Richard Fortunato's campaign website highlights the following issues:

• Every decision the Legislature makes seems to be governed by what's best for special interests, not the people. Special interests contribute enormous amounts of money to Assembly campaigns, including to Mr. Green and Mr. Kennedy (especially Mr. Green!) and so what the special interests want is what the Legislature does.
• What's best for the people doesn't seem to matter.
• That won't be true for me. I've never held public office before and my campaign bank account surely doesn't contain hundreds of thousands of dollars contributed by special interests.

• I'll work towards making New Jersey a better place for businesses to start up, stay and expand and not leave the State. The government ought to make sure businesses don't take advantage of their workers, but there is a balance that needs to be there. Government can't be "anti-business" and at the same time expect businesses to stay here and give people good jobs.

• We need to work to lower real estate taxes. I will work to lower real estate taxes. The underlying issue is the way the State funds local school districts. School funding in New Jersey needs to be reformed so that funds are allocated with more of an emphasis on the number of students in a school district, and not so much on the basis of esoteric formulas put in place by the New Jersey Courts. If funds were allocated more on the basis of the number of students in a district, there would not be a need for local real estate taxes to be as high as they are now.

• We need to move towards a system where new employees are enrolled in 'defined defined contribution plans' (401(k)'s for example), existing employees going forward should be phased into defined benefit plans and vested benefits under the current retirement plans should be valued and replaced with either cash (based on present values) which the employee can put into a self-directed IRA, or with a funded tax-deferred annuity from a qualified insurance company (where the annuity is designed to pay approximately the same pension benefit as was originally agreed).
• This approach will require the State to put up cash to fund the payout of its existing plans. The State, unfortunately, would have to borrow that money. The upside to this approach is that the total dollar amount is finalized, with no other additional obligations on the part of the State. So while that number will be large, it will be final. And when it comes to financial matters and the debt markets and rating agencies, certainty counts for a lot.

• I will work to make more choices available to parents, grandparents and others who responsible for the education of children.
• One option that should be available is 'education savings accounts'. With this, the local school district would make available to any parent or guardian an amount of money (for example 90% of what the district would spend on the child) for each school age child, and the parent or guardian would be able to spend that money on education related expenses, such as books, and also for tuition at any school which satisfies basic state qualification requirements. Arizona has this program. We should too.
• Another option would be to look at a voucher system. This would be similar to the GI Bill set up after World War II. With this, each parent or guardian would receive for each school age child a voucher worth a certain amount of money that could be spent to pay the expenses of sending the child to any qualified school. The school could be the local public school, another public school nearby, or a private school, as long as the school met certain minimum qualifications.