Common Sense For New Hampshire

It seems to me that liberals in New Jersey are just a little too enthusiastic about municipal consolidation for it to be about eliminating redundancies and excess capacity in the provision of municipal services.

Sweeney and other liberal proponents are selling it as “eliminating government”.  Hmmm.  Something must be up.  Since when does a liberal want to eliminate government?  What I suspect is that it’s that liberals just don’t like the fact that there are wealthy towns and there are towns that are not-so-wealthy and they think that the people in the wealthy towns aren’t doing enough for the people in the not-so-wealthy towns.  But if all those people lived together in the same town.……voila!

I’ve been saying that if being big made for lower taxes then the biggest towns in the state should have the lowest taxes.  They have the highest taxes.  And a just-released Rutgers study bears this out.

In yesterday’s Press:

Consolidation combat in NJ – Local towns resist mergers as state turns up pressure

It’s been asked for decades: How do you slim down New Jersey’s notoriously massive property tax bills?

Cut back on the number of small towns, some of which are most easily measured in street blocks — or better yet, holes on a golf course. That’s the answer New Jersey lawmakers plan to pursue again this year.

And it’s supported by Gov. Chris Christie, who said during a town hall meeting in Flemington last week that “provincial selfishness,” as well as civil service and collective bargaining rules, are blocking towns from realizing property tax savings through municipal mergers.

But new data coming from Rutgers University could throw cold water on the idea that the savings from rolling together these small municipalities will be as universal as they are often touted.

The study, by Raphael Caprio and Marc Pfeiffer, challenges the idea that New Jersey has too many local governments. More significantly, as it relates to talks about consolidation and service sharing in the Legislature, the study found that on a per-capita basis, New Jersey’s larger towns aren’t any cheaper to run than the smaller ones.

“The data actually suggests that there are no significant differences in the cost per capita of municipal services, the cost per capita of local government and that consolidation is a term that only complicates things,” Caprio said. “People are assuming that consolidation will end in lower costs and it’s not necessarily true.”

Even within Monmouth County there is nothing to show that bigger towns have lower taxes. Below is a chart with all towns in the county listed from largest to smallest and their effective tax rate in 2008.*

*http://www.state.nj.us/treasury/taxation/pdf/lpt/gtr08mon.pdf

The average tax rate for all towns larger than Belmar is 1.626. The average for Belmar and all towns smaller than Belmar is 1.307. Every town larger than Belmar had higher taxes than Belmar. Nine towns smaller than Belmar had lower taxes than Belmar. The numbers are similar state-wide. I would be happy to provide those numbers to anyone who requests them.

The truth is that small towns have many advantages aside from the great quality of life to be found in them. It is easier to privatize services without union opposition. They can have volunteer fire departments and that small town spirit inspires volunteers to do many jobs that larger towns have to pay people for. They can use part timers and generally pay even their full time staff less. Their budgets are much easier to manage and they have less corruption………

.

Of course many factors affect tax rates, but it seems pretty clear that simply being big didn’t result in any discernible advantage for the towns I looked at.

But actually my primary reason for opposing consolidation is that I’ve been to city council meetings at some larger towns.  (They go on forever.)