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♪ ♪ From NJ PBS Studios, this is NJ Spotlight News with Brianna Vannozzi.

- Hello and thanks for joining us.

I'm Brianna Vannozzi.

We're bringing you a special NJ Spotlight News edition of Reporters Roundtable, where Joanna Gagis has a roundup of the top political stories of the week with the help of a panel of local journalists.

Reporters Roundtable starts right now.

♪♪ -100 days in office.

Governor Sherrill hit that mile marker this week and commemorated the moment by looking at all that she's accomplished so far and laid out some plans for her next chapter.

We're going to talk about all of it.

Hi, everyone.

I'm Joanna Gagas.

This is Reporters Roundtable.

We've got a panel of journalists here with us to help break down everything that's happened in this last week of New Jersey news.

Let's meet our panelists.

First up, we have Colleen O'Day, senior writer and projects editor with NJ Spotlight News.

We have Lilo Stainton joining us today, senior reporter with New Jersey Monitor, and Brent Johnson, politics reporter for NJ Advanced Media.

So for political insiders, the first hundred days of administration really is a mile marker to assess the effectiveness of the administration.

Have they done what they planned to do at the start?

Have they set a tone to engender goodwill with the legislature?

And is their agenda clearly outlined for the next year or more?

Right?

These are all the things we look at.

Colleen, I'm going to start with you.

Obviously, it's hard to answer all of those questions, but they're guideposts of sort.

And when it comes down to Cheryl, how did she characterize her first hundred days so far?

She gave herself an A++ when she was talking to Brent just the other night.

I think that's a little generous.

You know, it's, I mean, it's not really even a grade if you're in school.

You could get an A+, I guess.

You know, I think what she's done, though, is that she's certainly done things that she said she was going to do in the campaign.

Number one, and of course, the first action that she took was freezing the rates of electricity.

Now, you know, that's certainly that that was a promise fulfilled.

I think when the summer comes, as she pointed out, and people are using maybe more electricity for for their air conditioning, people might not feel the same way because their bills are going to go up.

But as she points out, there's a difference between, you know, which rate is versus what you're paying.

But I think, you know, another thing I would point out is that she hasn't had a major misstep.

And I think that's different from certainly the last governor who had some, you know, some real problems early on in terms of ethics and scandals.

So, you know, I certainly she seems to have done, you know, she's fulfilling some promises and no major problems.

It's a good start.

We are going to get into some of the detail of it.

Brent, you sat down with the governor for a very long interview, one hour at NJPAC.

This was a big moment for you and for the governor, I would say, to really ask her a lot of questions about this early start of her campaign.

Colleen mentioned the A++.

What did you hear from her just in terms of kind of how she's feeling about where she is so far?

- Yeah, she talked a lot about things that she discussed during last year's election about making New Jersey more affordable, bringing down electric rates, and also opposing policies from President Trump that she thinks are hurting New Jersey, immigration and those type of things.

So, you know, she seemed very positive and upbeat about how she's doing.

We talked about some of the criticisms that her budget proposal still has some things that Republicans saying are tax increases.

She wants to pare down the stay-NJ property tax program for seniors.

She explained why she wants to do that.

She talked about the school funding formula about how she wants to change that, but that may not happen soon and all the things she wants to do in the meantime.

So there's a lot of positivity coming from her, but a lot of questions that critics still have.

And we discussed those too.

What's your take on an A++ score for oneself?

I mean, I don't think I ever got an A++ in school, but I also don't know-- I didn't know whether she was joking or not.

She was very in a jovial mood, which is kind of atypical sometimes for her.

She had cracked a lot of jokes and seemed to be very comfortable about what she was talking about, which was something that we didn't hear on the campaign trail last year.

One of the things that criticism she often got was that she was, you know, mealy-mouthed and sometimes had word salads, but she definitely was more on point with what she wanted to say during this interview.

I also asked her what her next big policy swing was.

She said she wants to focus on health care and education in the next hundred days.

