Hmmm… A couple of highly paid assistants, a few dozen runs to Starbucks and lobster lunches on the state credit card, or any number of other executive level perks vs. public toilets for taxpayers and tourists who spend money in the state plus firing a bunch of low paid workers who really need paychecks. Yup. The choice is obvious.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie wants to shut the last two rest-stop bathrooms on non-toll roads in the most densely populated U.S. state after this year to save $270,000.
“We just don’t have the money for the bathroom facilities,” Christie’s transportation commissioner, James Simpson, told members of the Senate Budget and Appropriations committee today during a hearing on his department’s $1.24 billion budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1.
[…]
The closings will eliminate 18 maintenance positions, according to the department’s written response to questions from the nonpartisan Office of Legislative Services.
[…]
Christie, a Republican who took office Jan. 19, last month proposed a $29.3 billion budget that includes $10 billion of spending reductions to help close a $10.7 billion deficit.
Found by Mr. Kevin
@UncleDave I guess you failed to read to the end “…$10 billion of spending reductions…” – definitely much more have been done than 270000 in bathroom closings. There is no money left after Leftist spending binge. 10Bil represents about 1/3 of the budget, I am sure that perk-assistants and lunches for spending lobby are included in the number too. Now if Obama would cut 1/3 of Federal budget…
Uncle Dave’s classic democrat crying trick doesn’t work anymore. The citizens of New Jersey are fed up with the waste and put Christie in as governor to clean up the mess.
And he is doing a bang up job. The only ones squealing are the union thugs and teacher unions.
Uncle Dave, your post is way off base.
That’s some ‘spensive toilets.
No pay as you “go?”
Couple of cleaners, some electricity, water bills = $270K
Contractors to erect closed signs.
Police to close road while signs installed
Rental of portable signs
Security for the closed bathrooms
Highway Police checks to make sure nobody is stopped to ‘go’ in the woods
Extra crashes due to people not taking rest breaks
Probably 10-100x the saving.
Remember when the rejected the budget under Clinton and the parks service hired 1000s of temporary workers to stand on trails and tell hikers they were closed.
Christie is the scum of the earth. And jbenson2 isn’t far off.
Clearly the solution to our decrepit educational system is to force out all the really “old”, knowledgeable people who can actually teach and replace them with dumbasses willing to work for spit. Yes, let’s have people who can’t get a better paying job teaching our children. While you’re at it, break every contractual promise ever made to those “old timers” for which they put in so much time and effort. Give them a nice Frack You! on the way out the door.
Now sit back, look at the cost savings, and wonder why we’ve lost our dominance as a country. No one cares as long as their kid still gets an A on their report card. What short-sighted idiotic drivel.
What if we paid our teachers well? What if we paid them like doctors and lawyers? What if we made teaching a respected profession instead of one that constantly gets pissed on? And what if we allowed our kids to get F’s when they deserve them? We might actually end up with a better country!
So where do we get that money? Let’s start by making state legislatures (and hey, even Congress) a PART-TIME JOB. That’s right, you get a little bit of money for spending a week or two at the capital legislating, and then you go back to a real job among your constituents. No big salaries, no perks. And if you take an unpopular position during a vote, you’re fine with not getting re-elected because you have a real job. Then, once its no longer your livelihood, you won’t be suckling at lobbyist teat. Oh darn, can’t have that.
Let’s just frack our children’s future by making them dumb sheeple.
NJ is the toll road capitol of the world. I bet people are still paying insane amounts of tolls but the rest areas are closing.
“save $270,000.” “…eliminate 18 maintenance positions”
$15,000 split evenly not including benefits, electricity, water, …
Those must have been some great jobs. Or some great rest stops.
There’s a restaurant on nearly every single exit, and pretty much a gas station as well. Who the hell cares? Rest areas are an outdated relic of the days when you would drive 30 – 1 hour just to find an exit with usually nothing there. It’s time to move on.
>> trirnoth said, on April 22nd, 2010 at 6:05 pm
>> $15,000 split evenly not including benefits, electricity, water, …
>> Those must have been some great jobs. Or some great rest stops.
$15,000 a year for a state employee!! THAT’S OUTRAGEOUS!!!!
But untold HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS to war profiteers from our tax dollars in no bid contracts to deliver shoddy service?
The teabaggers think that’s FRIGGIN’ FANTASTIC! It’s free enterprise!
“Christie is the scum of the earth.”
Uh oh. Someone doesn’t like the fact that New Jersey residents have finally woken up to realize they are grossly overtaxed in order to feed the bloated government sector. Keep blaming Christie, and I encourage the many obese SEIU members to continue their death threats.
