According to New Jersey State Treasurer Andrew Sidamon-Eristoff, “No money is being provided through the proposed 2015 budget to help the Transportation Trust Fund pay for road construction projects.” In other words, Governor Christie has once again failed to make good on a promise to fund transportation with more cash and less debt — the major selling point of his now three-year-old five-year Transportation Capital Program. While this is certainly not good news in terms of the state’s mounting debt, it also doesn’t come as a shock. Tri-State, among others, has long been skeptical about how Governor Christie and the State Legislature would meet the state’s transportation funding needs without increasing revenue. The entire five year (2012-2016), $8 billion transportation capital plan is financed using debt and the spoils from the cancelled ARC tunnel, which will run out in 2016.

Since announcing his transportation funding plan in 2011, Governor Christie has repeatedly used debt and gimmicks to fund transportation in New Jersey. In 2013, transportation funds were used to plug the General Fund deficit resulting in the State taking out an additional $261 million in debt to fill the hole in the transportation capital plan. In fiscal year 2014, the State planned to spend $375 million in Pay As You Go (PAYGO) funding, but ultimately this measure was replaced with a one-time shot of $250 million from some crafty capital project planning and higher than expected proceeds for previous years’ transportation bond sales.

And once again, this year’s planned funding allocation of $490 million will go to plug part of the general fund deficit. As a result, it is expected that Governor Christie will look for more bonding to pay for transportation projects but where that bonding authority will come from remains unknown, especially, according to the Transportation Trust Fund Authority, since it appears the TTF does not have enough bonding authority to take out more debt. Under current statutes, the TTFA “allows up to 30 percent of the Transportation Program Bonds that are permitted to be issued in a given year to be issued instead in a preceding fiscal year.” This means that TTFA would only be able to bond $1.023 billion in this fiscal year leaving over a $300 million gap in this year’s transportation program, while at the same time putting additional pressure on funding next year’s plan.

Governor Christie proposes $34.4 billion in total spending in FY2015, which represents an increase of 3.5 percent over the current fiscal year. Despite being “the largest state budget ever,” 94 percent of the increase is consumed by rising pension, employee health benefit and debt service costs — clearly a “looming crisis” — but evidently not worrisome enough for the Governor to do anything about it.

If Governor Christie is serious about tackling his state’s debt crisis rather than exacerbating it, he must consider raising the gas tax, which would at least help to address the overreliance on debt to support the state’s transportation infrastructure. New Jersey’s neighbors are finding ways to raise transportation revenues, but doing that in the Garden State is still considered taboo, despite the fact that New Jersey has the third-lowest gas tax in the nation, and it hasn’t been increased since 1988.

While Assembly Speaker Vincent Prieto acknowledges that the state should have an “honest discussion” about a gas tax increase, action on sustainably funding New Jersey’s transportation will not happen without Governor Christie’s leadership. Even Assemblyman John Wisniewski, Chair of the Assembly Transportation Committee and no ally of Christie’s, has said that while he supports an increase in the gas tax, he would not tackle the problem unless the Governor would support it.