Changing of Guard as
11 Step Down
in New Jersey
By RONALD SMOTHERS,
NYTimes on the Web, March 26, 2007
TRENTON, Mar. 23 -- None of
them are getting any younger. Some of them have one eye on the future and
the other on the aggressive United States attorney. And for others,
several long looks at their younger challengers have helped them make up their
minds.
For one reason or another, in an otherwise politically becalmed year, the New
Jersey Senate is about to lose 11 of its 40 members, including the
longest-serving legislator in the state’s history.
“That’s remarkable,” said Tim Storey, a senior research fellow with the National
Conference of State Legislatures. “And to see that in the middle of the
decade is a surprise,” he added, explaining that it was usually redistricting
every 10 years that caused such wholesale departures.
Despite the retirements, no drastic change is expected in the Democrats’ slim
22-to-18 majority. The three Democrats and eight Republicans who are
retiring come from generally safe districts.
But with so many high-ranking and long-serving legislators leaving, there is
bound to be a change in the way the Senate goes about its business.
Among the Democrats not returning are Wayne R. Bryant of Camden County, a former
chairman of the Budget and Appropriations Committee, and two longtime
legislators from Hudson County, Bernard F. Kenny Jr., the majority leader, and
Joseph V. Doria Jr., a former Assembly speaker who was elected to the Senate in
2004.
On the Republican side there is Senator Robert E. Littell of Sussex County, who
with 40 years of service is New Jersey’s longest-serving legislator. And
William L. Gormley, 60, a highly regarded 29-year veteran and one-time Judiciary
Committee chairman known for a savvy give-and-take with Democrats, said last
month that he would step down.
Yet this year is not at all like 1974, when an anti-Republican reaction to the
Watergate scandal caused 24 senators to retire or be defeated, shifting control
to the Democrats. A similar turnover took place after Gov. Jim Florio, a
Democrat, pushed through an unpopular tax increase in 1992. Twenty
Democratic senators retired or were defeated because of their support for the
tax increases, and soon after, Mr. Florio lost his re-election bid.
That said, political researchers found that the 27.5 percent retirement rate
this year was higher than normal in states without term limits. Mr. Storey
said that such departures usually average 20 percent nationwide.
The raft of retirements comes at a time when New Jersey lawmakers are staying in
office longer. Of the 5,406 Assembly and Senate members in the state’s
230-year history, 416, or 7.7 percent, served at least 10 years, and most of
those have served in the last 40 years, said Peter J. Mazzei of the state’s
Office of Legislative Services.
And to take it one step farther, Mr. Mazzei said, 55.8 percent of state
lawmakers currently in office have served at least 10 years. The average
service of the 11 retiring senators is more than 20 years.
He said that from 1776 to the mid-1960s members of the Legislature usually
served one to three terms. During much of that time, he explained,
geography determined political destiny because Senate districts were defined by
county lines. County party chairmen were the kingmakers, doling out
opportunities to run for local office to the party faithful.
“In the past, the bosses saw it in their interest to pass the goodies around,”
said State Senator Leonard Lance, 54, the Republican minority leader and a
student of the State Legislature. “They didn’t want anyone to get too
powerful and that was with both parties.”
But after a United States Supreme Court decision in the 1960s established the
one-person, one-vote doctrine, Mr. Mazzei said, such county-based boundaries
collapsed, giving way to districts that embraced one or more counties and
elections in which the candidate — and not the party — was central.
After the Supreme Court decision, the state bodies “emerged from their slumber”
and became more active in policymaking, said Mr. Storey, the researcher for the
National Conference of State Legislatures. Consequently, they were more
attractive places to be, and lawmakers stayed longer and longer.
Yet despite the power they may have gained, state senators attribute the high
number of retirements this year in part to age and burnout. The average
age of the retirees is 68 — 10 of the 11 are at least 60.
Of course, advancing age or not, the reasons for leaving vary.
In the case of the two Democratic senators from Hudson County — Mr. Kenny, 60,
with 20 years in the Legislature, and Mr. Doria, 60, with 27 years as a lawmaker
— there is an additional incentive: stiff challenges.
The same is true for Mr. Littell, 71. A courtly and moderate lawmaker in
failing health, he was facing a primary challenge from Guy R. Gregg, 57, an
outspoken assemblyman from the conservative wing of the Republican Party.
And there are more pressing reasons. Mr. Bryant, 59, who has been a
lawmaker for 25 years, is being investigated by the United States attorney for
New Jersey, Christopher J. Christie. He is looking into whether Mr. Bryant
received a $38,000 no-show job from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of
New Jersey in exchange for helping the school obtain state grants.
And Martha W. Bark, 78, a Republican from Burlington County who has been in
office 12 years, announced that she was retiring amid an ethics investigation
into allegations that she held two no-show consultancies with county agencies in
an effort to increase her state pension. The charges were never resolved
by an ethics commission, which said it lacked jurisdiction, but the questions
persisted.
Mr. Lance, whose father was both an assemblyman and a Senate president, said
that this was the “largest bunch” to retire in his time and that the Senate
would be losing a lot of “institutional memory.”
Ingrid W. Reed, director of the New Jersey Project of the Eagleton Institute of
Politics at Rutgers, said that in many ways the retirements could be seen as the
start of a “generational change in the Legislature.”
Some departures resulted from ethnic and racial changes in districts like Mr.
Doria’s, where black voters have been regrouping in the Jersey City portion of
the district to mount a strong challenge. Mr. Doria, who is the mayor of
Bayonne, also faced strong challenges from Hispanics and others in his mayoral
race.
But Ms. Reed did not discount the increased attention being paid to the work of
the Legislature because of questions about ethics that are chasing lawmakers
away.
Alan Rosenthal, a political scientist and expert on state legislatures who works
at the Eagleton Institute, said that by his count, five of the departures were
“involuntary” for reasons of ethics or the “feel of the hot breath of opponents
on their necks.”
This is especially true of the minority party in the Senate, he said, because
the “old days of collegiality are gone.”
“The Republicans have no footing now and with no footing it is no fun,” he said.
Senator Leonard T. Connors Jr., 77, the mayor of Surf City for the past 41
years, says the increasingly partisan tone prompted him to step aside after 25
years in the Legislature.
“I am disappointed and don’t see where we are accomplishing very much,” said Mr.
Connors, whose son Christopher, an assemblyman, has been picked to assume the
Senate seat. “When I was a boat captain, I would never leave shore without
a compass. Our state doesn’t have a compass, and I just figured it was
time to move over and let someone else try.”
The four other senators who are stepping down, all Republicans, are Walter J.
Kavanaugh, 73, of Somerset County; Henry P. McNamara, 72, of Bergen County;
Robert J. Martin, 60, of Bergen County; and Joseph A. Palaia, 80, of Monmouth
County.
As for Mr. Doria, he said that in addition to the desire to spend more time with
his family, he was leaving because he recognized that based on changes in his
district it was time to move on.
But he is also angered by the level of public cynicism about the Legislature and
the state itself.
“After a while it begins to demean the service, and you wonder what it is all
about,” he said. “It is grinding on your psyche. It seems that all
of us forget that the institution of the Legislature is important and needs good
people involved in the process.”
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