Christie Not Worried About Lack Of Action [AUDIO]

For weeks, Governor Chris Christie has been bashing the Democrat-controlled State Senate and General Assembly for not taking action on bills he claims will help cut your property taxes.

Christie constantly refers to what he calls the, "Do Nothing Legislature."

Christie has been calling for sweeping education reforms like making it easier to fire bad teachers and merit pay to reward good ones. He wants the legislature to eliminate huge end-of-career payouts to public workers for their unused sick and vacation time. He's also demanding real reform to the state's civil service regulations so more towns can be free to share services and consolidate.

Today, both the Senate and the Assembly have scheduled voting sessions. The aforementioned bills are nowhere to be found on the board list for either house. Perhaps, surprisingly Christie didn't seem to be sweating it yesterday when he was in Pennsauken to announce $2 million in funding for the Food Bank of South Jersey.

The legislature is in a lame duck session. New members will take the oath of office in early January. While some names will change, the makeup of both houses will stay almost exactly the same. Democrats still control the Senate by the same margin they did before the November elections. The Democrats' advantage in the Assembly has actually increased by one member.

Christie still thinks some pretty significant things can get done before January 9, but if that doesn't happen it's not a big deal. He says he'll give the State of the State Address on the 10th and then it's back to work for everybody.

"Lame duck this year is not as significant as it was two years ago because you're not really changing anything," explained Christie yesterday. "The numbers are barely changing. The leadership at the top level is not changing and the Governor's not changing so I think it's more of an artificial deadline."

The Governor said, "Two years ago you had a (Democratic) Governor (Jon Corzine) leaving office so there was a hysteria around the fact that I was coming to town and great fear and loathing in the legislature about the evil Republican that's coming to town so let's get as much stuff done as we possibly can before he gets here and can veto it."

Christie said the reason we're not seeing the frenetic pace of two years ago is because he's having, "really productive conversations staff-to-staff and me with the legislative leaders behind the scenes…..We're working hard together to get things moving and get things positioned to get done. If we weren't talking to each other I'd be more concerned, but since we are I'm not all that worried about it."