By the end of this month, the Legislature will have passed, and the Governor signed, a new spending plan that will carry New Jersey through the next 12 months…probably.

That done, the Legislature will recess for the summer. As that recess draws to an end, the fierce campaigns for all 40 seats in the state Senate and all 80 seats in the General Assembly will begin. And as the last of the informative and thought provoking campaign ads fades to black, we will all prepare for our annual League Conference.

The reason we gather year after year was artfully expressed by the only New Jersey Governor ever to call the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue his home…so far. “We should not only use the brains we have, but all that we can borrow,” was the sage advice of President Woodrow Wilson.

None of us can be so arrogant as to believe that we, or our municipality, or our part of the state, or our party has all the answers to all the questions that confront a municipal official in the Garden State in the second half of the first decade of the new millennium. But neither should any of us be so modest of our talents and experience as to believe that we cannot contribute to the solutions. We all stand under the same sky, but we all see different horizons.

We hope to see you at the Conference because of the things you have in common with all of your peers in local government, here in New Jersey. And we hope you’ll be there, because of your unique perspective on the problems, possibilities and the promise of municipal government for the people of our Garden State.
Elsewhere in this issue, you’ll find an outline of the upcoming conference. Use that to begin to plan how to use your time most effectively. Be on the lookout for updates in the mail, as well as at our website www.njslom.com.

Editorial from New Jersey Municipalities, Volume 84, Number 6, June 2007