So she definitely has an outlook that she feels that she's achieving what she wants to.

There's a lot of open-ended questions though for those who don't agree with her.

I do want to ask you, a lot of her early actions have been by executive order.

That's not entirely uncommon.

There's only been a little bit of legislation, just kind of high level.

Brent, break that down for us.

Yeah, it's something you see with presidents sometimes.

They come in and they do things by executive order, meaning things they don't need the legislature to agree on.

She has signed some orders on limiting where ICE agents can be on state property in New Jersey.

She created a portal to track ICE agents.

She signed the executive order that she says freezes electric rates or utility rates.

And those things were done by order.

She doesn't need lawmakers to approve of them.

She's only, one critics will say that she's only signed a few laws.

Those are notable laws that she signed the law to codify the immigrant trust directive, which limits how much local law enforcement can work with ICE agents, one to ban law enforcement for wearing masks, which was another swipe at ICE, which now they're being sued over by the Trump administration.

And then another to end a moratorium on nuclear power, which she said is another step that will help bring down energy bills.

Yeah, we're going to come back to that nuclear piece.

Lilo, I want to turn to you because one of the things she's made clear is that she wants to cut the budget and cut spending in as many places as possible.

Of course, her budget does expand spending overall, but she has made quite a, I would say, I think it's two billion, about two billion dollars in cuts.

But you talk about some requests for increases in the budget, in particular, these insurance regulators asking for nearly 20 percent increase.

What's happening there?

Well, it's a funny story because I don't think anybody, I mean, somebody very smart once said to me, you're never going to get elected on a platform of saying you want to hire more people at DOBI, the Department of Banking and Insurance.

But the truth is, anybody who works in regulated industries like insurance and banking will tell you DOBI desperately needs more people.

So it's a staff increase that they're long overdue for.

It sounds kind of like the last few administrations haven't been addressing this, probably because it's totally unsexy.

I would also say the thing that I learned most about this week is that, you know, or last week is Joby's budget is literally 80 billion dollars, 80 million dollars, which is a tiny, tiny budget in the scope of the 60.7 billion dollar spend that she's proposed.

And all of it comes from revenues or fees that they charge on insurance companies.

So it's a really small piece, but I think it's like, it's sort of to me, it indicates how she's looking at making government work in sort of fundamental systemic ways, as opposed to pet projects, which, you know, may be sexier, or more high, you know, more publicly enticing somehow.

And, you know, that are also really great for legislators to take home to their home districts and show off.

I think this is the kind of thing that what we're going to see in the next 100 days is how this works with the budget.

And you know, truth is, lawmakers have very, very different ideas of how they want to see that money spent.

So I think we're headed for a conversation there.

You raise a point, Lilo, about, you know, it's not too popular when governors come in and increase the size of government.

One of the pressures is going to be rising health care costs if she brings on state workers, right?

And those costs rise year over year.

And so that's an immediate point of the government of the budget that's, you know, going to grow.

I do.

I also think we're talking about 90 people, give or take in the scope of things, it's fairly small, I think.

Yeah, I mean, I think this whole affordability agenda is really interesting because people have very different ways of defining what that's about, right?

And I can't help but think it's sort of like maybe, you know, for 51%, at least, of Americans, maybe as many as three quarters live paycheck to paycheck.

So affordability has always been an issue for a lot of people in New Jersey, right?

It's always been and poor communities have struggled for decades.

This is not new.

Somehow it's now politically a message.

I think it's, you know, the middle class is feeling far greater strains that, you know, upper middle class is feeling more strains.

It's different people are now feeling this affordability crunch.

How you approach that and how you respond is, you know, there are a lot of different ways to do that.

No doubt it's a topic that kind of grew out of COVID, right?

When we saw inflation just escalating and supply chains impacting the cost of everything.

And it's really been a political messaging tool, I think for both parties.

Colleen, on that affordability issue, the governor had a big announcement this week about affordable housing.

