Common Sense For New Hampshire

The original readers of this blog (all five of them) will remember that my original targets were the proponents of the forced consolidation of New Jersey’s small towns.  For the first few months at least half of my writing was on this topic.  Despite the rhetoric coming from liberal Democrats like Chris Christie and Steve Sweeney, and from advocates like the group “Courage to Connect”, I could plainly see it as a scam.  It was a way to blame the taxpayers themselves for high property taxes instead of putting blame where it really belongs, which is union control of our politicians, unfunded mandates from Trenton, the unfair way that state property tax relief is distributed and corruption in its various manifestations.

It was also a way to decrease our representation by having more constituents per elected official.  Having a small number of governments is not the same as having small government as the consolidationists tried to get us to believe.  Actually, having a large number of governments is a way to keep those governments small.  For example, I wouldn’t consider Newark to be a small government town just because there’s only one government in Newark.  It’s the smaller towns that actually have less government.

Just for old times’ sake I present a screen shot from my very first story, posted December 6, 2009.

I may have been right, according to this just-released study:

Click on the image to read the report.

NJSpotlight has an excellent summary of the study.  Here are a couple of highlights:

SIZE DOESN’T MATTER — STUDY OF NJ MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT COSTS CONCLUDES
MARK J. MAGYAR | NOVEMBER 17, 2014
Rutgers analysts question ‘conventional wisdom’ that consolidation of state’s 565 municipalities would produce property tax savings

………………….In a study entitled “Size May Not Be The Issue,” Caprio and Pfeiffer noted that the wealthiest suburbs and poorest cities have the highest cost of local government services, reflecting the willingness of affluent taxpayers to pay for a higher level of services and the greater need of poorer populations for more police protection and social services that are paid for primarily with state aid.

Meanwhile, rural communities with low populations that are often considered prime targets for municipal consolidation have the lowest-cost municipal government services per person in the state — directly countering the assumption that “consolidation of small, inefficient municipalities” would lower property taxes, the study said.

“We may need to rethink the conventional wisdom that forcing municipalities into larger organizations will be more effective, more efficient, and/or less costly,” Caprio and Pfeiffer concluded. “It should also give pause as to whether we should be advocating with uncompromising vigor that consolidation of municipalities is a solution to the state’s high property-tax problem.”

The Caprio-Pfeiffer analysis runs directly counter to the arguments advanced by Republican Gov. Chris Christie that municipal consolidation — starting with the merger of his hometown of Mendham Township and neighboring Mendham Borough — makes sense, and the push by Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) to take a “big stick” approach to shared services by forcing municipalities to adopt cost-saving shared services or face a loss in state aid…………………….

………………………Their analysis concluded that previous studies suggesting that smaller municipalities are inherently inefficient — and, therefore, that municipalities with fewer than 2,000 residents should be encouraged or forced to merge, as former Assembly Speaker Alan Karcher once urged — were skewed by statistical analyses that included resort municipalities. These 50 Shore towns have disproportionately high per capita costs for municipal services not because they are inefficient, but because their year-round population is low and they have to spend a lot on police and other services for the thousands of tourists who flood in every summer.

With the Shore towns excluded, the cost of municipal services per person in municipalities with less than 3,600 residents is not appreciably different for municipalities with 11,500 to 40,600 residents — and lower than the cost for cities and suburbs with more than 40,600 residents that make up the top 10 percent of municipalities by population…………………..

………………The study also questions the validity of the often-cited statistic that “New Jersey has more municipalities per square mile than any other [state] in the country,” which is used to justify the “folk hypothesis” that New Jersey has “too many municipalities and too much government.”

That statistic, however, simply reflects New Jersey’s status as the most densely populated state in the country, Caprio and Pfeiffer noted. With 15.6 government units per 10,000 population, New Jersey actually has about half as much government as the national average, and lags just behind New York (17.7 government units per 10,000 residents) and far behind both Pennsylvania (38.5) and Delaware (37.2).

In fact, New Jersey ranks just 34th in the nation in the number of general governments per capita, the study pointed out.

Groups like Courage to Connect NJ have held up the recent consolidation of Princeton Borough and Princeton Township as evidence of potential cost savings and service improvements that can be achieved through municipal mergers.

However, Caprio and Pfeiffer assert that the fact that the Princetons were the first successful consolidation since Vineland and Landis Township merged in the early 1950s shows that New Jerseyans do not believe mergers will save money. The problem is that both municipalities need to save money for a merger to go through, and the anticipated cost savings are usually smaller than the increased taxes that the more affluent of the two municipalities will incur………………

BTW, the high per-capita cost of services in resort towns should be offset by the fact that half the properties in towns like Belmar are summer homes whose owners pay full property tax but use significantly fewer services than year round residents.