“People focus on the big companies a lot, but small businesses are the big employers in the state, and if you look at where we’re going to get employment going forward, it’s going to be small business more than anything else,” said Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Phil Murphy standing in the 18th Street Farm Fresh Market on Broadway.
“Look down Broadway. You don’t see Apple, you don’t see General Motors. These are small businesses, and they need leadership from the state.” – Phil Murphy
Murphy, the former ambassador to Germany under President Barack Obama, is coming off a commanding victory in the primary election in June. He doubled the number of votes of the next strongest performers, Assemblyman John Wisniewski and Jim Johnson, combined. He’s in full campaign mode, with the November elections coming up fast, where he will face Republican Kim Guadagno, who served as Lieutenant Governor under Gov. Christopher Christie.
Bayonne is a city of small businesses, unlike Hoboken, which is home to major corporations like Jet and Pearson, or Jersey City, with offices that house Advance Digital, Forbes, Mack Cali, and Murphy’s former employer, Goldman Sachs.
Murphy, who visited Bayonne on Friday, July 21, said, “Look down Broadway. You don’t see Apple, you don’t see General Motors. These are small businesses, and they need leadership from the state.”
Instead of Microsoft or Exxon Mobil, Broadway houses small businesses like Herbert’s Army and Navy store, Hendrickson’s Corner, and Garden State News. “You don’t see places like this anymore,” Murphy said at Garden State News, which provides perhaps the widest selection of print news and magazines in town. “I love it.”
Half-banked
Murphy is not known as a progressive thought leader, but rather, by many, as another financier running for office. However, he brings both progressivism and finance to the table with an old idea from a populist uprising in North Dakota a century ago and adapted for modern capitalism –a public bank.
“You ask a small business person the reason you didn’t get bigger, what’s the reason your business failed, why you couldn’t get started to begin with; it’s invariably [lack of] capital,” Murphy said. “So one of our ideas is to start a public bank that the citizens would own. And one of the main lines of business would be lending money to small businesses through community banks. So we’d work with community banks, not compete with them. We want to get more capital to them and through them.”
A public bank would, in theory, funnel tax revenue through local community banks, such as Bayonne Community Bank, to provide loans and credit to small businesses and help fund small-scale infrastructure projects, while returning the profits from interest back into state coffers. It could be a more efficient way to lend than the current system, which relies heavily on a few multinational financial conglomerates and a shrinking number of community banks.
Skepticism about the idea abounds in the finance hub of New Jersey, which ranks dead last in fiscal health in an annual George Mason University Mercatus Center study. Meanwhile, North Dakota, which created its public bank in 1919, and remains the only state to ever have done so, ranks second.
Garnering support
Murphy is shoring up early support in Hudson County, a vital political battleground for any gubernatorial candidate. His tour through Bayonne was facilitated by Assemblyman Nicholas Chiaravalloti, Mayor James Davis, Bayonne Business Administrator Joe DeMarco, and members of the Bayonne City Council, who were on hand for the event.
“I think it’s great that he came out. Hopefully he can make an impact,” said City Council President Sharon Ashe-Nadrowski. “It’s not every day you get an opportunity like this.”
Mayor James Davis, who first met Phil Murphy before he ran for mayor, strongly supports his candidacy. Davis said the most vital policy decision Murphy can make as governor would be to create an equitable and stable school funding policy.
“The thing is, you have to turn around and make it fair for everybody,” Davis said. “I really believe that is going to be one of the staples of his administration. I think school funding is going to become fair for everybody in the state.” He’s confident that Murphy’s experience in finance will be an advantage. “I really believe that his fiscal prowess is going to be something that he is going to show in the first two years of his administration.”
Murphy has heavily criticized Christie’s school funding policies in the past, and said on Friday that more resources need to be dedicated to infrastructure improvements and public education to achieve fiscal health for communities across the state.
“The fact of the matter is, we haven’t had investment in public infrastructure,” Murphy said. “We’ve taken money from infrastructure, from public education. We haven’t really done much for small businesses over the past seven and half years.”
