn't mean you have to give them everything they want.
Would you expand rail out to the Meadowlands?
I like that proposal. I also like the proposal of building a new tunnel to New York, but as you know that's such a long-term project that would never be completed while I was around. But I think anything which knits the two sides of the Hudson together creates a stronger regional economy and it is particularly beneficial for New Jersey.
I want to get back to the Empire Tract for a minute. Acting Gov. Donald DiFrancesco said this is an inappropriate place to develop. What do you think?
The optimal solution would be the Yankee/Nets putting in their own equity. Building a new facility in Newark. Having a concert arena or other improvements in the Continental site and preserving the Empire Tract
Do you think it's a suitable place for development?
I'm not an expert. I've been trying to push what I think is a good solution.
And in your optimal solution then there's no new mall?
Yeah, I really don't think a new mall is the best thing I think we can do for the regional economy. I do think that doing some transportation improvements in South Bergen would be worthwhile no matter what. Now they were a part of the arena deal. But we should just carve them out and do them because they're worthy of doing them on their own.
|
