“Poor New Jersey”

From the Record:

Public sick of dual office officials

In New Jersey, local politicians don’t just lobby the Legislature. They are the Legislature.

Twenty state lawmakers, or one in six, also hold an elected town or county post.

But these could be the last of their kind amid mounting criticism of the practice, particularly from the governor.

Governor Corzine dismissed dual officials as a non-issue when he was running for office in 2005. “It wasn’t as apparent to me that votes tended to be tied to community interests as much as they are,” he recalled in a recent interview.

He has become a lot less nonchalant after a year of experience with the Legislature.

“I’ve seen it at work,” Corzine said. “Not that every element of it is bad, but I think it ends up sometimes coloring why people do what they do, without examining the best interests of the state.”
…
In recent weeks, a federal investigation into so-called pork-barrel spending — special state appropriations that lawmakers distribute to local pet projects — cast further suspicion on legislators with such an obvious stake in town governments. The probe has given more ammunition to detractors who span the political spectrum.

The Legislature’s Republican minority has harped on the practice as evidence that Democratic lawmakers can’t reform anything, least of all themselves. And the liberal think tank New Jersey Policy Perspective laid out a thorough case for ending the tradition in a report last summer.

The report noted, among other objections to the practice, that town officials normally have to lobby their legislators for state money. “That check is lost with a dual officeholder,” author Tom O’Neill wrote, “who need only convince herself or himself that a hometown project merits state funding.”
…
Conflicting interests are the most obvious problem raised by dual offices, ethics experts say, since one person is faced with representing two overlapping but different constituencies. New Jersey Policy Perspective’s report further argued that the practice reduces political competition, frustrates checks and balances, encourages pork-barrel spending and reinforces the state’s already strong tendency toward parochialism.

Jon Shure, the group’s president, recalled explaining the local custom to a Texas legislator who demanded incredulously, “Y’all let people hold two offices?” Whether its defenders like it or not, New Jersey’s tolerance for multiple offices is firmly at odds with standard ethics and the national norm.

“It is certainly not par for the course,” said Judy Nadler, senior fellow in government ethics at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, in California. “Holding two offices is clearly a problem, and the fact that every other state has come to that conclusion should tell you something.” She added, “Poor New Jersey.”