by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

February 12, 2009

Inspired by his mother, a Sunday school teacher at Temple Concord in Syracuse, NY, Jon Shure was “pointed at an early age in the direction of how people treated each other.”

Following her lead, Shure told New Jersey Jewish News, he has been a newspaper reporter, press secretary to a former New Jersey governor, and founder of NJ Policy Perspectives, one of the leading political think-tanks in the state.

As of next month, he will transfer his expertise on fiscal issues from one state to all 50. Shure will become deputy director of the State Fiscal Project at the 80-person Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, DC.

“I’ll be doing the same thing I’ve been doing but on a larger scale — working on state tax and budget issues, but with an eye toward how federal policies affect all the states and what the states can do to make sure they provide services,” he said three weeks before his departure.

His new portfolio will deal with federal allocations to states as well as the states’ own systems for raising and spending money.

“There is a network of state organizations that we will be working with in trying to develop progressive policies for taxing and meeting the needs of the people. We’ll be conducting research, showing one state what other states are doing, and helping state groups share information with each other. Each group is working hard in its state but may not have a sense of what is going on in other states,” he said.

Shure’s motivation — he said — comes straight from his mother’s teachings at the Reform synagogue of his youth.

“We all needed to help each other — especially those who had less opportunity,” he said. “That was part of the force that got me thinking about these issues in the first place.”

Shure moved to New Jersey from Syracuse in February 1975 to become a reporter for The Bergen Record. Twelve years later he signed on as press secretary to Jim Florio, the Democrat representing New Jersey’s First Congressional District, and remained in that job when Florio served as governor from 1990 to 1994.

Three years later, Shure founded NJPP “with the belief that there needed to be broader debate on tax and budget issues. We thought it was time to get ideas about taxes into the public more. Right-wing anti-government people were not just winning debates, they were shaping the terms of the debate. I felt very strongly if you don’t get in at the beginning and shape the terms of the debate, you will never win.”

He said that being at the center of such controversies “did not make me want to run for office. It made me want to run from office.

“Working in government was a good experience — I saw there were good people in government trying to do the right thing — but I saw what they were up against.”

Shure clings to the belief that “progressive policy means an underlying belief that government has an active role to play. Relying on the market alone will not bring prosperity to everyone. We as a state or a nation are all in this together, and the longer we go on as two nations — one prosperous and one struggling — the worse the outlook is for our democracy.”

Ben Dworkin, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University in Lawrenceville, knows Shure from academic conferences and considers him “a real talent.”

“The fact that he is going to work in Washington is a compliment to his skills and abilities,” said Dworkin. “He offers an unabashedly liberal and progressive voice on the role of government and was a benefit to the debate in New Jersey.”

“I have a high regard for Jon, but that doesn’t mean I agree with him,” said Steve Some, a Republican lobbyist at Capital Public Affairs, a bipartisan lobbying and public relations firm in Princeton.

“He has been extremely effective in pushing policy issues. He is viewed by policy makers from all sides of the debate as a person of integrity. He is such a presence among the policy makers that when he leaves, there will be a major void from the perspective he represents,” said Some.

As Shure prepares to turn his office over to Mary Fosberg, the NJJP research director who will become its interim president, he and his wife, Janice Conklin, are trying to sell their solar-powered home in Ewing Township while they hunt for a house in a Maryland suburb.

Shure said leaving the organization he fathered “was a hard decision because I love what I’m doing. But this is a wonderful opportunity and a chance to work on state issues on a wider scale.”

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