>> Major funding for Reporters Roundtable with David Cruz is provided by RWJBarnabas Health.

Let's be healthy together.

Serving the insurance needs of New Jersey residents and businesses for more than 100 years.

Promotional support provided by New Jersey business magazine.

The magazine of the New Jersey business Association.

Reporting to executive and legislative leaders in all 21 counties of the Garden State since 1954.

And by Politico's New Jersey playbook.

Online at Politico.com.

♪ David: When transparency makes things clear as mud.

Hi, everybody.

It is Reporters Roundtable.

I'm David Cruz.

Our panel includes Colleen oh O'Day.

Sophie Nieto Munoz.

And Danielle Hahn.

We will hear from the panel and a bit but we begin with a discussion about transparency, or the lack thereof, in the Senate approved elections transparency act.

The Republican conference leader in the Senate is Holly Schepisi and she joins us now to talk about this.

Good to see you again.

>> Good to see you.

How are you?

David: Very well.

There are more emails that appear to support the administration's argument about a bias on the part of the Executive Director director of the election law enforcement commission.

There's a disciplinary hearing on this schedule for next week.

That said, the reaction to that, amendments to the so-called elections transparency act give the governor unchecked authority to appoint the entire board of elect, no Senate input.

You had a warning for your colleagues when you spoke on the Senate floor about that this week, no?

Sen. Schepisi: Absolutely.

This bill, with the amendments that were made to it, actually makes it incredibly bad bill.

One of which is the governor being able to unilaterally appoint four people to elect, and no say of the Senate, no kind of collaboration.

problem is it coupled it with the new two-year statute of limitations which effectively wipes out any pending matter, including some very significant potential fines against the Democratic Party.

My warning was, for two years, the governor gets to appoint whomever he wants and we keep seeing a pattern in commissions all throughout, anybody who speaks up against what the governor wants or what his administration wants is being unilaterally replaced.

Here, if there is even a member of the Democratic legislature who speaks out, they will have to prioritize who they go after because of this two-year statute of limitations.

We have four people being appointed that are in there solely for the governor.

It sets a very dangerous precedent.

David: It is a quick way to put people in check by having total authority over this board, which checks into everybody's finances and so on for the campaign, right?

Sen. Schepisi: That's correct.

So, one, it is wiping out all pending matters.

Two, it is wiping out some pretty significant pending matters for the Democratic state party, the Senate assembly.

And now, it is also giving the governor the most powerful governor in the entire U.S., unilateral authority to appoint who is going after political people for whatever misdeeds they did on their reports.

David: I want to talk about that more in a minute.

I want to play this excerpt from our talk with the Senate President.

He is talking about the bill.

He was the only one who spoke in favor of it.

Let's hear him and come back and get your thoughts.

>> We just saw this week, somebody got fined $32,000 for a 26 campaign.

We should be looking at filings that are happening in real time and not wasting our time on stuff that happened in 2016.

>> When you say they are qualified individuals, if you guys don't have the opportunity to vet that, who says they are qualified and not just partisans handling the governor's business?

>> We are insured that the folks they are looking at, replacing the current commissioners, are of the highest quality.

There are three in Moldova and one is vacant right now -- in holdover and is vacant right now.

>> You are ensured these are high-quality by whom?

>> By the governor's office and the names they have indicated to me.

David: I trust the governor.

I cannot imagine the Democrats giving Chris Christie 90 days of unchecked authority.

Your thoughts when you hear that?

Sen. Schepisi: Unequivocally would never happen.

With respect to the particular matter that the Senate President did reference, it is my understanding that has been a pending matter for quite a long time, so it was not just yesterday elect reached out to this candidate and said, by the way, we're issuing something against you.

That is something that has been out there for quite a long time.

One of my biggest concerns about this is with the edits to the bill -- I think we can all agree, we don't want dark money in politics.

About four years ago during a hard-core race, I had half $1 million put against me that came out of somebody's basement that they own from one of these dark money PAC's.

None of us want that.

The amendments that were placed on this, they are almost Incentivizing bad behavior.

David: If I am a lawmaker who plays loose with the elect guidelines, I like this part of it.

