With state revenues beginning to thaw, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey nonetheless proposed a tightfisted $29.4 billion budget on Tuesday, calling for sharp cuts in benefits for public-sector workers that would pay for a modest increase in property-tax relief and even more in tax breaks for businesses and the wealthy.

The governor appeared to be framing his priorities to force lawmakers to think long and hard, in an election year, about protecting state and local government workers at the expense of taxpayers and job creation.

With the state’s education system still reeling from Mr. Christie’s cuts a year ago, when dozens of districts lost all their state aid, the governor offered to increase financing to every school district in New Jersey by an amount equal to 1 percent of its current-year budget.

Mr. Christie, a Republican, is also hoping to save hundreds of millions in Medicaid spending by requiring all patients, whether nursing home residents or disabled adults, to enter managed-care programs that have until now been mainly aimed at families on welfare.

Last year, Mr. Christie closed a budget deficit he pegged at $10.7 billion. This year, with nonpartisan estimates putting the deficit at about $10.5 billion, he dispensed with that calculation, which typically compares expected revenues with the total cost of all spending programs if they were continued at current levels. Instead, his aides used the governor’s first budget, and the “hard choices” he said he had to make last year, as the basis for comparison.

“This budget represents the new normal,” Mr. Christie’s chief of staff, Richard H. Bagger, said in a briefing for reporters early Tuesday afternoon.

Spending for transportation, higher education and charity care at hospitals would grow under Mr. Christie’s budget plan. Environmental protection, nursing homes and urban enterprise zones would see cuts. State aid to municipalities would hold steady at current levels.

Mr. Christie was scheduled to give his budget address here on Tuesday afternoon.

The budget basically holds spending flat at the current year’s level. Mr. Christie is offering to prepay a scheduled pension contribution of $506 million before the new fiscal year takes effect, if the Legislature enacts the changes he is seeking in the retirement system. Such an early payment, conveniently, would also allow the governor to boast that he has cut spending for a second year in a row. But if the pension payment is not made ahead of schedule, then spending would actually grow slightly, officials confirmed.

After a first year in which Mr. Christie got much of what he wanted from the Democratic-controlled Legislature — to the consternation of traditional Democratic allies in the public-sector unions — officials in Trenton are bracing for a far more contentious and partisan budget season.

Already, Democrats have held up scores of Mr. Christie’s nominations, and he has vetoed scores of bills, including a stack of 14 on Friday that Democrats said would cut taxes for small businesses and help create jobs at a time when the state is in dire need of them. And a frequent ally of the governor, Stephen M. Sweeney, the State Senate president, has taken to speculating that Mr. Christie is more focused on the idea of running for national office than on running the state.

Last year, Democrats departed from custom and refrained from offering their own spending plan, leaving Mr. Christie to enact his agenda essentially unchanged, by wrangling the support of a small number of Democratic lawmakers.

But all 120 members of the State Assembly and Senate are up for election this November, some of Mr. Christie’s swing votes are facing potential primaries, and Democrats are struggling to show some spine without being tagged as obstructionist.

The Legislature must enact a budget by July 1, the start of the state’s fiscal year, or risk a government shutdown. Further complicating matters is that 14 public-sector union contracts are up this year. And a lawsuit challenging Mr. Christie’s cuts to education is making its way through the courts and could result in an order to increase state financing.

(Source: NY Times)