As New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy prepares to leave office, attention is turning his administration’s policy efforts over the past eight years.
In a recent conversation with Law360, Guillermo Artiles, Chair of McCarter’s Government Affairs group, discussed several policy challenges Murphy’s administration worked to address, including affordable housing, NJ Transit, and improvements to the state’s pension fund.
He discussed the passage of landmark legislation overhauling the state’s affordable housing framework, noting that the changed resulted in less litigation and accelerate development.
Guillermo also reflected on the challenges Governor Murphy faced with respect to NJ Transit, saying “It’s a math problem that seems to be impossible to solve given the needs of the agency. It just requires so much more that no one governor can truly solve it unless we suddenly come into all this money.”
During his tenure, Governor Murphy made full payments into the state’s pension system for five consecutive years, after the obligation was largely ignored by his predecessors. “As a governor of New Jersey, you inherit a whole lot of pension liability that you can choose to meet or not. And I think he’s chosen the more responsible route here and done what many would argue is contractually obligated,” Guillermo said. “Plenty others have not seen it that way.”