What can you tell us about what she announced?

This is early in the week, alongside, I should say, Jamie Ding, our New Jersey resident, who is the 31 game winning streak holder, title holder on Jeopardy.

But what did she say when it came to housing?

So she's really kind of starting a process here.

There wasn't a lot of news out of it, I'd say, because we're not going to really know what the outcome, what the recommendations are going to be until late September.

But she is at least starting a process, and she did, again, this is something she talked about during the campaign, was trying to increase the affordable housing stock.

We know that New Jersey needs as many as 200,000 more affordable homes.

I mean, getting these things built has been a problem for decades.

A lot of towns don't want affordable housing within their borders.

We've got a new law that's kind of slowly, it seems like it's going to make a difference.

But in the meantime, you know, whatever the state can do certainly will be helpful.

So there's a process starting.

She's bringing in folks from various departments, kind of trying to take an all of government approach.

There are going to be recommendations ultimately made in time for the Governor's Housing Conference, which happens in September, pretty much of every year.

And what she did say was that she expects that about 20,000 new homes will come from this, many of them transit-oriented developments.

So they're likely to be built on land that is owned by the state New York train stations.

- Yeah, so this is the Housing Governing Council is what she's created, another move by executive order, we should say.

Although, as you said, it's not that the legislature has not been active on affordable housing legislation.

They have many laws passed under the Murphy administration.

I do find it interesting here.

There seems to be maybe a recognition in this move that a lot of municipalities have not been happy about some of the requirements to expand in their small communities.

Some say they don't have the infrastructure for it.

They don't have the schools for it.

And so she's really focused on transit, you know, areas that have strong transit hubs and redeveloping, repurposing land.

Do you think that's a move towards the middle on her part?

Yeah, I mean, the problem has been for decades that you can't really, I mean, you've tried to force towns to do more.

Again, some towns are doing, are actively building, but there have been a whole host of towns that have just fought this tooth and nail since the very beginning, really going back to the first Mount Laurel decisions way back in the 1980s.

So I think that this is a recognition that the state needs to do more and do what it can control.

And in this case, it can control state-owned land.

And so that seems to be a good way to try to at least make a dent in the need.

Yeah.

Brent, you talked about staying on this affordability topic.

You talked about the moratorium that she signed when it comes to nuclear energy.

Maybe here again, another move to the middle.

What's her policy and her energy policy been really since that first day when she signed the rate freeze?

- Yeah, the thought that she moves to the middle is, she's definitely governed like she campaigned, being a moderate.

On the Democratic side, she will take on Donald Trump and try and say she's gonna stand up to him.

But on affordability and on energy and stuff, she does seem to have a middle ground approach.

The nuclear is the next big swing she took after the utility rates.

And you will even hear some critics say that the utility rate freeze is kind of slight of hand, that we still don't know exactly how that's gonna work out and we'll probably know more over the summer.

But the nuclear thing is something that she says is going to be longstanding, and that it's gonna take some while to prop up.

But this is the other way to try and knock down rates is to expand energy power.

Solar is another way she wants to do it.

She says the more energy sources we have the better our bills will be.

Some progressives in her party may not like some of her energy policy, at least proposals at this point.

Do you believe, well this is legislation, do you think that this is an area maybe where she has a fight within her own party?

I know that's something that Governor Murphy faced quite a bit.

Yeah, the legislature has gotten more blue, meaning and even more progressive.

You've seen some since the county line disappeared, you've seen some more progressive members join the legislature.

You have heard some, excuse me, some criticism that she's not focused enough on the environment that her that she's a pro business and type of governor that maybe that will, the environment will suffer because of that.

We haven't heard a ton of that, but yeah, there's something she does that definitely will get pushback from progressives.

It hasn't been very vocal yet.

The legislature has been kind of muted in her response to her, but again, it's only been a hundred days.

Right now, her polling is very strong and we'll see what happens with that as time goes on.

