The Trailblazer

Rutgers Magazine
Spring 2010
By Angela Delli Santi

Barbara Buono CLAW’79 is still setting precedent, this time becoming the first woman to serve as the majority leader of the New Jersey Senate.

When Barbara Buono CLAW’79 was elected to the New Jersey legislature in 1994, she was one of 14 women out of 120 making up the senate and assembly. It was a dismal percentage of women lawmakers—equal to that of Mississippi, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers.

Today, the number of women serving in Trenton has grown—there are now 34—but Buono, a Middlesex County Democrat now in her 16th year, is still blazing trails. Buono’s colleagues elevated her to the number two spot in the state senate, to majority leader, at the start of the legislative session in January—the first woman to hold the position.

After serving as a public defender for 18 months in Middlesex County, one of the few women practicing criminal defense law at the time, Buono says she was prepared to enter the male-dominated legislature. “It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling, being one of the few women in a field dominated by men,” she says. “It feels a lot better now in the senate. There aren’t a lot of us, but we have a core group, and we support one another. It makes a world of difference.”

While in the senate, the lifelong New Jerseyan has been an advocate for consumer and environmental protection, ending predatory lending practices, banning smoking in college and university dorms, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. As the recession took hold, she turned to economic issues. Recently, she put her name on a bill that would cap the amount of unused sick and vacation time retiring school and government employees can cash out.

Holding a leadership position in the majority party gives Buono the power to advance an agenda that includes reforming the state’s severely underfunded pension system and putting a lid on the state’s highest-in-the-nation property taxes. Those are two key issues on which Democrats like Buono are finding common ground with New Jersey’s new Republican governor, Chris Christie. On other issues, Buono says she’ll seek détente. “I’m committed to working through what­ever differences arise,” says the majority leader. “We share an overarching goal of government being more transparent and less self-serving.”