When things become bad enough, towns will consolidate. That, I think, is the lesson that we should be taking from the recent police and courts merger down in Gloucester County.
As the Packet Group paper, the Windsor-Hights Herald, reports, the borough of Swedesboro has disbanded its Police Department and signed a shared-services agreement with Woolwich to take over patrols and court services. The agreement is expected to save Swedesboro taxpayers about $400 annually and Woolwich taxpayers $68 a year.
The consolidation of law-enforcement functions likely wouldn’t have happened, however, were it not for the squeeze put on smaller towns by the Corzine administration, which wants to see local governments streamline, eliminate duplicated services and share services whenever possible,
Consider:
”There had been talk (about sharing a police department with Woolwich) in Swedesboro for as long as I have been mayor, which is about six years,” Swedesboro Mayor Thomas Fromm said Tuesday.
”But when Gov. Corzine announced his municipal aid cuts at budget time last year, that’s when we realized what we had to do. We knew we needed to do something real, and something bold, for our taxpayers, and we began in earnest at that time,” he said.
In 2008, about one-third of Swedesboro’s $2.2 million municipal budget was used for police- related expenditures, according to Mayor Fromm.
Hightstown and East Windsor have been talking for nearly a year, while the two Princetons have gone back and forth for years, slowly merging many smaller services but failing to share police services or go all the way to full consolidation.
As for Jamesburg and Monroe, officials in the two towns treat consolidation like a particularly nasty strain of swine flu.
Consolidation — whether full-bore or incremental — makes fiscal sense for Hightstown and Jamesburg, at least on the surface. Both towns have faced difficult fiscal choices in recent years, with stagnant ratable bases and increasing costs forcing the towns to cut services and increase taxes. Jamesburg even considered closing its public library to give it some budgetary room last year.
East Windsor and Monroe, however, have not felt the same level of pain — but the state’s own fiscal emergency may change that. It is going to get more and more difficult for the state to justify giving cash to towns like Monroe and East Windsor that completely surround their poorer neighbors when it doesn’t have enough money to pay its debts and provide basic services.
Hank Kalet 