James Joseph Florio (29 August 1937 – 25 September 2022) was a member of the US House of Representatives (D-NJ 1) from 3 January 1975 to 16 January 1990 (succeeding John E. Hunt and preceding Rob Andrews) and Governor of New Jersey from 16 January 1990 to 18 January 1994 (succeeding Thomas Kean and preceding Christine Todd Whitman). He was the first Governor of New Jersey of Italian descent.
Biography[]
James Joseph Florio was born in Flatbush, Brooklyn, New York City, New York in 1937, and he was an amateur boxer before serving in the US Navy from 1955 to 1958, later becoming assistant city attorney for Camden, New Jersey and being mentored by Democratic politician Angelo Errichetti. He went on to serve in the General Assembly from 1970 to 1975, in the US House of Representatives from 1975 to 1990, and Governor of New Jersey from 1990 to 1994. In the US Congress, he authored laws to clean up the most polluted sites in the country, to save the nation's freight railroads, and co-sponsored the bill which created the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. After several unsuccessful gubernatorial bids, he was elected Governor in 1989, inheriting a budget deficit caused by the late 1980s-early 1990s recession. He oversaw a tax raise which balanced the budget, increased property tax relief programs, and increased education spending, and he also eliminated 1,500 government jobs and cut perks for state officials. His tax raises and his redistribution of millions of dollars in school aid from suburban school districts to urban ones resulted in the Democrats losing their majority in the state legislature in 1991, and he lost re-election to the Republican Christine Todd Whitman in 1993. Afterwards, he mounted a failed bid for the US Senate in 2000, served as the Chairman of the New Jersey Pinelands Commission from November 2002 to June 2005, criticized George W. Bush's presidential administration and the Iraq War, and taught at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. He died in 2022 at the age of 85.