State Senate candidate Richard Kanka today said he believes legislating pension and health benefits was the wrong way for the state to handle reform of the troubled programs.
Kanka, a member of the Plumbers and Pipefitters, said while he agrees the system had to change, collective bargaining and not legislation was the answer.
“Pension and benefits reform, if you look at how it was negotiated over the past 20 years and you look at the state’s inability to fund that program has put us in the position we are in now,” Kanka said. “I’m saying that if they wanted to make changes they should have sat down with all the entities that were in place such as the bargaining units and they should have worked out a deal. Legislatively is not the way to do it they should have done it through collective bargaining. Collective bargaining is the way we got the benefits, collective bargaining is the way they should have been taken away.”
Asked how he would have withstood heavy pressure from the GOP and Gov. Chris Christie to vote for the reform, Kanka said the governor and he would have had to agree to disagree.
“It’s not whether I’m going my own direction,” Kanka said. “We have to agree to disagree. And we’re going to agree on some things and we are going to disagree on some things. I’m my own person, I speak for myself.”
Kanka is running to unseat Democrat Linda Greenstein in the public worker-heavy 14th. Greenstein is immensely popular among union members and voted against the controversial pension and benefit reform bill. The bill passed in both houses of the Legislature with unanimous support from Republicans and tepid support mainly from South Jersey and Essex County Democrats.
