I maybe pushing it. I ran five miles outside in the beautiful weather on a very sore and tight left calf with tight quads. I managed a 47:11 — not great, by any stretch. I’ll have to keep an eye on the calf, though. Don’t want it to get worse.
Music: Wilco, Kicking Television
I know this is not a popular view — especially in Monroe and Cranbury — but the state is taking a positive step forward in eliminating regional contribution agreements from its affordable housing program.
RCAs, as they are known, have done little but give towns a way out of providing housing while keeping the few affordable units that have been built in the state’s cities. It has contributed to a pattern of segregated housing that has left the state’s suburban communities overwhelmingly white and its cities overwhelmingly black and Latino.
Doing away with RCAs should help spread the obligation out to a greater degree. To make up for the lost revenue in urban areas, the bill creates a developer fee that will be used to create a pool of money that can be distributed to cities and towns to pay for units.
While the bill addresses a significant shortcoming of the Fair Housing Act — bringing it in line with the original Mount Laurel decision that created the affordable housing requirement — it ignores another issue that is likely to come more and more to the fore in the coming years: the shrinking availability of land on which to build units.
This is a major issue in Cranbury, for instance, which has done a remarkable job preserving open space and farmland and is near build out because of it, and it is fast becoming an issue in South Brunswick, which also is nearing build out. The bill that has made its way through the Legislature and now awaits the signature of Gov. Jon Corzine requires that the Council on Affordable Housing take this into consideration. The problem is that the bill does not provide a way of doing so.
What happens if COAH and a town disagree over what constitutes available, developable land? What happens if COAH’s requirements clash with specific planning decisions made at the local level? Who makes that decision?
Consider: Cranbury and South Brunswick build warehouses that create a total of 1,000 jobs (this is a hypotehtical). Under the current rules, each town would have to zone and then build housing to accommodate a portion of the workers who take those jobs. Seems fair, but it may not be practical. As state Sen. Bill Baroni pointed out to me last week, this issue could create a constitutional conflict of its own.
“How do we provide affordable housing, keeping the commitment we’ve made, but also recognize that there are economic, health and space issues that towns have already run into?” he asked. “At what point, do you say we can do no more.
“At one point, you will have a clash between affordable housing and open space. If trends that are apparent now don’t change, you will have towns faced with requirements to build but the only space available would be the open space.”
We are not there yet, but we’re not as far off in Central Jersey as one might think. After several decades of what can only be described as warp-speed development that has more than doubled the population of most towns (South Brunswick has gone from about 17,000 residents in the early 1980s to about 42,000 today), there is not a lot of space left on which to build new housing — at least, not without using deed-restricted open space or forcing towns to rezone commercial areas. Neither approach — one because it would violate contracts, the other because it violates the principles of sound planning and penalizes towns under the state’s outmoded tax system — makes sense.
That’s why the developer fee makes sense. It essentially allows some revenue sharing to occur — towns that build the warehouses, create the jobs and earn the tax revenue — woule be helping fund housing in neighboring towns.
Again, consider the example I offered earlier: Cranbury and South Brunswick, via their developers, would pay into the fund while New Brunswick, North Brunswick, East Windsor, Jamesburg and other neighboring towns could get trust fund money, addressing the cost of building the units needed to address the regional housing need without creating too much of a tax burden.
The residual costs — education, police, etc. — would still be picked up by local taxpayers, however, which is why there is a need to change in the tax sytem — away from property taxes — or, at the very least, to share revenues among communities.
But that’s a piece of legislation that is still a ways off.
In the meantime, here’s hoping the governor signs the COAH reforms and pushes the Legislature to continue working to fix its other ills.
I grew up listening to George Carlin’s FM & AM album and, in the process, I learned a lot about language.
Carlin — who along with Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Mort Sahl and a few others — stands above the stand-up business the way the 1927 Yankees stand above other baseball teams. He was inventive, pointed and versatile — and he was one of the most incisive social critics of his generation.
The series of bits he did on profanity — “Shoot,” “The Seven Dirty Words” — took the harsh language of the street and the bland euphemisms we’ve concocted to replace them and twisted them in such a way as to expose our own hypocritical self-censorship.