But she could be in for a few fights of the legislature, especially the next two months are going to be very critical.

This is in many ways what's going to define her young governorship is the fight over the budget in the next two months.

Yeah.

Lilo, Brent had a chance to ask the governor about the state health benefits plan.

That's something that we haven't heard her talk a whole lot about, as Brent pointed out in his interview.

But we know it's a massive budget expense that is coming.

She's going to have to deal with it in the future.

Can you just first help us understand why that fund is in trouble.

Well it's in trouble.

It is.

Yeah.

And I just want to say Brent I think you're 100 percent right about the budget fight.

I think that's really what we're going to.

There's going to be a whole second chapter here.

So yeah, I mean the cost of health care is going up astronomically.

Everybody knows that.

The state has done some benchmarking.

They're funding efforts to try to study and control the cost of health care.

But their first report from January shows it's not working yet.

So you have that.

You have a benefit plan that you know most of us would describe as extremely rich.

You know members don't pay very much if at all in co-pays.

They get a lot of coverage.

It's generous which is great.

If you're the recipient but of course as the taxpayers you know that's footing the bill.

So there are two sides to that.

And it's also it's been it's been used in a way that community that municipalities can can get in and get out of the plan.

So when they when it's not working for them economically they leave and that leaves it more vulnerable because you need more people to make insurance work so that you're spreading your risk.

So sort of a combination of factors have led it to a really really critical point.

And nobody seems to have a clear idea of how to move forward.

I think it's really gonna come down to people making concessions and the workforce has been really hesitant to do that.

I understand why, in the private sector, you tend to make more in salary than you do in the public sector.

Benefits in the public sector are sort of the off, the balance for that.

So this is a longstanding issue that has been really kicked down the can has been kicked down the road by multiple governors.

And it's reaching a crisis point.

It's sort of it's similar to the crisis points we're seeing in you know the Obamacare marketplace insurance.

I mean there's the same four different plans different benefits but same facts acting on it.

The costs.

Yeah.

And you know I want to I want to have Brent John here because you did ask the governor how she planned to handle it.

What did she say in terms of how she's thinking about solving this issue.

She didn't she didn't have a ton to say she said she said she knows that the plan is on the brink of collapse and she knows this is a big thing facing her behind the scenes.

I have been hearing that.

Yeah.

This is one thing that she really needs to pay attention to that.

This is kind of like the silent issue that's going on during the budget and something that everyone says we need to pay attention to.

She didn't give any concrete comments but she noted the problem and said that she wants to start having real discussions on this.

Brent, I'm sure you can speak to this.

One of the things that we have seen from this administration before she ever even came into office is that she has sat down with so many different stakeholders.

She really, it seems, has tried to put her ear to the ground of what's really happening in a lot of different areas.

And so not too much that she takes action on seems to be kind of out of the blue.

It seems even business leaders will tell you that they feel that she's speaking to them, health care leaders, et cetera.

When it comes to this, though, imagine she's got to have a lot of different perspectives in terms of how you actually solve it, right?

Yeah.

And this is, again, a bit of the beginning of an administration, is that there's, you know, you'll hear supporters of her push back on that this is a honeymoon period, because that implies that she's not getting anything done.

It might just be everybody's kumbaya and happy.

But, you know, she has taken the steps to talk to these people and has really tried to reach out.

And you will hear that a lot of people feel they're being listened to, that that's something that they didn't always have in the past.

And so, yeah, but again, the pedal comes to the metal during budget season.

There will be a document on July 1st that shows the exact priorities of both her and the legislature, and that is going to be what goes forward and where she'll get praise and criticism.

Yeah.

Colleen, to mark her 100th day, she held a press conference touting a lot of the things that we just talked about, but she made some news and rolled out a pilot program for this, this dashboard, this business dashboard that she talked a whole lot about on the campaign trail.

It felt a bit wonky for outsiders, but folks in the business community understood exactly what she means.

What can you tell us about this pilot program?