I live in Louisiana don’t bother us a bit we would just crap in the highway.
Vermont too. Most rest areas been closed and destroyed!
Vermont has closed Rest Area and turn them into parking only area. Well, when you stop at one of those do not lay on the the lawn. I had to stop and walk into a nice place to do some business and I’m not the first one.
Here in Alberta, there are only two rest stops on the most traveled highway (#2, 300km Calgary to Edmonton), one each way! Drivers have been rousted by Police for sleeping near the road, as there are no proper rest stops, and one I know of ended in a fatality due to driving tired. Our right wing gov’t is playing the same game as NJ, only we never had the rest stops in the first place! Professional truck drivers deserve safe places to stop. Period.
We did this here in Arizona a while ago.
Lou Minatti,
NJ has ridiculous taxes. Christie has promised not to raise them. Sounds great on the face of it. However, if you look closer you’ll see that rather than cutting the real pork in state government he’s cutting funding to the individual communities, mostly schools.
No community can run a school on the amount of funding Christie wants to provide, so they have to raise property taxes to make up the difference. Those politicians don’t care because they can go ahead and blame Christie. If you think that even a small percentage of the tax hikes NJ residents will see are going back the programs where state funding was cut, you’re an idiot. The local politicians are going to steal it all.
Oh, and for the record, a douche bag who gives a political speech at a middle school and tells the students that their teachers are “evil” and “the enemy” and they should go home and tell their parents that — He’s the scum of the earth.
How much dough did we piss away in Afghanistan today? Anybody have a figure? I thought not . . .
Let private industry take care of public toilets.
$1.00 to urinate
$5.00 to defacate
$10.00 to change your baby
$20.00 to vomit
For confused foreigners, a “public toilet” is a state run lavatory. These are placed along side of public highways in places known as “rest stops”. These are often nearby lonely and isolated places used by serial killers to dispose of their victims. Hence the name, rest stop.
I drove across AZ last week and noticed that state had closed all of theirs.
As someone who actually lives in NJ I can say its about time someone tried to clean up the mess this state has become.
I also went to a pretty well regarded HS and all these teachers that are supposedly “knowledgeable” are uninterested in anything that stops them from going through the motions of the class they’ve taught for the last 20 years. Most of them have no interest or concern for their students. Let them get a job where they have to work 12 months out of the year.
#23. isn’t that a long way to go to take a leak?
NJ is going down!!!! Economically…. The dollar is going down because of NJ!…. OOOHHHH!
It’s is the same as the doom scenario of Grece and the Euro.
What is going on with the woooorld?
California along hwy 5, which runs in a straight line for 1,000 miles down the state has closed a lot of ‘rest stops’
No worries! up here in Northern California, we just pull over and urinate into the canal that feeds our ‘water’ to LA.
We’ve had many people take a dump in the confessional booth.
Liberal Uncle Dave just can’t resist conservative bashing. The papers here in Jersey do the same…spinning every single thing Christie does to cut OUTRAGEOUS spending in this state, into some kind of heartless act of evil and callousness. The state was ridden into the ground by Corzine and Company…the liberal democrat nearly bankrupted the state with his idiotic policies, corruption. Where were the newspapers THEN? Where was all the great reporting then? When the budgets skyrocketed, corruption was everywhere, and NJ Govt. resembled a crime syndicate? Where were all the bleeding heart liberals crying out for justice? They were turning a blind eye, just like they did in California, and many other states, the Liberal run newspapers didnt care what Corzine did, now that we have an honest, hardworking, no nonsense guy like Christie, who is not afraid of making tough decisions to save the state, they bash him every single day, in every newspaper. I would fall down in shock if I ever read a headline praising Christies bravery, and unwavering resolution. They will never do that, because it fits nicely with their agendas to bash fiscal conservatism, because we all know, conservatism wont line these scumbags pockets the way they want.
I travel through and work in NJ just about every week. I have seen a few of these rest stops that are to be closed down. Most are not in isolated ares. In fact that majority are within an exit or two of a sheetz or wawa.
They should just do what they have done with the turnpike. Hand over maintenance of them to private industry.
They can be required to keep the restroom open 24 hours, provide at least the same level of security as before, and take care of cleaning and maintenance of the property. In return the company gets free rent and prime location just to the side of the interstate.
Of course you wouldn’t make anything of them, but you wouldn’t be losing money on them either.
The US is rising from affluence to poverty
#12 “$15,000 a year for a state employee!! THAT’S OUTRAGEOUS!!!!”
I bet they are all UNDOCUMENTED and just trying to help their family too.