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Trust me, we didn’t plan on taking issue with the Journal’s editorial two days in a row — it just happened. If they’ll stop getting it wrong, we’ll stop — promise.

As we reported on Monday, the pension payment deferral plan passed both the state Senate and Assembly. Under the bill, Jersey City will be eligible to not pay a total of $14.8 million into state pension funds this year only. Good thing, since the city had already factored this potential savings into its FY2009 budget.

Here’s the Journal‘s editorial on the subject today:

Jersey City would benefit from this bill because it anticipated passage of the measure, but it may not be enough to prevent a hole in its budget. The city expected a deferment of $15 million, but that was for one full annual payment.

A 50 percent commitment may mean the county seat would face a multi-million-dollar hole in its $460 million budget that was introduced last month. Unless there is another one-shot fix in the works or more cuts in spending, city taxes may increase. City taxpayers should expect an explanation from City Hall of how the state legislation affects them.

Here’s the problem: The Journal is dead wrong, a fact confirmed by city business administrator Brian O’Reilly today.

The deferment of $14.8 million the city expected was not for one full annual payment. Know why? Because deferring an entire year’s payment was never a part of the proposed state legislation, even when it was first introduced back in December.

All that the unnamed editorial writer would have had to do was think back to just over a month ago, when (s)he wrote the following:

City officials took into account a deferral of half its pension funding obligations for the year. By excluding payments into pension accounts, Jersey City hopes to save nearly $15 million.

Instead, the paper chose to fit a square peg in a round hole and use bad information to argue its position against the pension deferral plan and against “smoke-and-mirrors” city budgetary processes (a position we might have some common ground on). By doing so, the Journal does the city a disservice by continuing to muddle the discourse in this city about budgets and taxes in a year when those subjects are on a good many residents’ minds.