But as crashing revenues widened a budget gap just weeks before the end of the fiscal year, the governor borrowed a tactic from the McGreevey administration playbook to find "savings" of more than $450 million by shifting certain expenditures - mostly school aid - to July, the start of the next fiscal year.
Republicans say that's exactly the kind of financial shenanigan Corzine promised to end. Democrats counter that, given the recession, it's a reasonable way to close a budget shortfall without hurting schools or other services.
The debate reached a fevered pitch during an Assembly Budget Committee meeting last week.
"No one lost a payment. No one lost a dollar," Assembly Budget Chairman Louis D. Greenwald (D., Camden) said, regarding the first time the tactic was used, in 2003.
Greenwald challenged Republicans to come up with another way to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in the next few weeks, arguing that if not one state worker went to work for the rest of the fiscal year, which ends June 30, the state would save only about $115 million.
Declan O'Scanlan (R., Monmouth) pointed out that New Jersey had never made up the lost payment from the last time Gov. Jim McGreevey shifted expenditures forward.
"Someone is biting that bullet," O'Scanlan said.
"The only time we miss that payment is if the world stops turning on its axis," Greenwald responded. "Otherwise, the payment is just eight days back. It's moved eight days. . . . It will eventually come unless the world stops."
Both are right, in a sense. School districts are supposed to receive 20 installments of aid from the state each year, on the eighth and 22d of each month from September to June.
Each year since the McGreevey administration first postponed the last payment of the year until July, in 2003, the state has continued the practice. Corzine's proposal would also postpone the second-to-last payment into the next fiscal year.
Because there's a gap in payments over the summer, the delayed payments don't have a ripple effect on all the other payments.
The maneuver appears to solve the problem of balancing the current year's budget without actually cutting spending or raising revenues.
When McGreevey first pitched the idea, similar versions of which have also been used in other states, then-State Auditor Richard Fair objected, saying it could violate normal accounting principles to ask local schools to say they received money in the current school year when in fact they would not until the next. Fair withdrew his objections after the state said school districts should not list the aid in the current fiscal year and also promised to cover interest for loans to borrow for resulting cash-flow issues.
Assistant State Auditor Stephen Eells said that while it was never good fiscal practice for anybody to shift expenditures into the future, it was "allowable within the proper financial reporting means."
As it has in the past, the state plans to pick up any interest that schools incur if they need to borrow money to meet expenses as a result of the delay. Last year, those costs totaled less than $27,000, according to the state Treasury.
Frank Belluscio, a spokesman for the New Jersey School Boards Association, said more school districts would likely need to borrow money this time to meet their payroll and other expenses. But he said postponing another payment was preferable to cutting school aid.
"We're not happy with it, but these are incredibly desperate financial times," Belluscio said. "There's limited alternatives for the administration to take. It could be worse, and we understand that."
Mary Forsberg, interim president of the liberal think tank New Jersey Policy Perspective, agreed that the move must be viewed in the context of the dismal economy.
"We are in extraordinarily bad times, and I think anything we could do that doesn't end up being actually a cut to the budget is an important thing," Forsberg said. "I don't think it will cause any real hardship for the school districts."
Some local districts confirmed that view.
The Camden City school board may borrow money to cover expenses while waiting for the delayed state aid, said David Shafter, interim business administrator for the district. But the delay will not result in any programs' being cut, he said.
"We're not losing the money. It's just postponing when we're going to receive it," Shafter said.
But Republicans argue that playing accounting games will not help the state out of its financial woes.
"New Jersey is in serious financial peril that we will never escape by repeating the same mistakes that got us into this mess," said Assemblyman David W. Wolfe (R., Ocean). "Democrats portray this scheme as one that merely changes the date in which schools get their funding, but we know, and Corzine's own treasurer has acknowledged, that schoolchildren and property taxpayers will never be repaid for this theft."
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