My column today — well, yesterday — on Princeton Patch.
I am not the only New Jersey columnist who believes the state needs to rethink how its local governments are organized. Alfred Doblin, editorial page editor for The Record, takes on the sacred cow of home rule in his column today:
What is more important: Quality education or a local school district? Is the firefighter less competent because he or she answers to a regional supervisor instead of a local chief? Does it matter if the municipality, county or an independent contractor removes snow as long as the snow is removed?
He likens the state’s fiscal crisis to the Chicago fire that destroyed that city in the late 19th Century, saying New Jersey has “burned down” and adding that “We should not build it like it was.” As he says of the sacred cow of “Home rule” — a “very big cow”: “it’s time it either produced a beverage or became an entrée.”
The fiscal reality is bleak. But there are ways of providing many of the services we expect while still spending less. We don’t have too many teachers. We don’t have too many parks. We don’t have too many roads. We have too many districts. We have too many municipalities. We have too many departments that essentially duplicate other departments.
It is in the new governor’s hands. Gov. Chris Christie, Doblin says, “has the personality to withstand the blowback from reactionaries afraid of change.” But does he have the vision? Is he willing to take on the web of problems that have created our fiscal mess, or does he plan to just slash indiscriminately, balancing the books but breaking our backs?
The jury is still out, though his budget freeze — which essentially will create problems for many school districts next year and exacerbates pension problems — raises some concerns.
Ultimately, though, as Doblin points out,
Change is happening. The issue is whether it is change for the better or for the worse. It is time to put the home-rule sacred cow on the altar of fiscal sanity.
In desperate times, every cow is accountable. Either produce milk or end up as hamburger.
That may not be popular, but it has to happen.
A Quinnipiac Poll issued last week contained what I think is an interesting nugget that indicates that New Jerseyans may not be as selfish as I’ve come to think..
There is no doubt that we have too much government in New Jersey. We have a bloated state government, expensive and often superfluous county governments and more local entities than any other state on a per capita basis. All told, there are more tha 1,400 taxing entities in the state, an absurd figure that creates its own momentum for more and more taxes.
South Brunswick and Monroe, for instance, are each served by five separate and independent taxing authorities — three fire districts, a school district and governing body. Jamesburg is served by three, Cranbury by two, Plainsboro by three and so on.
And yet we keep hearing that consolidation of towns and school districts is off the table.
But what should we make of last week’s poll which showed a huge majority of respondents answer yes to this question:
One recommendation to raise the money needed to fund a cut in property taxes is
to merge neighboring municipal governments and school districts. Would you
support or oppose merging school districts or governments in the county in which
you live if it meant lowering your property taxes?
The numbers: 73 percent favored mergers, with little variation based on political affiliation, gender or race.
And support has increased over the last three years, from 61 percent who said they’d support mergers in 2006 to 73 percent today.
The question, however, is this: Can these poll results be translated into real merger proposals? I’m not so sure. Much of what I know is anecdotal, but my read on the situation based on discussions with people in the area — mayors and council members, school officials, parents, seniors, etc. — is that most people favor mergers when their communities are not affected. Their support, basically, is theoretical.
That said, I think the state could move this question along if it were to force the consolidation question onto the agenda. We have a commission meant to look into the issue — one that has could have had more teeth — but it has been dormant. That was Gov. Jon Corzine’s fault. It’s now in Chris Christie’s hands and I can only hope he will let the committee loose on the question and develop some hard data that can be used to convince voters — forget the mayors — that they may just save some money, get better services and not lose the rather amorphous notion of identity.
Talking to municipal officials as the gubernatorial election wound down, I was struck by how many of them viewed Chris Christie as an ally in their attempts to beat back the tides of change. Forget the affordable housing issue, for a second, on which he does appear ready to make suburban mayors happy. It is on consolidation — or, to be more precise, in opposition to consolidation — that many mayors and others were looking with optimism toward the now-governor-elect.
Talk to officials from many of the region’s towns and you discover rather quickly that they think there is too much government, just not at the home office. So, they look to the state for cash, but refuse to do what is necessary to streamline the state’s confusing web of government entities.
Corzine, in a small way, put the issue on the table; Christie avoided it, but sent signals that he was with the towns.
And now the former U.S. Attorney is the governor-elect, we have a better handle on where he stands on what may be the most important issue he could face. During a speech at the state League of Municipalities today,
Christie delivered a forceful speech in which he said he would use “every tool at my disposal to force change.”
“The people of the state of New Jersey will no longer stand for us asking, ‘What’s in it for me,'” he said at the luncheon at the annual League of Municipalities convention. “I believe the message from this last election, the message to me and to (Lt. Gov-elect) Kim Guadagno, is we have to start asking what’s in it for us. And what is in it for us is a period of continued pain, continued difficulty and continued challenge.”
The state has become a “patchwork of ‘what’s in it for me'” over the years, Christie said. “That attitude is no longer acceptable to the people of this state,” he said in a warning tone.
Though he never said the words “shared services” or “consolidation,” that’s the message the municipal leaders in the room said they heard.
“We’re talking about possible layoffs and consolidations that we’d prefer not to do,” said Ellen Dickson, president of Summit Common Council. “It’s going to be very painful but we have to do it or else the state will be unlivable.”
Are we looking at something analagous to Bill Clinton and welfare reform, or Ronald Reagan and nuclear weapons? A Republican president never could have pushed through the draconian reforms enacted by Clinton. It also is likely that a more dovish president than Reagan would have had difficulty selling anti-nuke efforts that Reagan pushed through.
In this case, Christie is perceived as a friend of the suburbs, unlike Corzine, so he might not stir up the kind of almost paranoid opposition to consolidation we’ve been hearing for a while. Let’s see where this goes.
I forgot to post this on Tuesday (the week before’s also never got posted to the blog), so here it is: Dispatches on Garden State corruption and the need for municipal consolidation.
Hank Kalet 