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

Good evening and thanks for joining us.

I'm Brianna Vannozzi.

Tonight we're bringing you a special edition of NJ Spotlight News as we sit down with Governor Phil Murphy for our final in-office interview together after eight years steering New Jersey through some of its most defining moments in decades.

From tackling a progressive policy agenda to navigating the COVID-19 pandemic taking on high profile battles over taxes transit and climate policy.

Governor Murphy's tenure has been marked by sweeping ambitions some realized others still debated.

Tonight we'll talk about the choices that defined his administration what he sees as his lasting impact and the outstanding challenges that will be left behind for the next team in Trenton.

Governor Murphy welcome and thank you It's nice to see you.

Good to see you.

Good to be back.

I was looking back through old footage.

No one can forget that night when you leapt up on stage.

You know we weren't going to let that one go.

I'd forgotten actually.

You were so joyful.

So full of hope.

Do you still feel that way now as you leave office or are you equally happy to now be making your exit?

No, I'm still very-I'm a glass-half-full person to begin with, and I remain incredibly bullish on New Jersey.

What's different is we were inheriting a long list of challenges when I leapt up on that stage eight years ago.

Today, and it's not to say that we don't still have challenges.

I would say as a nation and as a world, bigger than we have in New Jersey right now.

But we've chopped through an enormous amount of the challenges that we faced back then.

Again, not patting ourselves on the back, not perfect, not done.

But we're in a dramatically, as a state, a dramatically different and I would argue better place.

Stronger and fairer.

>> Let me ask you about that.

You ran on that stronger, fairer agenda way back, you'll recall.

Which you have maintained.

And I want to tick off some of the major wins in that area.

These were the campaign promises you made that you delivered.

New property tax relief through anchor and stay NJ.

Expanded the senior freeze raised the minimum wage to 15 dollars an hour enacted paid sick leave expanded paid family leave millionaires tax to which you and Steve Sweeney but it heads on quite a bit in the beginning there.

The earned income tax credit you introduced the New Jersey child tax credit shortly before you took office in 2018.

You said the middle class in New Jersey has been ravaged.

How would you say the middle class is doing now.

I think it's doing a lot better.

But that's not to say there aren't to say there aren't.

>> I think the biggest challenge is affordability continues to be a big challenge.

And that's not withstanding record property tax relief.

If you qualify for the anchor program, even if you rent, and certainly if you're a senior and stay in, J., we'll add even more juice to this, we've knocked your property tax bill back a decade.

That's all really good news.

But tell that to somebody who's looking at their health care premium or the utility bill.

Again, we're we've done and we continue to do a lot in both of those arenas.

I think the middle class is a lot stronger, but challenges remain without question.

And they they are overwhelmingly in the affordability bucket.

And I mean, realistically, right, how do you reconcile that when you look at these policies on paper?

These were all things that folks when you came into office said you're not going to get done.

Yeah.

You did them in the first couple of years.

But then how do you square that with folks who say we're still in an affordability crisis and it's still just costs a lot to live?

Yeah.

So two things.

Number one, can you imagine where we'd be if we hadn't done those things?

Just look at the millionaires tax and the many hundreds of millions of dollars that we've taken from that plowed into really good programs like funding schools.

And by the way, we have more millionaires today in New Jersey than ever before.

Yeah, the argument back then was that they would all leave.

Yeah, which I've never accepted.

The research always says an asset tax is a crippling tax that leads to an exit.

An income tax typically does not.

But then you've got new challenges.

So I was a diplomat.

I was our ambassador in Germany.

And somebody once reminded me, it's very rare when you could put a bow around the box of that accomplishment, put it on the shelf and be done with it.

So affordability is something you have to earn every single day, particularly given the enormous and rich basket of services and support that comes back at our residence.

Number one public education system in America, top handful of health care systems, quality of life, location second to none.

None of that comes free or cheap, but it's a battle, and we stay at it.

I'm proud of what we've done, but we will be sprinting through the tape on a whole range of interests over the next 40-odd days, and affordability will be at the top of the list.

Did you largely, though, achieve what you wanted to when it came to stronger, fairer, more affordable?

I'd say stronger, fairer, responsible is the third word I'd use.

Stronger is job creation and investment.

We have more people living in New Jersey than ever before, more people employed than ever before, more businesses in operation than ever before.

On fairness, we've closed a lot of those inequities.

We haven't shut them out completely.

I just came from-my wife is hosting her infant and mortality-mother summit.

She has over 850 people in that room.

We made enormous progress.

So fairness is about shrinking inequities, housing, maternal matters, access to health care.

The very first executive order that you signed, I think was just hours after you were sworn in, was promoting pay equity for women.

Correct.

What were you trying to signal then right from the outset?