Yeah, I mean, I think Brent mentioned this as well.

You know, when she was she has been talking about being a pro business governor.

You know, I'm not sure why there would need to be a difference between someone who is a Democrat and is pro business.

But it's not kind of what we have been used to in the state.

And so constantly we hear, everybody hears, I think, from businesses who say it just takes way too long to get permits to do things in the state.

There are environmental permits in particular.

And I think, again, Brent kind of mentioned this, that the question is going to be, if you are able to speed up the permitting process for businesses, will that wind up leading to some sort of increase in pollution or in, you know, the loss of habitat, wildlife habitat or forest land?

So it'll be an interesting, it'll be interesting to see just how this process works.

But certainly businesses have been complaining about this for a long time and are welcoming the the Sherrill administration's trying to do anything to speed up the process for them.

Brent, I want to go back to you quickly because we've talked a lot about this tourism tax and she spoke about it as though it were a foregone conclusion.

We know that there's legislation that's been presented that would increase the sales tax, that would increase the hotel tax, gambling taxes at different rates.

Is this a done deal now that the governor said this is happening?

No, I mean the fact that she is talking so openly about it means it's something she really wants and there are lawmakers in the legislature, very powerful lawmakers like Paul Sarlow who is sponsoring that legislation, who also want to see this happen.

But no, I don't have any sense that this is definitely going to happen.

You do have some very leery Republicans and Democrats who think that now is not the time to be raising any tax, even though she says this is a temporary tax just around the Meadowlands and that people from New Jersey can write it off on their taxes and get a refund.

So I don't think it's a foregone conclusion, but you know, the other thing is that it's tied up in budget negotiations, but it has to be done before the budget is due on July 1st because the World Cup games start on June 13th.

So you need it done before that final few weeks stretch where they really negotiate the final budget.

So this is something to watch out for.

You basically only have a month left to get this done if she wants to install it.

Yeah, it's going to be fair to say Harry when it comes to that last month before the budget deadline.

Colleen, just a few minutes left.

We are not off in the story of the news, but we are no strangers ourselves to the ever changing world of news.

This is our last day in our studio as we know it.

Our news will continue.

But fair to say that we are facing some growing pains.

Yeah, we sure are.

We still are not quite certain what's going to come next for NJ Spotlight News.

We know that there are two groups that are negotiating with the state public broadcasting authority to take over.

We had a fond farewell party for our studio, our beloved studio, last night.

Lilo, a former NJ Spotlight News colleague, was there as well.

And yeah, we're all just kind of holding our breath a little bit to see what happens next.

Yeah, if this week tells us anything, and this recent period of time, it's that news matters, facts matter.

Brent, the work that you do is evidence of that every day.

Lilo, the work that you do also.

And Colleen, proud to work alongside you and Lilo.

Brent, sharing the space with you as well and all the great work that we've done here at NJPBS over all the years.

We're not done, but the space is for now.

But Colleen, Lilo, Brent, I want to thank you so much for being with us today.

And you can follow me on Instagram @joannagaggisnj, and go ahead and scan that QR code right there on your screen to see more episodes of Roundtable.

For all the crew here at Gateway Center in downtown Newark, I'm Joanna Gaggis.

Thanks for being with us.

Have a great weekend.

That's going to do it for us this week.

And as the panel mentioned, this show will continue remotely, but it is our last production here at the Agnes Vera Studio at the Gateway Center in Newark, the place that's been our home for the last 11 years, where so many people have helped shape and contribute to this broadcast.

Just about every elected official in the state has walked through these doors at one point or another, and so have many residents and community leaders who have trusted us with their stories.

It's been a place of collaboration and camaraderie, which is so, so very important in a world where we don't ever have to meet in person if we don't want to.

So it's the end of this part of our chapter.

But we do still hope to write many more.

I'm Brianna for Mary Alice Williams for Michael Aaron and for the entire NJ spotlight news team.

Thanks for being with us.

Have a great weekend.

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