I won’t repeat the language — this blog is tied to a family newspaper, after all — but how is it any less crass to substitute “shoot,” “horse hockey” (remember Col. Potter on “M*A*S*H) or “frig” and “Fug” (this one is Norman Mailer’s early contribution) than to use the expletives in their full and unvarnished glory?
He broke open the oxymorons that we live by (from the first Saturday Night Live):
The term Jumbo Shrimp has always amazed me. What is a Jumbo Shrimp? I mean, it’s like Military Intelligence – the words don’t go together, man.
RIP, Mr. Carlin.
South Brunswick Republicans — or at least Republican candidate John O’Sullivan — appear ready to turn the South Brunswick Township Council’s use of its budget surplus into a campaign issue this year.
In a letter to the editor of our paper last week, Mr. O’Sullivan criticized the council for spending $9 million of the township’s $9.8 million surplus to balance its books this year and “hold the tax rate steady.”
Is this a good idea? What happens next year when costs for services, salaries and commodies rise and pension expenses increase? Where do we get the money then?
This year is an election year with three council members running for re-election. Next year there is no municipal election.
Is it a coincidence that the council is applying this short-term fix of sacrificing the current surplus in an election year, knowing that the following year will require either a significant tax increase or a dramatic cut in services?
Mr. O’Sullivan is It’s a simplistic understandingTownship Council Charlie Carley, who is up for re-election, issued this response this week, which will run on Thursday:
the surplus represents revenue (mostly property taxes) collected by municipal government in excess of what is needed to operate town hall (pay for police, public works, library, senior programs, etc.) for that particular year. Much of that Dec. 31 excess is typically rolled over in the following years operating budget. By the next Dec. 31 — lo, and behold — the surplus has typically regenerated itself as new ratables (which for the purpose of that particular budget year are unanticipated sources of revenue) come on line.
In South Brunswick, we have concentrated on the expenditures side of the budget. While it’s good that the town’s ratable base is growing, it’s more important that the mayor and council are keeping municipal spending in check. In fact, discretionary municipal spending has lagged the rate of inflation these past four years and the municipal workforce is significantly reduced in that same period.
He questions criticism, saying the current budget “is typical of the budgets of the recent past — a budget that maintains services, where discretionary spending remains flat, and the property tax rate is stable.” What is the point, he asks, of having “town hall stockpile the annually recurring surplus and so have to hike the property tax rate.”
The surplus is excess collection of property taxes its the peoples money. Why hoard the peoples money and pursue a policy of over-taxation for the sake of building a cash stockpile?
Even in good times its never good policy to raise taxes just for the sake of raising taxes no government should ever feel an entitlement to the peoples money. In tough economic times, raising taxes should be the last option exercised by government.
One hopes that the surplus debate plays itself out on a much higher — and more honest — level. Mr. O’Sullivan attempts to cast the Democrats in charge as being prfligate over-spenders who are doing little more than delaying a tax hike until after the council election. His defense of maintaining a surplus, however, lacks any substance or understanding of the roll surplus plays in municipal budgeting. While the council needs to keep an eye on next year’s potential costs, the reason that spending down the surplus is such a dangerous move — especially in a down economy — is that revenue is not likely to be generated at the level necessary to rebuild the account. If it generates less than $9 million, it will not be able to match this year’s contribution and it either will have to cut spending or increase some other revenue — most likely property taxes — to plug the gap.
Mr. Carley alludes to this, but disingenuously reports that the surplus “has typically regenerated itself as new ratables.” But this has happened just once in the last eight years and is unlikely to happen at a time of recession, especially with the township getting closer to build out.
As we’ve written before, it would be fiscally prudent for the council to raise taxes by a penny and work to cut about a half-million in spending from the budget. That would leave an addition $900,000 to $1 million in the surplus account to start the year and give the township a better chance to stabilize its use in the future.
In the end, the rule of thumb should be that no municipal governing body should be spending more of its surplus account than it thinks it can generate over the course of the year in new ratables and other anticipated but off-budget revenue (liquor licenses, for instance).
I stayed inside because of threatening skies and humidity and ran five on the treamill in 42:56. I followed with some medicine ball work.
Music: The Hold Steady, Stay Positive
Hank Kalet 