TRENTON — Gov. Chris Christie and leading legislators ended months of negotiations tonight by announcing an agreement to roll back pension and health benefits for public employees.

Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) and Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver (D-Essex) have bucked members of their party by pushing forward with the plan, a signature issue of the governor’s, angering public employee unions that have long allied themselves with Democrats.

Christie, who announced the agreement to a standing ovation while addressing a room full of business executives in Plainsboro tonight, thanked the legislative leaders for their work.

"There have been months of serious discussions about this," Christie said. "The issues are difficult and they are emotional ones."

He said that the full Senate would vote on the compromise bill on Monday, and the Assembly would vote next Thursday.

The agreement did not go down easy with all of the Legislature’s top Democrats, including Assembly Majority Leader Joseph Cryan (D-Union), who emphasized that Oliver didn’t have a majority of Assembly Democrats on board.

"For those of us who haven’t sold out our party, we decline to accept. And for those of us who work for a living, we decline to agree," Cryan said in a telephone interview. "The Speaker doesn’t have the majority of her own caucus, and as the majority leader, I say she shouldn’t put it up. And as for the rest of us, we all want health care. We all believe in a better life for us and our children. And how terrible it is that the Democratic Party today chose to take a different path."

The legislation would force public employees to pay more for their pensions and health benefits and push back their retirement age. Although Christie and top Republicans have long pushed similar changes, tonight’s statement was their first public acknowledgment that they would back the Democrat-authored compromise legislation.

Christie hopes to realize $300 million in savings by overhauling health care benefits in his $29.6 billion budget, which lawmakers have until June 30 to adopt.

The announcement came on a day when the public employee unions launched a last-ditch effort to derail the plan.

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Today, the New Jersey Education Association — the largest in the state, representing nearly 200,000 teachers — released a television advertisement trying to discredit the legislation as politically tainted by highlighting the relationship between Sweeney and the South Jersey power broker George Norcross.

"If the legislation is approved by the committee, it will be proof positive that the interests of the party bosses are more important to this legislature than the interests of the state’s taxpayers," the president of the teachers’ union, Barbara Keshishian, said today at a Trenton news conference.

The union, opposed to changing health benefits through legislation rather than negotiation, focused on a short provision in the 120-page bill that would bar public workers from using out-of-state hospitals unless there "is no in-state health care provider reasonably available to treat the particular condition."

Norcross is the head of a health insurance brokerage with strong business ties in the state and chairman of the Cooper Health System and Cooper University Hospital in Camden.

TV AD BY NEW JERSEY EDUCATION ASSOCIATION:

The union claims the provision was tucked into the bill to help raise profits at Cooper and other state hospitals, without regard to public workers who would prohibited from using highly regarded hospitals in New York City and Philadelphia.

Sweeney has already removed a provision that would have blocked local governments from entering the state health plan after an article published in The New York Times questioned how the measure would financially benefit Norcross, Sweeney's longtime political patron.

A cadre of influential Democrats fired back at the teachers union later in the day, accusing it of "shallow name calling." Norcross was joined at the news conference in Cinnaminson by Mayor Cory Booker of Newark.

"The NJEA is fiddling with our teachers’ money while Rome burns," said Sweeney in a statement. "This $1 million attack ad won’t do a thing to save the pensions of hundreds of thousands of teachers and retirees from collapse, or give property taxpayers any relief from the ever-increasing weight of health benefits that hangs around their necks."

Norcross dismissed the union’s assertion that his insurance company stood to benefit from his efforts but did not address the possible business it would bring to the hospital he heads. In a statement, Norcross said his company, Conner Strong, operates in all 50 states and is "not dependent on the outcome of health-care debates in any particular state."

The rhetoric is only likely to escalate in the coming days as the two legislative committees take their first look at the bill. The Senate budget committee has scheduled a hearing Thursday, and an Assembly hearing is scheduled for Monday.

Thousands of union workers are expected to rally at the Statehouse on Thursday in an effort to block what they see as a crucial blow to collective bargaining rights in the state.

NJEA Executive Director Vince Giordano said Democrats are making a "very, very dangerous mistake" by backing the bill.

"It is party who has seem to lost its way in terms of middle-class values, working people values, " he said. "That is the base of the Democratic Party and when they take issues of this nature and try to out-Christie Christie on it, I think they are losing their base."

By Jarrett Renshaw and Chris Megerian/ The Star-Ledger

Staff writers Chris Baxter, Matt Friedman and Ginger Gibson contributed to this report.