Property taxes dominate Trenton today

BY TOM HESTER JR.
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) --Lawmakers are meeting today to try and cut the nation's highest property taxes.

The Assembly and Senate are set to vote on a legislative package designed to make the state's 1,389 local governments more efficient and cut property taxes that average $6,000 per property owner, or twice the national average.

Those votes, though, will come as thousands of public workers rally outside the Statehouse against cutting benefits as part of the bid to cut property taxes.

It also comes in the wake of a letter Gov. Jon S. Corzinesent legislative leaders on Sunday night, telling them to move forward with the proposed benefits reforms if they saw fit.

This came just three days after Corzine had blocked the reforms, contending they were best handled in contract talks. However, after legislative leaders said that move made it more difficult to pass tax reforms, Corzine did an about face and encouraged them to move forward.

For more on this story, see tomorrow's Daily Record.

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Trenton protest draws thousands

Monday, December 11, 2006
By JIM WRIGHT -- North Jersey - STAFF WRITER

Thousands of public workers descended on the Statehouse on Monday morning, chanting and waving signs to protest changes proposed for their benefits by legislators who want to cut the nation?s highest property taxes.

Teachers and state, county and municipal government workers waved signs reading ?Back Off!? and ?Hands Off Our Benefits? as they rallied against the possible changes to pension and health plans. With thousands of teachers expected to attend, the rally left some schools in the state closed Monday.

New Jerseyans pay twice the national average in property taxes, and lawmakers have been searching for ways to lower the levies that pay for things such as schools and government worker benefits. Key to the proposals is a measure to give many homeowners 20 percent property tax credits.

But altering the benefits earned by union-protected workers has sparked a showdown between Gov. Jon S. Corzine and his fellow Democrats who head the Legislature.

Leading the charge over proposed cuts to pensions and health benefits is Carla Katz, Governor Corzine's former girlfriend and head of the largest union local for state employees in New Jersey.

Katz will be hard to miss. The diminutive 47-year-old Paterson native will be the only union leader in 3-inch heels, a smartly tailored pinstriped suit and a cascade of raven-black ringlets.

She says, with a laugh, that she won't need a bullhorn: "I'm fairly loud without one."

Her message is blunt. She defends her union's current health benefits, insisting that "you don't improve health care in New Jersey by cutting back health care for middle-class families."

On recent efforts by legislators to bypass contract talks and cut pensions and benefits by enacting laws, she says: "Collective bargaining should be between two parties, not with a third party standing to the side of the table and holding a gun to your head."

Anyone who thought that Katz would fade into the Trenton woodwork when L'Affaire Corzine -- complete with details of a $470,000 gift -- became front-page news last year badly miscalculated.

Though gossip columns labeled her Corzine's "gal pal" and critics shrieked "Conflict of interest" after her union backed his bid for governor, Katz remains the outspoken president of Communications Workers of America Local 1034.

She also has remained friends with Corzine -- even as her local and other unions have been increasingly at odds with the Corzine administration's efforts to lower New Jersey's highest-in-the-nation property taxes.

The state says it can save $13 billion over 14 years through reforms such as raising the retirement age and requiring employees to pay more for medical care. Katz strongly disputes those numbers.

"Public employees are being used as a scapegoat," she says. "It's just wrong and inaccurate."

This is a crucial time for taxpayers -- and for Corzine and Katz. If Corzine doesn't stand his ground, the public will wonder if he caved because of his relationship with Katz. If Katz fails to win a solid contract, the rank and file in her union also could blame the relationship.

Katz is unfazed. "The only people who matter when it comes to holding me to a higher standard are my own members, and they keep reelecting me, even when I ran last year at a time I was being pilloried in the press," says Katz, who represents 9,000 state workers.

The divorced mother of two says she has always "vigorously advocated on behalf of my members, regardless of who the governor is -- Jon Corzine, Jim McGreevey or Christie Whitman. And that hasn't changed."

In a statement, Corzine also dismissed critics who say the relationship will taint negotiations.

"Our prior relationship is not a factor in our professional responsibilities, including contract talks that have just gotten under way," he said. "The public and workers will have every opportunity to examine the outcome of the negotiations and come to their own conclusion."

So far, the conclusion is that Katz is not backing down. Ever since state lawmakers put employee benefits in their cross hairs last spring, she has been highly visible. The rally today will bring together members of many unions, including teachers, firefighters and police. At least six school districts, including the Passaic city district, have announced they are closing their schools because they expect so many teachers to attend.

"I had no intention of receding into the background," Katz says. "That would be an extreme disservice to my members."

Born in Paterson

Katz was born in Paterson, long a hotbed of organized labor and the site of the legendary silk-mill strikes of 1914, but she grew up in a non-union household in a two-family clapboard house on 21st Street. Her parents met as employees of Jack's, a small department store. Her father later worked as a laborer for Continental Can Co. and Union Carbide Corp. Her mother taught at a day-care center.

