Princeton Plan

Amid the popping of firecrackers, the sloshing of wet towels and the laugh of horseplaying members the New Jersey legislature adjourned one dawn last week after one of the longest sessions on record.

Of the 41 State legislatures which opened regular sessions last winter, New Jersey's was one of the last to go home. It left behind a legislative record that made fresh fodder for the old argument: Should State governments be abolished as political anachronisms and their administrative authority divided up among fen regional districts, as recommended by Ohio State University's Professor Peter H. Odegard, or turned over to their largest and richest cities, as favored by University of Chicago's Professor Simeon Eldridge Leland?

As in every other State, the New Jersey Legislature fussed and fiddled over a stack of legislative trivialities with which its critics contend it should not concern itself. Passed were bills to license barbers, to accept Grover Cleveland's birthplace at Caldwell as public property, to register lodge emblems. Though it ducked a sales tax and beat a horse racing & betting bill. its more important enactments followed a national trend. As in three other States, it required automobiles to be equipped with safety glass in the near future. As in 33 other States, it took control of beer sales.* As in three other States, it sanctioned public housing corporations as R. F. C. borrowers for slum clearance. Also, following a nation-wide trend, it passed a new alimony code and the smallest appropriation bill in a decade.

Before the Legislature when it met Jan. 10 was an opportunity to do a man-sized job reforming and modernizing the State Government. If it had taken that opportunity in full, as Iowa took it, State Government would have had fewer critics today. Last year Governor Arthur Harry Moore asked Princeton University to survey the New Jersey Government, recommend improvements. Put in charge of the survey was Dr. Harold Willis Dodds, Princeton's famed political expert. For three months he and 20 assistants combed the State bureaucracy, turned in on Jan. 1 a 125,000 word report showing how New Jersey could cut expenses $7,657,000. up revenue $6,356,000. His job done. Dr. Dodds went on to greater things. He was elected Princeton's president. He was feted at Yale. He became a national figure. But last week Dr. Dodds was not too busy to glance back at Trenton and see what the Legislature had done with his recommendations.

It had not abolished the four-man State Highway Commission. In New Jersey, as in Georgia (see col. 2) and many another State, highway boards mean patronage and votes to politicians. It had not cut the State's production of more teachers than it could employ. It had not plugged up exemption leaks in the gasoline tax. It had not boosted the license fees for trucks. It had not adopted a pay-as-you-go road building program.

But, on the last evening of the session it did pass Dr. Dodds' most important recommendation, thereby taking a long step toward establishing an executive budget. (At Harvard last week that master of State Government, Alfred Emanuel Smith, loudly declared that such a budget was the most crying governmental need today.) New Jersey's bill created the job of State Fiscal Commissioner, to be appointed by the Governor and solely responsible to him. The Commissioner was authorized to suspend or withhold appropriations, reduce personnel, save much money. The Legislature was still to fix the maximum appropriation but the Governor was to control its minimum spending. Senator Dryden Kuser, the measure's sponsor, hurried across to the Assembly chamber to speed it through. The legislative wags put a cup of ice water in his chair, tossed an exploding firecracker at his feet. As he backed toward the door escorted by two Assemblymen who playfully tickled his ribs, a chair was hurled at him. It missed its mark, went clattering to the corridor floor. Then and then only was the Assembly ready to pass Senator Kuser's bill.

*Because its beer law expires Sept. 1, the legislature will reassemble Aug. 29 to make it permanent.

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