Exclusive: Murphy on drones, clemency, the state’s finances – and a Chappell Roan fave

By the New Jersey State House News Service reporting team

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy is as curious as most New Jerseyans about reports of mysterious drones hovering in the night skies for the past several weeks, but he also wonders whether the issue may be overblown.

Drones were the buzziest topic in an exclusive interview with New Jersey State House News Service, and he also talked about the state’s economy, an upcoming announcement on New Jersey’s clemency program and the potential effect in New Jersey of President-elect Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies.

Murphy, a 67-year-old Democrat, also reflected on seven years in office and shared plans for his final 12 months. By law, he can’t run for a third term. Another elective office isn’t calling him. 

“Will I ever run again? In this moment, probably not,” he said. “But I wouldn’t say never, never, never.”

Asked about residents’ most pressing concern – dozens of alleged sightings of pilotless aircraft over military installations, reservoirs, neighborhoods and elsewhere – Murphy said he had no explanation. 

“I think there’s a significant amount of over-reporting,” he said. Some people may be mistaking planes for drones, he said, or “seeing things that actually aren’t there, but we’re thinking we saw them.” 

Murphy even shared a snippet from Wrapped, the year-end favorites list that Spotify users are sharing on social media. Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” beat out “Pink Pony Club” for him, he said, acknowledging most of that play was during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August:  “We had a big Chappell run.” 

Here are major points from the 30-minute interview. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

What’s in the sky at night?:

Our folks, our homeland security people, our state troopers in particular – they’re doing an outstanding job. We are not equipped, nor do we have the legal authority, to the airspace. It’s the federal government’s purview. The Department of Defense, the Pentagon came out and said they had no evidence at all of a national security threat, of a public safety threat, of any foreign actors. So forget what I think. I’m going to defer to them.

This happens, apparently, from time to time. I’m told that Virginia last year, in and around a particular area, had a whole lot of this and then all of a sudden they stopped. 

I don’t know where this ends. Over-reporting, double counting, ‘I think I saw it, but I’m not really sure I saw it’ – the numbers, I think, are a lot smaller. There’s a little bit of a panic setting in on something like this. 

This reminds me of the early days of Covid. You need to be calm, steady, put your head down. Base your decisions on the facts as opposed to some hysteria. And some public officials are letting us down in that respect, in my opinion. So there’s no need to panic, on the one hand, based on everything I’ve been told.  On the other side of it, you have to take it very, very seriously, and we are doing just that.

Non-violent offenders serving comparatively excessive sentences:

We announced six months ago a sort of nation-leading clemency initiative. We’re going to put names to that on Monday – either pardons or commutations. Commutations literally means reaching into a corrections facility and pulling someone out, and they’re free. That’s pretty cool. Parole reform is something else we want to get to in terms of equity.

The state’s economic future:

We have a bunch of innovation hubs. Think of them as seeds that we’re planting for future start-up communities. One of the most exciting ones that we’re working on is a joint venture with Princeton University on generative artificial intelligence. We’re going to have some big corporate news to break in the next month or so related to that. 

New Jersey was mismanaged, and it was mismanaged for decades. But we largely held on to the big corporations. Where we lost our way completely was in the start-up community. When you’re trying to attract companies to come here, or keep companies that are here to stay here, it’s expensive. What’s a lot cheaper is if they’re born here. So getting a start-up culture where you’re spinning out literally hundreds of start-ups a year is, we think, the name of the game. 

The state of Washington, within a few years, or I guess a decade or more, birthed both Microsoft and Amazon. And they have, between them, market capitalization of  $3 trillion to $5 trillion in value. That’s what we’d love: to have Microsoft or Amazon to be born here.

Sequel to the state’s $56.7 billion annual budget:

We’re in a little bit of a challenge. We’re spending more than we’re taking in – deliberately, post-pandemic – but we have to, sort of, begin to reverse that. We have a hiring freeze in place. We have a structural deficit. We wanted to come out of the pandemic on fire, and we largely have. We deliberately deficit spent. 

