Former NJ Official: Christie Used Misdirection on Pension Payments in State of State Address

During his State of the State address last month, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie made a few remarks defending himself against accusations of short-changing the state’s pension system.

He claimed that he had contributed more to the pension system than any governor in New Jersey history.

That’s not a false statement. But it also doesn’t tell the full story.

Edward Buttimore, formerly of the state’s Attorney General’s Office, penned a column on Tuesday explaining the misdirection.

Buttimore writes:

When Gov. Chris Christie praised himself during the State of the State address for making the largest contributions to the State pension funds of any governor in New Jersey history, that statement was true, but not accurate.

While Gov. Christie has contributed $2.9 billion (if he makes the reduced $681 million payment for FY2015), what he fails to be clear about is that he will have skipped $14.9 billion in required pension payments during the past five years as Governor, according to his own Pension & Health Benefit Study Commission’s Status Report.

Former Gov. Corzine made $2.1 billion in pension payments while skipping an additional $6.4 billion required from 2007 to 2010.

In fact, Gov. Christie’s $14.9 billion skipped pension payments eclipses the $12.8 billion combined missed payments of his five predecessors over a 15-year period from 1996 to 2010. That was a pretty important fact that he omitted from his State of the State address.

For the last three years Gov. Christie has traveled the country congratulating himself for his 2011 bipartisan pension reforms, including prominently mentioning it during his keynote address for Mitt Romney at the 2012 Republican National Convention. He then he failed to follow through on making the required payments.

Read the entire piece here.

Photo by Bob Jagendorf from Manalapan, NJ, USA (NJ Governor Chris Christie) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons