Florio, who as a congressman in the 1970s wrote the primary Superfund legislation known as the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act, or CERCLA, stressed the importance of environmental responsibility as a driver of commercial development.

“We were an industrial state for a long time, and in the old days, people didn't pay attention to environmental problems,” Florio says. “We created a lot of Superfund sites, hazardous waste dump sites. We have to appreciate the fact that not having access to clean water, having a proliferation of hazardous waste sites does not help economic development. This shouldn't be a debate between economic development and environmental sensitivity. You're not going to have one without the other.”

Florio is complimentary of newly inaugurated Gov. Phil Murphy's programs, which include increasing state investments in transit, education and environmental projects.

“He talked about the fact that if we want to have a New Jersey transit system that works well, if we want affordable higher education, if we want to have preschool for all our students, we're going to have to have revenues, which means raising taxes,” he says. “He campaigned on that, which is interesting, and was successful. I think he has the opportunity to do some courageous things, because in some respects, spending is not the problem in New Jersey, revenues are. To have revenues, you have to raise taxes, and that's never a popular thing to do.”

Florio thinks voters will accept an honest conversation about taxes, and the so-called “millionaires tax” is part of a common-sense approach.

“Nothing is for nothing,” he says. “We can either pay for fixing our roads or we can have holes in our roads. We can pay for fixing our infrastructure, bridges, tunnels, or we can wait until the bridges and tunnels fall apart. Life is about choices. We know that in our home life, why should it be any different when we talk about government?”

The current political climate poses difficulties to reaching compromises, Florio says. The staging of every political argument in a “winner-take-all” context leaves little room for the compromise and negotiation of past political debates, he says.

“It's much more polarized,” he says. “There was much more opportunity for a degree of collaboration with the opposition. There was tension, but it was never really as venomous as it is now. That's troubling, because you can't resolve problems without forming a consensus.”