You can’t do that, if you’re in New Jersey, forever. So we have to begin to correct that, which is why we froze and we’re asking for cuts across the board. I don’t know what they’ll look like yet, but it won’t be pain-free for sure. I have to sign a balanced budget by June 30 at the latest every year. And we’ve deliberately deficit-spent because we had a massive surplus, and we were able to say, you know, we can eat into that. But now we have to sort of begin to level that out. We haven’t come up with the plan yet, but it’ll be austere. 

I’m hoping we’ll have a very significant amount of property tax relief, though, which we’ve set records with the past several years, and I’ll be disappointed if we don’t continue to have a big program.

Congestion pricing to fund Manhattan mass transit, with fees for driving in Midtown starting Jan. 5. New Jersey has sued to block the initiative, arguing that it will tie up traffic and increase air pollution:

None of the money that it raises comes to us to mitigate that pollution. If I had been the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York, I would have thought maybe we’ll give Jersey some money to help them deal with that pollution. That has not happened.

It’s an enormous burden even at $9. They lowered it from $15 to $9 and made out like that was a deal. It’s not a deal. It’s a lot of money. And we had hoped there would be a system in place to get credit against that $9, and that does not appear to be in the cards. If we lose in court, we’re going to know pretty soon.

The incoming Trump administration and anti-immigration policy:

We had three years alongside him in his first go-round. And when I leave here, in a year from January, I will have been the longest-serving, at that moment, Democratic governor alongside a Trump administration. I believe that should lead to battle pay or something. The reason I say that is we’ve got a sense of the playbook.

If our values are attacked, if innocent individuals are attacked, if communities that are innocent are attacked, we’re going to fight like hell. And at the same time, if we can find common ground and we have been able to with him, we will do that as well. 

On deportations: using facilities in the state, that’s a problem. 

You go after an innocent individual who fled persecution, fled personal violence to come to America, the world’s immigration state, the beacon on the hill. They’re here for all the right reasons. They’re good, law-abiding individuals. That’s a real problem, or even more so if it is an American citizen. And the fear that I have is that it’s going to be a blunt action as opposed to a surgical action. 

The undocumented individuals who legally have their driver’s licenses are probably going to be targets, as opposed to the right to have that license. We’re preparing. Legal action is almost certainly going to be at the core of whatever response we have.

On his 2023 signing of a bill that recognized Central Jersey as a region, to the wrath of residents who cling to only North or South:

Stephen Colbert, out of the blue, came to us and said: We want you to come on the show and talk about why Central Jersey exists. I said OK. And I remember saying: I don’t think this is that funny, but he’s the comedian, not me. 

But yes, it does exist. It’s a mystical place, is what I called it. 

And the guys in Ocean County came to me and said: Please don’t suck us in. We like being in South Jersey. I said: OK. We’re cool. You stay in South Jersey. 

I think everyone’s kind of at peace with the North, Central, South now. 

Proudest second-term achievement:

I’d say probably getting us back on our feet after the pandemic, if just to pick one. And that’s not to say the pandemic wasn’t a tragedy or crushing. We lost 35,000 people. But I think we’ve gotten back on our feet, considering that overwhelming tragedy, as well as we could have. 

I’m particularly proud, although I can’t believe it, but I’m told it’s true that we’re the only American state or any level of government that commissioned an arm’s-length, full-bore, soup-to-nuts postmortem on our pandemic response. What worked and what didn’t work, and what we need to change for future administrations. 

My definition of arm’s-length: The first time we saw it was the day it was published. Some of these reports you get a chance to give your comments in advance. Our decision was we didn’t want to be that guy. We want to see it the day you put it out there.

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Editor’s note: This interview was conducted on Dec. 12, 2024, in the State House media room by New Jersey State House News Service reporters Skye Frawley, Gary Love, Umehani Rehmanji, Jenna Rittman and Lila Swietanski.