The statute of limitations.

Sen. Schepisi: Yeah, the statute of limitations, it is an insanely low statute.

10 years was too great, but a lot of the states and I believe the federal government are all about five years.

That is a reasonable period of time.

Often times, these sort of violations are not even picked up upon until the next election cycle because someone takes a look and says the person running against me never filed when they ran for school board or council or something like that.

And based upon the changes made to this, there is no recourse.

David: Let's move on to the state budget.

That bill made it through the assembly committee and will be before the assembly very soon.

State budget had its first public hearing this week.

Torrents of pork is a term we heard.

$18 billion more than Chris Christie's final budget.

Is this a budget you can get behind?

Sen. Schepisi: No.

And for a couple of different reasons.

The budgets we are putting forth right now, it has become almost like a Vegas shell game.

Ok, we will give you an anchor, but you will ultimately pay this year twice as much because of cost increases for health insurance for state employees, for implementation of new DEP requirements for green energy.

Anybody who lives in this state have had no meaningful property tax reform.

Look at what we are giving to you in an election year.

There has been no meaningful way of funding schools.

There are so many different ways this could have been done.

We could have taken up special needs funding and transportation costs from our local school budgets and funded it at the state level which would have slashed property taxes and 60% of the communities.

The rebates -- we could have looked at additional funding.

We could have reimplemented the energy tax rebates to our municipalities.

We could have ensured these huge cost increases for insurance costs that are being put through by the state health plan were offset.

Yeah, you hear this and you are like, oh, a new $3 million program, it sounds great.

It will help first-time homebuyers.

When you really delve into it, OK, we will help 100 new homebuyers in the state?

That is some of the stuff that I think, it sounds good, it is good soundbites but it has no real meaningful impact on trying to make the state affordable for the middle class.

David: Let me ask you really quick to look ahead to 2025, when there's going to begin open governor's race.

No incumbent.

Who in your party has the inside edge, do you think?

Sen. Schepisi: Right now, ther'' s an inside edge because he has run twice now.

He shows up to a lot of stuff.

And he's popular and has name recognition.

I do think we have a lot of people that have the potential to also be phenomenal candidates.

I think it is a little bit too early to say this is the one.

We have to see who officially puts in and take it from there.

David: I hear the smile in your voice, Senator.

It is mostly all men people are talking about.

What about Holly Schepisi for governor?

The state's only elected female governor was a Republican.

Sen. Schepisi: I do agree, we need more women in politics in general, and particularly Republican women.

Right now, I'm up for Senate, that is my only focus.

I'm also still fairly young.

I would not rule it out at some point in the future.

It just depends upon what makes sense for me and my family.

David: 2025 is technically the future.

All right, Holly Schepisi, always a pleasure, Senator.

Thanks.

Sen. Schepisi: Great seeing you.

Have a nice weekend.

David: Panel, Colleen, Sophie, Dan, good to see you all.

Let's start with this elections transparency act because who names these things?

Daniel, you are all over the state house this week.

What sticks out to you about the details of this bill, the chatter around the chambers, and the Senate President?

>> I think Senator Schepisi highlighted the two most controversial parts of the legislation, which is having a mechanism that allows the governor to effectively oust the current elect Executive Director Josh Brindle.

Also having a two-year statute of limitations for campaign-finance violations.

One interesting statistic is that approximately 80% of the pending investigations would go away under this bill because they are past the two-year statute of limitations.

Those are two parts of a wide-ranging bill that would redo campaign-finance in this state.

Why I think it is quite ironic is before those two additions were made, they had support from the election law enforcement commission and Republicans.

There are provisions that would have increased campaign contributions.

Tried to disclose donors for so-called dark money groups.

Have uniform state pay to play laws and scrapped local rules for political contributions and campaign contracts.

So, that is just a very short synopsis of what is in a very long piece of legislation that we could talk about for this entire roundtable.

David: Colleen, of all the bills that have been bills since the legislature started passing bills, have you ever seen a bill so transparent in its brazenness?

>> A couple of things that stick out to meet -- with all deference to the Senate President, we are just going to take the governor's word on it that these are good people?

