Consolidation needed for state to serve public

EDITORIAL, the Home News Tribune Online, September 1, 2006

Although ongoing hearings in Trenton have been unable to determine exactly how much municipalities would save by consolidating government and school services, one outcome is clear:  There is some dollar benefit to property taxpayers across New Jersey when communities merge or share their obligations, and any increases in efficiency, no matter how small or large, ought to be encouraged whenever possible, if not compelled.

Offering one of the more optimistic projections for savings, Marc Holzer, a Rutgers University professor of public administration, testified Wednesday before the Legislature's property-tax committee that government could shave from 3 percent to 5 percent of its costs by sharing services.  Since counties, municipalities and schools spent about $20 billion in property-tax dollars last year, residents need only to do the math to realize the significant chunk of cash they could keep in their own pockets if shared services were pursued aggressively on a statewide basis.

More to the good, lawmakers on the panel seem inclined to agree, a requisite sentiment if any plan of real value is to be passed along by the panel and implemented by the full Legislature down the road.

"Now, if ever, is the time to do something, and clearly what we've seen is redundancy upon redundancy," said Assemblyman John Wisniewski, D-Middlesex.  "... We have to be willing to be bold in our suggestions.  We have to recognize that if we finish this process with 1,300-plus local units of government, we will have failed the people of this state."

Exactly right.

Of course, naysayers abound.

Chief among them has been League of Municipalities Executive Director William G. Dressel Jr., who has panned consolidation in recent weeks as a "simple" and "superficial" solution to the property-tax conundrum.

Dressel told the panel, "There seems to be this Wall Street mentality of trying to save dollars through consolidation without considering services."

He isn't entirely wrong.  Any change comes with risk.

But for New Jersey to aimlessly fumble along content to support more than 500 municipal fiefdoms and an almost equal number of school districts is mindless and counterproductive public policy.

One of former Gov. James E. McGreevey's best ideas that never came about was to encourage the state's 172 school districts with one school to consolidate services; eliminate 23 other school districts that don't have a school, and penalize districts that spend too much on administration and reward those that save in that area.

Expert after expert to sit before the panel has suggested all manner of variations on that same theme, not only for schools but for duplicative government units of every sort.  Clearly, there is consensus among those who study such problems for a living.  Now it's up to lawmakers to build agreement among themselves and finally make broad shared services an integral part of the tax-reform template.  It won't be easy.  Home rule is an embedded cultural phenomenon of the Garden State.  Still, the alternative is untenable:  a government complex so big and costly that New Jersey's residents exist to serve it, rather than the other way around.

(Emphasis Added)

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