MEL EVANS / Associated Press
Gov. Corzine listens to a question at yesterday's news conference. "Voters have given us clear instructions," he said. "They told us to resolve our alarming and pressing financial problems."
N.J. voters won't spend
TRENTON - New Jersey taxpayers have spoken, and they're clearly not happy.
There was little disagreement in the political world yesterday that voter concern over the state's finances and outrage over ever-rising taxes drove Tuesday's defeat of $450 million in bonds to fund stem-cell research and another measure to earmark more sales-tax revenue for property-tax reform.
"Voters have given us clear instructions," Gov. Corzine said yesterday. "They told us to resolve our alarming and pressing financial problems."
The measures' defeat represented the first time a statewide ballot question has been voted down in 17 years.
"I give the voters a lot of credit," said Ingrid Reed of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. "They said we want respect. We know we're in bad financial shape. Why are you asking us to borrow more money?"
In fact, "we're not going to approve anything to do with money."
Corzine and Senate President Richard J. Codey (D., Essex), who led the charge to make New Jersey a leader in stem-cell research, said they were extremely disappointed by the loss.
The $450 million for research grants over 10 years was meant to piggyback on $270 million approved last year to build lab facilities, and would have made New Jersey second only to California in terms of dollars committed to luring the best scientists.
Corzine said yesterday that he was concerned how the vote might affect biomedical companies' decisions to set up shop in the Garden State.
Corzine said he still believed New Jersey residents supported stem-cell research, which advocates have touted as a pathway to curing now-incurable diseases and disorders. But he said their concern over the state's finances overrode all else on Election Day.
New Jersey already is carrying $30 billion in debt and payments on that debt account for almost 10 percent of state spending every year. The pension system is tens of billions of dollars in the hole. And Corzine has forecast a deficit of up to $3.5 billion going into the next budget year.
Corzine said the stem-cell measure would have paid for itself through economic benefits to the state, but acknowledged "we probably didn't make a strong enough case" to voters.
Agreed Codey: "What we learned is that we didn't do a good job of telling them that this will not cost them anything."
Opponents, meanwhile, did a formidable job of mounting a resistance.
Antiabortion groups, which had tried and failed in court to block the measure from appearing on the ballot, ran ads against funding experiments on embryonic stem cells, arguing they were morally repugnant.
Steve Lonegan, mayor of Bogota, in Bergen County, and state director of Americans for Prosperity, launched his own campaign against the bond measure - and both other ballot questions involving money.
Lonegan said his group spent $450,000 on the "Vote No" campaign, which used TV ads and signs and an across-the-state tour to urge voters to reject the three questions.
"We got a very simple message out: This means higher taxes. And the message worked," Lonegan said.
Roberts said the largely grassroots effort put forth by Lonegan played a role in sinking the sales-tax dedication, which would have earmarked the other half of last year's one-penny tax hike - another $700 million - to a property-tax reform fund.
Voters approved dedicating the first half of the penny last year.
