N.J. governor undone by tax hike
Jim Florio, who was elected governor of New Jersey in 1989 by convincing voters that he would not raise state taxes but who then pushed through a record increase shortly after taking office, incurring public wrath that led to his defeat in his bid for a second term, died Sunday. He was 85.
He died of heart failure in a hospital in Voorhees, N.J., his son Chris said.
The nation was facing a worsening economy and New Jersey the prospect of a yawning budget deficit when Mr. Florio, then an eight-term Democratic congressman, insisted during his campaign that he would balance the budget only by cutting waste in state spending.
But two months after taking office in January 1990, he proposed a budget that called for sharp increases in income and sales taxes totaling more than $2.5 billion, in addition to deep cuts in most state services.
He had no choice, he said. On taking a close look at the state’s books after he took office, he said, it was plain that just cutting spending would not be enough to balance the budget. Mr. Florio said tax-revenue projections by the previous Republican administration of Gov. Thomas H. Kean Sr. had been grossly overstated, even “phony,” and made even the deep spending cuts he proposed insufficient by themselves.
Public reaction was harsh. Many New Jerseyans felt betrayed, asserting that Mr. Florio had broken a firm pledge not to increase taxes. Many fellow Democratic politicians expressed shock at the extent of the proposed increases, and some budget experts said that Mr. Florio had ignored evidence during the campaign that tax increases would be unavoidable.
Ultimately, however, the Democratic-controlled state Senate and Assembly approved his plan by slim margins.
More popular were his successes in enacting auto-insurance reform aimed at lowering the steep premiums that the state’s residents had been paying; pushing for property-tax relief for many middle-income homeowners, a measure approved by the state Legislature; and appointing an environmental prosecutor to crack down on the state’s notoriously polluting industries.
Mr. Florio also won legislation to ban semi-automatic assault weapons, then prevailed over intense efforts led by the National Rifle Association to have the law repealed. And he successfully pushed a bill that shifted a substantial amount of state aid from affluent public school districts to lower and moderateincome ones — a measure that proved widely divisive.
But the tax increases were his undoing. Feeding off voters’ anger, Republicans for the first time in two decades gained control of both houses of the legislature in 1991, and in a close election two years later, Mr. Florio was denied a second term by Christine Todd Whitman, a former Somerset County freeholder and scion of a prominent New Jersey family who became the state’s first female governor.
Mr. Florio won the governorship after two previously unsuccessful races for the office during the 15 years he served in the House of Representatives, where he made a name nationally as an environmental protection advocate. Most prominently, he helped spearhead the 1980 Superfund legislation to clean up dangerous toxic waste dumps and chemical spills across the country.
In Congress, representing the Camden area, he gained a reputation as a hard worker and a frugal one.
“My philosophy has always been, I have one pair of shoes because I have one pair of feet,” he said at the time. “My father always worked, always worked very hard. It is just beyond comprehension that anyone would not.”
James Joseph Florio was born in the Brooklyn borough of New York City on Aug. 29, 1937. His father, Vincent, was a shipyard painter in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. His mother, Lillian (Morgan) Florio, was a homemaker.
Mr. Florio dropped out of high school to serve in the Navy, where he earned a high school equivalency diploma. He was also an amateur boxer, an avocation that left him with a permanently sunken left cheekbone.
He later served in the Navy Reserve for 17 years, rising to lieutenant commander.
Mr. Florio graduated from Trenton State College (today the College of New Jersey) in 1962 and from Rutgers Law School in 1967.