"Paterson even back then was a tough town," Katz says. "My biggest school memory was, my Mom would walk my sister and me to the school down the block. At the end of the school day, they would line up all the kids at the door and tell us to run -- as fast as we could -- home.

"We moved to Burlington County when I was in the fifth grade, and on the first day of school, I remember I waited for the teachers to tell me to run home."

Katz got her first taste of organizing in her teens when she worked as a cashier at a Burlington County hardware store. She tried to unionize the employees -- and was fired. "My dad was furious," she says.

In her senior year at Rutgers University, she took a course on labor. "I just fell in love with it," she says.

She has been a union official, mostly for Local 1034, for a quarter-century. Her first job was to mobilize the state's supervisory employees when the Kean administration tried to decertify their fledgling union. She later was a grass-roots organizer for the CWA in the Midwest before returning to New Jersey and Local 1034.

The rank and file -- who range from clerical workers to nuclear engineers -- elected her president in 1999 and have overwhelmingly reelected her twice to her $89,000-a-year post. State workers represented by 1034 include employees of the judiciary, the Department of Labor and the Department of Environmental Protection. The local also represents county employees in Burlington, Hunterdon and Monmouth.

At a time when the number of unionized workers has been shrinking, Katz helped build her local's membership from 3,000 to 16,000. She has negotiated some of the most family-friendly programs for union members in New Jersey, including flex-time and compressed workweeks. She also helped build the coalition of public employee unions now confronting the state over benefits.

The current contracts expire on June 30, 2007, and Katz has been mobilizing Local 1034. As workers at the state Labor Building left for their lunch hour on a recent Thursday, Katz and her team handed out whistles and placards. In a blink, a full-fledged picket line was in full swing, chanting, "Hands off our benefits."

At legislative hearings on public-employee benefit reforms, Katz and her union members took front-row seats -- putting lawmakers on notice. In June, when state Sen. Stephen Sweeney, D-Gloucester ? a union official himself -- held a press conference suggesting that state workers take a 15 percent cut in pay and benefits, Katz appeared with more than 100 state employees to protest.

Katz lives and breathes public labor unions in New Jersey, says Bill Lavin, head of the New Jersey firefighters union.

"I don't know of any other labor leader who advocates for their members as she does," he says. "She is a master at coordinating a galvanized response. She delivers a get-out-the-vote effort of her constituents like no one I've ever seen. She's a good friend of public employees but a formidable adversary for legislators."

Political donations

Katz's local has courted lawmakers over the years, donating nearly $300,000 to both Democrats and Republicans statewide in the 2004-2005 legislative cycle. Some of those lawmakers recently appeared with her at a press conference. Katz insists this was no quid pro quo, and quotes legendary union organizer Samuel Gompers, who once advised: "Reward your friends and punish your enemies."

"She can pack a wallop," said one high-ranking Democrat in state government. "I wouldn't want to be confronted by her in an alley."

Such high-profile tactics have a down side. Although state officials were reluctant to say anything negative about Katz -- they are, after all, negotiating with her union -- the high-ranking Democrat points out that "she has the distraction of being Jon Corzine's former girlfriend. Most people know about her because of her relationship with Corzine, and it distorts and poisons what people see in her."

During his campaign for governor, reporters discovered that Corzine had lent Katz $470,000 in 2002 to buy her ex-husband's share of their Hunterdon County home and pay off the mortgage. Corzine later forgave the loan, prompting critics to complain that the relationship would taint contract talks.

Although Corzine and Katz said they stopped dating in 2004, the media wouldn't let up, reporting that both had apartments in the swank Hudson Tea Building in Hoboken.

Katz then took heat when her union endorsed Corzine. But she says that it was the CWA Local 1034 board's decision and that she recused herself -- quickly adding that the choice was not difficult.

"[Republican candidate Doug] Forrester wanted to lay off 6,000 state workers," she says.

Katz, who has a 15-year-old daughter and a 12-year-old son, says she remains friends with Corzine and hopes "that negotiations don't get to a point where our friendship is affected."

Corzine appears to be cutting a path that could both defuse and inflame suspicions.

His initial contract proposals -- raising the retirement age to 62 and imposing higher health insurance costs -- are likely to infuriate public employees. But he also succeeded last week in forcing lawmakers to gut legislation that would have made cuts to public benefits and pensions. Corzine said that should be hashed out during contract talks -- exactly the position that Katz and other union leaders have taken.

Katz, however, remains wary. "That doesn't mean we won't face these same issues legislatively down the road," she says.

What's next for Katz? She is in her third year at Seton Hall Law School, and says she plans to keep leading Local 1034 -- and using her newfound legal knowledge to benefit her members.

She has but one barometer for success in the current battle of Trenton: "whether or not the members of Local 1034 wholeheartedly ratify the contract."

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