This is going to be a long year for advocates of clean government and property tax reform in New Jersey. The trajectory, beginning with the four joint legislative panels and continuing through the opening salvo in the legislative wars this week, has been to water down proposals to protect vocal constuencies and avoid conflict.
Municipal consolidation went from a base-closing type commission that would put a list of mergers before the Legislature, who would the have the final say, to a commission that essentially would offer an advisory opinion, leaving the final say to the towns themselves — dooming any chance of significantly reducing the number of towns in the state.
And now prohibitions on dual-office holding,the proposed comptroller and significant changes in the state pension have been watered down to the point where they may have been made inconsequential. The Star-Ledger today writes that opposition from affected groups — Hudson County legislators (nine of whom hold more than one office), county and municipal prosecutors and municipal and school officials — were the impetus for the weaker reforms.
State Sen. Nicholas Scutari (D-Union), who is chairman of the special legislative committee that recommended the pension reforms, pretty much summed of the failures when he told the Ledger that
the slim menu of reforms still in the bill will do little to cut government costs or rein in property taxes.
“I just don’t think this serves any legitimate public purpose,” he said. “It’s almost a slap in the face to the committee’s hard work.”
Scutari said that as lawmakers remove certain affected groups from the reform bill they make it more difficult to impose reforms on anyone else.
“Why is one group out and one group in?” he asked. “They have a real good point. It’s not fair.”
It’s failures like this that have convinced me that, my earlier trepidations aside, legislators can no longer be trusted to fix the state’s tax system. It’s time for a constitutiona convention to deal with the problem.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
Hank Kalet 