New Jersey Survival

New Jersey needs a clean sweep…let us start at the top!

A special legislative committee on local government consolidation in 2006 suggested that New Jersey towns would require a “big stick” approach, as opposed to incentives (aka a “carrot”).Gov. Corzine’s proposed cuts in state aid were presented as such an approach. However, after running the town-by-town numbers yesterday, my impression is that the cuts will hit like a hammer in a small handful of towns, but sting like a gnat almost everywhere else. The end result — the governor will achieve a budgetary savings, but compel few if any towns to merge.

In fact, I realized yesterday that the math on the face of it pointed to only a mild incentive: There are about 2. 5 million homeowners in New Jersey, and Corzine’s proposal amounted to a reduction of about $168 million in formula aid.

That’s only $67 per homeowner. And then when you consider that homeowners in New Jersey pay 70 percent of the property taxes — the rest of the tab gets picked up by owners of commercial and other types of property — the potential tax impact gets reduced to $47.

True, after running the numbers, there were 124 towns where the potential impact topped $100 per homeowner. But that’s $100 spread across four quarterly tax payments, and obfuscated by the regularly scheduled municipal tax hike, along with whatever happens to school and county taxes.

To wit, even if municipal officials pass the cost of the aid cuts onto their constituents, very few New Jersey homeowners are going to feel enough pain to go down to town hall and demand a push for shared services.

Which means, of course, that most municipal officials will simply pass the costs onto their constituents, and life will go on as usual in this land of many municipalities.

Here’s the town-by-town impact chart that ran in today’s paper:

SEE DETAILS AT:

http://blog.nj.com/statattack/2008/03/will_corzine_aid_cuts_really_e.html

in article by Rob Gebeloff at http://www.nj.com/news/