That the system was rigged, that it took-I forget what the fair-the equal pay day is now, but it takes women a lot longer than it takes men to achieve the same level of pay equity, which is not right.

And so we've done a lot in that arena.

Responsible, by the way, is a word I don't want to lose, because we're the first administration since the 60s to get nine credit rating upgrades, which is important to me because it tells me that the world at large, the experts looking at New Jersey, think this is a stable, good prospect, and that saves taxpayers real money.

Those are always a little nuanced, though, right?

How they count the actual credit upgrades, depending on how many agencies they come from.

We only look at three and each of them have done a multiple upgrade.

I've been meeting with rating agencies, believe it or not, since July of 1982.

I do believe it.

And I didn't miss one meeting while I was governor.

Those are real.

Those are real upgrades.

A lot of these, at least these reforms, these progressive, I'll say progressive items that you had, they came really early on in your first couple of years, as I said.

And then your second term was really about getting into the weeds, the wonky stuff, as we like to say.

Why was that?

There was a lot of early achievements.

So we had a list, I think, of 52 campaign promises, and I think we clicked through 50 of them in whole or in part.

What's left?

We didn't get a public bank done.

And I had to go back on the bear hunt, which I'm not happy about.

But we almost lost some humans, including at least a kid or two, and I could not countenance that.

I still hope we can find nonlethal ways to control the population.

So the fact of the matter is, working with the legislature, great relations with Craig Coughlin, the speaker, Steve Sweeney, Senate president, now Nick Scutari, for the past four years, we got a lot done.

And so the question is, when you inherit something that's kind of a mess, you've got a long to do list, you chop through most of that to do list in the first three or four years, you then are focused intently on execution, and really extending steps that you took early on, whether it was a law, I signed or an executive order.

We also had the pandemic in the middle of all this.

I'm just quickly, though, thinking about that, you know, working with the legislature, having all three branches of the government be in your party.

There was a lot of relationship building that needed to happen early on, though.

No, I mean, the first budget, there was almost an impasse, came down to the wire.

There was sort of this kumbaya where you and Craig Coughlin, in the middle of you and Steve Sweeney at a diner table, said, you know, we're going to work together and sort of turned the page on it.

What do you think you learned from that and building those relationships?

I don't think it's too complicated.

I know one thing.

I ended up with great relations with all of the above.

It takes a while to get your groove.

We didn't come as close as the press would think in terms of shutting the government down.

You had the education funding deal a few days beforehand.

Which we continue to is a landmark bill.

We're the only administration ever to fully fund the public education formula in New Jersey.

But listen, when we got here, the surplus, which is basically for folks watching, is your rainy day account, was about $400 million.

The surplus that I just signed a few months ago is $6.7 billion.

And it's been up, up and away over the past eight years, and I'm proud of that.

I want to ask you a little bit about that and the economy, because you came in wanting this innovation economy.

And the administration did pour billions into incentives, programs to grow film and tech sectors, the Netflix, Paramount that are now coming here.

I wonder, 10, 20 years from now, will we say that the tradeoffs, right, because there have been criticisms that in order to grow that, we're building it on this increasingly expensive foundation, that the tradeoffs will have been worth the cost?

I think overwhelmingly, yes.

First of all, we're the quintessential innovation economy.

I would love to make cars, trucks and technology.

I think you owe yourself to wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and be honest about who you are, who you're not, who you can be, who you can't be.

And when I look in the mirror, and I've thought this from moment one, I see an innovation economy, perhaps the quintessential American innovation economy.

So that's what we've all-that's what we've been about from day one, investing heavily in biopharma, life sciences, tech, telecom, increasingly generative AI, the green economy, fintech, film and television.

And the evidence is overwhelming.

Folks who criticize incentives like film and television assume that you're going to get a multiple dollars back into the state coffers directly relative to what you put out.

That's not what the state does.

the state puts chum in the water, if you will, to ignite private sector investments.

You look at a 300-acre campus with Netflix.

You look at the largest campus in North America in Bayonne.

You look at Lionsgate campus in South Newark.

Those are there for decades.

And it will have been far worth -- well worth it.

>> Is it necessary then to have grown the budget in the way that it's had?

$22 billion.

It's increased since you took office.

Those were necessary steps, you're saying, in order to get to have these -- >> Yeah, the revenues -- absolutely.

But people forget the fact that the revenues have gone up $22 billion, only $3 billion of which was due to any tax increase, which means, as they say in the retail business, $19 billion of that $22 billion increase of revenues was same-store sales, if you will, assuming the tax rate had stayed the same all those years.

And we retained a lot more of our increase.

I don't know any state in America that has retained what we did, which was over $6 billion of that increase, which is the surplus or the rainy day fund.

