News

NJ: Christie vetoes bill to give NJ Legislature a say in lottery privatization plan. Chris Christie today vetoed a bill that would have required him to get the state Legislature’s approval to go ahead with a plan to privatize parts of the New Jersey Lottery. Both the state Senate and Assembly passed the bill (A3614) earlier this year amid concerns from Democratic lawmakers that the plan has been cloaked in secrecy. Assemblyman Vincent Prieto (D-Hudson), one of the most vocal critics of the plan, said the veto puts Christie “squarely against public transparency and oversight” and was “sadly not surprising.” Hunterdon County Democrat

OH: Gubernatorial candidate warns against privatizing state agencies. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ed FitzGerald….used as an example the problems that are going on now with JobsOhio which was created when the Ohio Department of Development was privatized under Governor John Kasich. “You’ve got millions and millions of dollars going into a private corporation, what they’re calling JobsOhio, and it’s a secret as to how the money is spent,” FitzGerald said. “Now you’ve got the state auditor investigating them and subpoenaing the records to try and figure out how the money is being spent and, on behalf of the taxpayers, trying to figure out what has happened.” FitzGerald called the problems outrageous. Wilmington News Journal

The Uncertain Future of Public Roads. “The notion right now is that PPPs are the solution to the problem of not being able to use public funding as much, and that it becomes a win-win situation,” says Elliott Sclar, director of the Center for Sustainable Urban Development at Columbia University. “Right now that’s the conventional wisdom, but if you actually look at what happened to so many PPPs, you begin to see where these problems are going to begin to creep up.”  The Atlantic Cities

Fannie, Freddie Study Privatization of Multifamily Business. Privatizing the profitable multifamily businesses of Fannie Mae FNMA -0.61% and Freddie Mac FMCC 0.00% would do little to repay taxpayers for their government bailouts of the firms, and while the new companies might be viable, they would play a much smaller role in the market, according to new reports published by companies at the request of their regulator. The Federal Housing Finance Agency asked both companies last year to study the feasibility of privatizing the multifamily units, which sustained minimal losses during the housing market crash, in contrast with the hundreds of billions in losses at the companies’ single-family loan-guarantee businesses.  Wall Street Journal