I think all of the senators and all of the assembly members who will consider this next should consider the Democrats might not be in power all the time.

Who's to say there's not going to be a Republican governor who comes in and puts in his own people?

The whole idea of having these appointments stretch out, and certainly, they should get Senate confirmation.

Why the Senate would give that up, I don't know.

The whole idea of having this stretch out potentially over multiple administrations is you don't have one party packing the commission.

I think the solution to that is have Governor Murphy nominate people and have the Senate approved them, right?

That is how you get rid of holdovers, like normal times, exactly.

David: Sophie, he's going to be able to appoint the elect board of the commission that oversees election law.

And you, citizens of New Jersey, have no say.

Can you find one person aside from the Senate President who will speak in favor of this bill?

>> I don't.

I think we saw that on the floor the other day.

The Senate President was the only one to speak up about it.

I think there's a lot of hesitancy around this bill.

It is just moving so quickly.

Things are changing every day.

It has become really clear that there's almost like a silent support for this bill.

Like Colleen said, just taking Murphy's word for it, it seems like.

There are so many layers to this story with more emails coming out this morning, putting the pieces together of the timeline.

I think the hearing on Tuesday will also kind of uncover some of the other layers that are still missing in the story.

David: All right, budget season.

Colleen, the pesky school funding formula grabbed all the headlines from the first set of budget hearings.

There was a bill that added $102 million to certain districts.

That had Wildwood and toms River and others howling.

A, tell us what all the ruckus is about, funding formula.

And B, fix the funding formula.

Go.

>> OK, yeah, how much time do you have?

You need to bring in some experts for that because I don't think I can do it.

So, we had 157 districts losing some significant amounts of money.

Jersey City, one of them.

The formula is designed to try to equalize the districts that have a lot of money, in terms of wealth in the district, as well as look at districts that are growing.

It is a complicated formula.

Under that, and we have been working on that -- I think this is the seventh year -- districts will lose money.

This is happening.

And district officials are up in arms.

So, some -- there's a lot of money in the state surplus, the governor's office with the help of some Democratic senators who are in some maybe a precarious position in this year's election.

It would give back roughly two thirds of the money to most of these districts that are losing money.

David: Daniel, anything jumping out at you from the budget season yet?

Health care costs will be critical with a lot of that emergency COVID money expiring.

Is the state going to be able to fill that gap?

>> I think they are going to be budget hearings and you were going to see questions on the state health benefits program cost for public health workers insurance.

Republicans have been very adamant, they have been very critical of the treasury for how they handled this.

There have been allegations of a lack of transparency.

But you have also seen that from some Democratic lawmakers.

I remember last fall, there was a press conference where the assembly budget share -- chair said she would be more cautious going forward during these budget hearings.

I would expect to see some questions around this space.

As far as other budgetary items, one thing that didn't get a lot of attention but I think is interesting is the Murphy administration is proposing another $125 million they can spend unilaterally in the American rescue plan money without the legislature's approval.

That is on top of the $300 approved last budget cycle for them to spend without the legislature's approval.

David: It is becoming a theme of this second term.

An interesting piece on some local groups like the New Jersey Association of Counties and others setting up their own health care plans because the state plan became too expensive.

What are they doing and is it going to catch on?

>> Right now, the New Jersey Association of Counties is in the early phases of creating their own health insurance program as a direct response to the rate increases on the state health plan.

I spoke to the group's executive director and he said a lack of transparency, accountability -- his words -- on the state plan where the reasons why his organization was moving forward on this.

It is not unheard of for local governments to pool together to buy insurance, although you have not seen these local government trade organizations take this step within New Jersey.

The league of municipalities, also a force within Trenton, is also taking early stages to create their own health plan.

But to be determined exactly how it looks like.

David: Sophie, you had a piece which you posted with a cheeky tweet.

"tThis is what happens when too many lawmakers do not get their Bruce rendering tickets -- Springsteen tickets."

>> Apparently, some lawmakers had trouble with Ticketmaster.

There has been a lot of fumbles with buying concert tickets in the last year, ranging from its -- I don't know if we have secret Swifties in the legislature, to our hometown, Bruce Springsteen.

