New Jersey’s voters will decide this November whether their State government should borrow $990 million to build transportation facilities, colleges, health and welfare institutions and housing to meet a backlog of needs that has been permitted to accumulate over decades.
This referendum is so fraught with far-reaching consequences for the very quality of life for New Jersey residents that even sedate businessmen and pragmatic politicians speak of it in apocalyptic pronouncements. Thus Governor Richard J. Hughes, whose political style is usually devoid of histrionics, chose these words to describe the State’s looming crisis in his message to the Legislature last April:
“We have reached the day of reckoning. And I tell you very seriously and respectfully that we must act in these two months before us or this State, over the next six years, will sink into stagnation and despair that will take a quarter of a century to overcome.”