The odds looks pretty good that New Jersey will have a lieutenant governor in the next year or two. Our last two governors left office early, and the NJ constitution allows the senate president to assume the office in an acting role until the next election. That will change if we get an elected lieutenant governor who would then step in to take the office if the governor left early.

But as this article in the Bergen Record reminds us, the job really doesn’t do too much. Other states have found that the job of lieutenant governor is very ill-defined with very few roles for the position, leading to a lot of critism by government watchdog groups. In Maryland, one of the newspapers called called its lieutenant governor “The Wanderer,” after he went on a bunch of taxpayer-funded trips to France, Ghana and South Africa.

And of course, once you create a lieutenant governor job, that person will need an ever growing staff. In Illinois, the lieutenant governor has a $2 million budget and dozens of aides, even though his job description is one sentence long “perform the duties … delegated to him by the governor.” Seems like mostly the lieutenant governor serves on committees or leads some blue ribbon panel in a pet project, like literacy or domestic violence.

The NJ job will probably pay over $100,000 a year and you will get to hire a staff, probably get a state car and stuff like that. Hmm … sounds pretty good to me. I wonder where I send my resume.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 24th, 2005 at 6:56 am and is filed under New Jersey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.