It’s convention time for the state’s municipal officials, and they plan to focus their attention on Gov. Chris Christie’s so-called tax reform “tool kit.”
The convention — the League’s 95th — comes as Republican Gov. Chris Christie and Democratic leaders of the Legislature fight over how towns can meet the cap.
Christie has been pressuring the Legislature to pass his “tool kit” bills, the most important of which would allow towns to opt out of civil service rules and put a cap on arbitration awards. Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) said he’ll get to that before the end of the year, but that the governor has not proposed legislation that would push towns to share more services.
Elizabeth Mayor J. Christian Bollwage said he and other mayors will use the convention to tell lawmakers and members of the Christie administration to stop fighting and get to work on property tax solutions. He said more drastic steps are needed than what’s included in the “tool kit.”
“The rhetoric, the chess playing has to stop and there needs to be some bills passed that will get us to meet this two percent cap,” he said.
The problem, however, is the cap itself. The cap is nothing more than an arbitrary imposition, one that bears no relation to the reality of running local government. The cap, like so many of the other reform proposals on the table will only go so far and fail to address the real issues facing local government.
We need to stop making distinctions among different types of government spending and different taxes and start thinking about the role of government in the state in a more unified way. That will mean consolidation of some communities and school districts, elimination of fire districts (fire and first-aid spending should be a municipal or county-level responsibility) and other special taxing districts. This will allow streamlining — fewer police chiefs, fewer school superintendents, etc. — which should save money on the spending side.
Plus, we need to alter our thinking on taxes, begin to think of the tax pool as a larger single entity made up of smaller components — income, corporate, sales, property, gas, etc. We can then assess their fairness and make the most efficient use of them for collecting revenue and distributing funding according to need.
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