That is an unwritten story about our financial strength.

My colleague Brenda Flanagan this week reported that some 100 employers have filed war notices.

She talked to folks over at Moody's, at Rutgers, economic analysts, who said, you know, we're dangerously close.

We're not at a recession, but we're dangerously close to it.

How do you square that with the picture that's being, you know, painted here?

Yeah, so the facts don't lie.

More people are living in New Jersey than ever, and more people are employed in New Jersey than ever.

That's a fact.

And I think you're going to see more evidence of that even in the next few days.

I'm worried about the nation, period, its leadership and its economic leadership right now, and we're not immune to that.

If the world were inside the four walls of New Jersey-again, not perfect.

We haven't done everything we wanted to do.

But, boy, I feel really good about what's going on in our state right now.

I feel a lot less good about our economic leadership right now and in the global economy.

I'm not a tariff guy.

I think those are inflationary.

Folks will pay a price for that.

And it's inflation.

I worry about our allies and their lack of investment in America.

There's a lot of things that concern me that are important to me.

I think we have to be careful.

What we can control, I would argue we've dominated.

And that's a good thing.

>> You brought up the pandemic before.

This obviously was a big part of your time in office.

All the while, you were battling cancer.

>> I was.

>> Which didn't get talked about a lot.

Obviously your personal life.

But those were two pretty big But those were two pretty big things to contend with at the same time.

Yeah the spring late winter spring and summer of 2020 is not a period any of us I hope ever have to live again.

I mean putting aside my own challenges you know we lost at the end of the day over 35,000 precious souls in New Jersey.

That's just a staggering staggering number.

But you became the face of it right.

I mean you sat you had the televised press conference.

Every day for many many months.

Where would you say you got it right and where would you say you wish you could have a redo?

I'll tell you one thing which is a way of answering this.

We're the only I find this shocking.

We're the only government that I'm aware of.

Any level of government that did a full arms length postmortem on our actions.

Nine hundred and ten pages.

The first time I saw the report was the day it was published.

We had nothing to do with it.

It had 20 odd recommendations.

There's a blue ribbon commission that we set up.

How far along is the administration in getting through those recommendations?

They're in decent shape.

They're going to be in existence through January 20th.

We're going to clearly hand off a playbook that we did not have early on.

Now, what do we wish if I could have changed history?

It's hard to believe this now.

Early on, March, April, May of 2020, even health experts were arguing, are masks good or not good?

Think about that today.

Or do you remember bringing the mail in with our gloves on and putting it on yesterday's newspaper, not on the kitchen counter?

I mean, the lack of knowledge, the lack of a playbook was staggering.

Reopened.

You know, there was lots of talk about the schools and the businesses.

Monday morning quarterback.

Would you have done that sooner?

You try to make the best decisions you can with the information you have at the time.

It's easy to look back in the rearview mirror when you've got when now we have a lot more information, although the public health picture in America is also falling apart, which is another in addition to the industry.

But you feel by and large the state is in a better position should another public health crisis hit now?

>> The state is in a better position should another public health crisis hit now.

>> Absolutely no question.

That arm's length report and the work that we have done to work on its recommendations puts us in a dramatically different and better place.

>> Another area that was a big lift, New Jersey transit.

>> Early on you had to get positive train control equipment installed by a federal deadline.

That was a big lift that you had to accomplish before you could even start tackling all of the other systemic issues.

There's still, of course, reliability issues.

We've talked about this.

I've spoken with Chris Colori about it quite a bit.

Why is it so difficult to make those improvements?

Where do you think the next administration should pick up here?

Here's the challenge.

If your train was late this morning and you missed a class or you had to get to work late, you're really upset and I don't blame you.

So I get that.

But look at the arc arch of history.

The facts eight years ago versus today.

This is a dramatically different organization measured in every respect.

You mentioned positive train control.

So measured in safety on time performance customer satisfaction.

We are in the process of replacing literally every rail car and every bus in the system.

We've made historic investments in stations.

The expectation and I get it I don't blame people for this is that you've got a thousand that every train is on time that every moment you're you're you're maximizing you're batting a thousand.

I want that to be the case.

The fact of the matter is public transit anywhere doesn't bat a thousand.

Yeah our batting average is dramatically better.

You know what you change the funding in terms of the funding sources from from one shots to a combination of things but the corporate transit fee which will end at the end of 2028 what what will happen to that and what are you what advice are you giving to the administration.

The notion is the following that we needed a revenue not a permanent revenue source, that we had evidence and we still have evidence that NJ Transit can be on its own feet financially and fiscally.

Plus or minus period was about a seven year period.

And that's that's where we landed.

Chris Calori is doing a fabulous job.

And again the system has never been stronger.

