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A Conversation With Bret Schundler, Urban Renewer
By Clifford D. May
Jersey City, N.J., is a gritty, post-industrial town of
230,000 just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. The
average per capita income is a meager $10,000 and 41% of
the population is on welfare or Social Security. Minorities
constitute the majority of the population: about 30%
African-American and 25% Hispanic.
But under its current mayor, Bret Schundler, a Harvard
graduate and conservative Republican,
Jersey City is also a laboratory for a set of
radically unorthodox municipal policies.
Schundler talked about those policies not
long ago in a speech at a dinner hosted by
the Golden-based Independence Institute.
Getting elected in a city that hadn't had
a Republican mayor since before World
War I was Schundler's first trick. He accomplished that, he told me, by focusing
on my agenda, not my party affiliation."
For example, though Schundler made
school vouchers a campaign issue, he
didn't get involved in tedious arguments
about Pedagogical theory. "I simply said to parents, 'I'll let you pick
the best school for your child, public,or private, and I'll pay the bill
up to $4,500 per child.'"
He could afford that, he explained, because currently New
Jersey spends $9,000 per child - twice the national average - for
schooling that is widely regarded an ineffectual. (Colorado, by
contrast, spends about $4,000.)
This pitch won him no friends at the teachers' union and not a
single endorsement from local minority activists. "But a lot of poor
people who have too few choices and opportunities understood that
I was offering them a choice and the opportunity for their kids to
go to the best school available," he said. "And they responded to
that."
Schundler's prescription for the linked problems of welfare and
unemployment is also unusual. "Instead of having a government
bureaucracy that gets paid whether or not they find anybody a job,"
he said, "and instead of having just a few government bureaucrats
to help thousands of people, we're going to go to all our private
employment agencies and say, 'Listen, you place one of my welfare
recipients in a job, and that person stays in the job for six months,
well pay you $3,000. Where does that money come from? Right
now, in a six-month period, the average welfare family is costing us
$10,000. So even after paying the employment agency a nice fee,
we'll still be very much in the black."
Crime is another high priority item on Schundler's list. When he
came to office he found that more than six out of every 10 police
officers on his payroll were spending their days in the station house
shuffling papers rather than out in the streets collaring criminals.
the streets collaring criminals.
"That was their reward for
campaigning for previous
mayors," Schundler said. I
reassigned them to street patrol.
They sued me for unfair labor
practice. We're still in the courts."
Schundler is also dividing the
city into small zones and asking
the residents within each zone to
elect their own "neighborhood
improvement board."
"Our plan is to turn tax moneys
over to these boards" and allow
them to hire private-sector
employees to provide
supplementary security services.
And those employees we'll hire at
$25,000 a head, plug benefits,
which means you can get three of
them for the price of one police officer. They won't carry guns, but they will have walkie-talkies."
"This program has not been fully implemented yet but we know
it will work," Schundler said. "It's working right now in every mall
in the country and in all the rich neighborhoods that have private
security. All we're trying to do is extend the same system to even
the poorest neighborhoods."
Underlying Schundler's approach is a recognition that
government "tends to look out for its own interests those of
government employees and politicians - and to neglect the people's
interests. That's what has to change."
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