Adding new toll lanes on the turnpike? Auctioning off naming rights to state facilities? Allowing development on state land?

It’s too soon to tell whether any of that will become reality, but the administration of Gov. Phil Murphy has taken the first step toward exploring ways to “maximize value” of state assets to shore up New Jersey’s ailing pension and health benefits systems and pay down its ballooning debt.

The state treasurer issued a request for qualifications last week for an “asset financial advisor” whose job will be to estimate the potential value of everything from airports and bridges to roads and water treatment plants, and to suggest how they could be used to help fix the state’s financial woes.

“It’s widely acknowledged that New Jersey faces many fiscal challenges, which won’t be solved by any single magic bullet,” Treasurer Elizabeth Maher Muoio said in a statement. “At the direction of the governor, we designed this RFQ to explore tangible, creative solutions to help maximize the state’s assets in order to minimize the burden to taxpayers.”

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The preliminary move was applauded by state Senate President Stephen Sweeney, D-Gloucester, who helped assemble a bipartisan Economic and Fiscal Policy Workgroup last year that issued a report offering recommendations to address what it called a pension and health benefits system in "crisis."

“The Treasury’s action is fully in line with our recommendations to analyze all of the asset holdings not only of the state government itself, but particularly of various independent authorities, including transportation infrastructure, water and sewer authorities, real estate and reservoirs,” Sweeney said in a statement.

Murphy, a Democrat, is not the first governor who has turned to the state's vast portfolio of holdings as a possible way of meeting daunting fiscal challenges.

In 2008, Gov. Jon Corzine, also a Democrat, pitched a sweeping “asset monetization” plan to help pay down the state’s bonded debt, which then exceeded $32 billion. He wanted to reorganize the state’s toll roads under a nonprofit “public benefits corporation” and raise tolls 500 percent over 15 years but ultimately abandoned the proposal after he failed to sell it to the public.

Murphy’s Republican predecessor, Chris Christie, had more success in 2017 when he got lawmakers to agree to transfer the state lottery into the pension system. The lottery, valued at $13.5 billion, instantly reduced the pension system’s shortfall and, in theory, what the state needs to pay into the system each year to keep it solvent.

But New Jersey for years has not made the full pension payment recommended by actuaries. Instead, it is slowly ramping up to that amount, meaning that pension payments will consume an increasingly large share of the state budget through Murphy’s first term even while the health of the pension system continues to deteriorate.

At the same time, Murphy, who has close ties to public-sector unions, has refused to endorse proposals to make workers pay more for their health benefits or to move some public employees toward a defined contribution plan, similar to a 401(k). Those steps are widely considered to have the largest potential to put the pension and health benefits system on sounder footing, but they would infuriate the state's unions.

As of mid-2017, the state’s bonded debt had climbed to $46 billion, while New Jersey’s pension system had a $115 billion gap between its assets and what it's expected to owe retirees, according to the state’s most recent debt report.

The state was short another $36 billion for post-retirement benefits such as health insurance, the debt report said.

Taken together, those figures dwarf the current state budget of $37.4 billion.

The Treasurer’s Office said it was not aiming to use any transaction involving state assets to help balance the next state budget, which must be finalized by the end of June.

“We envision these more as long-term solutions,” said Jennifer Sciortino, a department spokeswoman.

Sciortino emphasized that the state is still in the “exploratory phase” of how to increase the value of state assets. No decisions have been made, she said, and thus it’s too early to compare the Murphy administration’s approach with that of prior administrations.

The bipartisan group assembled by Sweeney was more specific in what it wanted to see happen. The so-called Path to Progress report recommended exploring the feasibility of transferring the New Jersey Turnpike system into the pension system — as was done with the state lottery two years ago — and growing revenues by adding high-occupancy toll lanes as has been done in several other states. Those lanes provide an option for drivers to get around traffic but charge fluctuating tolls based on congestion.

The report also suggested studying which other state assets are best suited for dedication to the pension system and allowing local governments, which make yearly payments into the pension system on behalf of their employees, to contribute local assets to the pension system in place of cash payments.

According to the request for qualifications issued by the treasurer, the asset financial advisor is required to conclude its preliminary analysis of state assets by May 15, with a more in-depth analysis to follow if the state asks for it.

Email: pugliese@northjersey.com

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