Is it perfect.

No but it's never been stronger.

One of the other areas in affordability that we're still faced with now obviously are energy costs.

Which is something that I know your administration is still working to tackle in these last few weeks.

But I mean you came in.

You said you wanted 100 percent clean energy by 2035.

It's less than a decade really from now.

And offshore wind was a major part of that.

Obviously faced a lot of hurdles, not the least of which was the Trump administration halting those projects.

And I wonder, given the fact that they've also cut funding for solar, if you feel the state can still hit its goal to that end without the support of the federal government?

It's hard.

And the Trump team is making it hard.

They haven't really impacted us on solar.

We're leading the nation.

We're actually in the press today.

Top three state and community solar in America with New York and Oregon.

We've set records there.

We're also leading the nation in energy storage.

But 11.5 gigawatts, which if folks are watching at home, that's power to basically light up a million and a half homes.

That's what the Trump team has taken off the table in offshore wind.

I think it's a very significant mistake.

And you play the hand you're dealt.

If you're the Texas governor, you're sitting on oil and gas, I get it.

You're going to maximize that hand.

We're sitting on 140 miles of shoreline with a very advantageous undersea shelf that goes out many tens of miles.

Offshore wind is a no-brainer for New Jersey.

I'm optimistic that at some point down the road, we'll get back there.

There was a positive judicial, federal judicial ruling this week.

We'll see how that shakes out.

It's too obvious.

It's too smart not to pursue it.

I hope we get back to that.

Fair enough.

Another item, as I was looking back through all of the years, you ran on having an open government.

There's been a number of legislative changes to transparency laws, open the Open Public Records Act, the Election Transparency Act, even just the way that the budget happens, right, with those last minute add-ons that often come under criticism.

Why did you believe those changes were needed?

First of all, we've got a laundry list of things that we did that are in the good government transparency space.

The one we didn't get done is one of the ones you just mentioned, which is I'd love the end of the budget process to have a longer open window, if you will.

>> I think the budget is almost $60 billion.

About 98% of it is part of the budget presentation that the governor makes in late February, early March.

It's out there for months.

It's the last sliver of it.

And I'd love to see that change.

>> Do you feel like the administration lived up to what you said as far as -- >> Absolutely.

>> I'm proud we put in place.

We've run through several elections since the laws were changed, since that board has been in place.

Outstanding.

But you look at voting rights and how we've opened them up, what we did early on and what was acceptable or not as it relates to taking gifts in government.

There's a laundry list of about 20 steps we've taken that I'm incredibly proud of.

And transparency has been a big -- transparency and good transparency and good government have been big through lines in a lot of what we've done.

Very quickly, it's no secret, obviously, as we sit here, NJPBS itself faces potentially a closure on June 30th.

The state had appropriated funding to NJPBS for -- since about 2021.

That, of course, was cut significantly, 75% in the current budget.

Is it your sense generally that government shouldn't be involved in funding media, local journalism, that there should be a line there?

Yes and no.

I mean, first of all, I think I'm the only governor that ever funded it.

I know I'm the only governor -- I know I'm the number one funder of governors.

I'm not sure I'm the only one.

And like any budget, it's a combination of back and forth between the legislature and the governor's office.

I would like to see the model -- I think the model works.

I'd like to see a -- we're still working on creative solutions as we sit here.

And I hope we can find one, because it's a valuable voice.

And we need more voices and that's one thing that I also bemoan.

We're having a reception for friends of the press this weekend.

You are, yes you are, as you have done.

And that group is a lot smaller than it was eight years ago, and that's not a good thing.

Quickly, because I want to get to your legacy, New Jersey is getting ready to host the FIFA World Cup, which you poured significant time, energy, political capital into securing that.

Why was that so important to you, and do you see that as being part of your legacy?

I would think so.

Why was it important?

First of all, I love the sport, but that's not reason enough to do all the cartwheels that we did to get it.

Huge economic impact, several billion dollar economic impact into the region, shared by New Jersey and New York City.

It'll be 15 to 20,000 jobs.

It'll attract a million to two million visitors into the region.

A lot of really good reasons.

Plus, we've got great games.

And we have the World Cup final, which will be watched by three and a half to four billion people.

Aside from that, how do you want to be remembered?

One or two words.

We we did what we said we would do.

And in politics, that is not often the case.

We campaigned on an agenda that we actually, when we got into office, we actually executed and stayed true to.

Governor Murphy, thank you for sitting down with us today.

It's been a privilege to cover your administration and good luck to you from here.

Thank you for this.

Thank you for having me, as always.

That's going to do it for us tonight.

I'm Brianna Vannozzi.

For the entire team at NJ Spotlight News here in Newark, thanks for watching.

Have a good night.

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