There's a package of bills that would basically give consumers more protections when it comes to buying tickets for concerts.

Part of the problem is Ticketmaster and Live Nation own about 70% of the live entertainment industry.

So, part of what these bills would do is force these companies to be more clear with their service fees.

Force venues to share how many tickets are available, how many are sold, how many are still pending.

Be very clear when you are being redirected to a resale site.

This is offer consumer protections.

There were a lot of upsides to that, but these ticket venues or these concert venues and ticketing officials say it will really hurt their business that is still recovering from the COVID pandemic.

They are worried also that some of these laws, if they became laws, would drive concerts to Philadelphia, New York, and we would get less shows in Jersey.

David: You also had a story on a more serious topic.

A big backlog on conceal and carry permits in the state.

>> Yeah.

So, concealed carry here changed in June.

People were able to apply for concealed carry and the superintendent of police said he expected about 200,000 applications.

From what we found, from July to December 22, about 11,000 were filed and 800 are pending.

What I think is interesting is nobody is keeping track of how many have been filed since December.

Part of that reason is the law that Governor Murphy signed, which leaves this bill up to municipalities.

It is no longer going up to the state police because we have 565 different municipalities.

565 different ways of dealing with it.

565 different timelines.

We just really have no idea how many permits there are in this state right now.

David: Time for our only in Jersey moment.

Headlines and notes that are quintessentially Jersey.

Sophie, let's stay with you.

Start us off.

>> So, there was a little calf on the run in Brooklyn.

I think it was a four-month-old calf.

It escaped from a slaughterhouse.

Now, it has a new home after it was lassoed on the streets of Brooklyn.

It has a new home in a sanctuary in Sussex County.

It escaped the butcher's block and now he gets to chill here in the garden state.

David: That is every story of every Brooklyn transplant that made it to Jersey.

Daniel, you got one?

>> I do.

A state agency, I believe the comptroller's office, sent a subpoena to a local government for records and now found themselves in court because the local government did not provide said records.

The reason it is my only in Jersey moment is because you have a local government denying public records and an investigation in Hudson County.

It does not get any more New Jersey than that.

David: You heard the senator say something about a basement.

Colleen, you got one for us?

>> We are Jersey and we do have attitude.

We kind of like to drive fast on our roads.

We don't like it when trucks are on that left Lane getting in the way.

So, on Thursday, an assembly committee gave this bill its first nudge through the legislature.

It would double fines for those trucks in the left lane and add that prohibition to smaller highways.

Boy, I will support that because when I am making my commute, it is kind of annoying when those trucks are holding me up in the left lane.

David: Colleen says move, move, get out the way.

Mine comes from closer to home.

Liberty State Park where the DEP abruptly canceled the public meeting and opened house when they were supposed to discuss future plans for the state park.

The reason for the cancellation, the DEP says it is because of "significant public interest."

We are moving it to the spring to provide more advanced notice and ensure maximum participation, despite the fact the news about the meeting was all over social media and everywhere else.

Not coincidentally to some, it also allows groups funded by Paul Fireman, who owns the golf course next door, to fund an organized effort to commercialize the park in the guise of more community access.

Only in Jersey can a public meeting be canceled because too much of the actual public is interested in going.

That is roundtable for this week.

Colleen, Sophie, Dan, good to see you all.

Thanks to Senator Holly Schepisi for joining us.

You can follow the show on twitter and subscribed to the YouTube channel to get fresh content every day.

I'm David Cruz.

For the entire crew here in downtown Newark, thank you for watching.

We will see you next week.

>> Major funding for Reporters Roundtable with David Cruz is provided by -- RWJBarnabas Health.

Let's be healthy together.

Serving the insurance needs of New Jersey residents and businesses for more than 100 years.

Promotional support provided by New Jersey business magazine.

The magazine of the New Jersey business and industry Association.

Reporting to executive and legislative leaders in all 21 counties of the garden state since 1954.

And by Politico's New Jersey playbook, a topical newsletter on garden state politics, online at Politico.com.

♪ ♪