This war has spread to New Jersey:
There’s East Rutherford, then Carlstadt, then Moonachie, then — whoosh–
faster than the car radio can play the latest hit single, you’re in
Little Ferry, the next borough over. That’s four boroughs in one song.
You pass through Moonachie during the refrain.Moonachie is small: about 2,700 residents. That’s smaller than some New York apartment complexes. That’s just one-seventh of the seating capacity of the arena at Madison Square Garden.
That’s too small, says New Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine (D).
Corzine, who presided over mergers and acquisitions as chairman of Goldman Sachs, is telling hundreds of New Jersey’s smallest towns and boroughs that they are too small to exist. Multiple
layers of government are financially wasteful, he says, and the
littlest towns and boroughs need to merge with their bigger neighbors
to achieve economies of scale.Corzine’s incentive — more like a hammer — is a threatened cutoff of state aid.
I would be disappointed if they did away with East Rutherford and Moonachie. Here is the full story.
I support diversity where it arises naturally or out of people’s choice, I am against /forced/ diversity.
East Rutherford and Moonachie would still be there, they just wouldn’t have their own local government. I’m not sure this would be such a bad thing for cultural diversity, especially if places like Moonachie (notably low-density and 86% white, FWIW) are currently using land use controls as a de-facto restriction on entry.
I don’t believe that these small towns will be going away under Corzine’s plan. He simply wants small towns to pool resources and services when it makes economic sense. There is an incredible amount of administrative redundancy in these small towns that has, in part, led to sky rocketing property taxes in them. (It is not unusual for a household to pay more than 10k a year.) This tax burden is pushing out many of the long time blue collar and middle class residents who provided these towns with a sense of community and tradition. The rich are becoming the only people who can afford to live in these towns. (Having been born and raised in a small South Jersey town, this has made me more cognizant of the “downsides” of gentrification — something which I had never really comprehended.) Even if most governmental services are consolidated, it is not clear to me that this will eliminate cultural diversity or the unique sense of place. This “local color” is already being maintained — not by governments — but by civic/religious groups and, in the case of our wonderful “main streets,” by quasi-private “business improvement districts.” Those interested in these issues should read Richard Briffault’s articles on BIDs and the “local government boundary problem.”
Multiple layers of government are financially wasteful
I agree. I suggest abolishing most of the NJ state government.
Make all highways toll roads (not a hard thing to do as NJ residents are used to tolls already). Sell long term leases on all the toll roads as has been done elsewhere in the US.
Continue to finance the courts and state prisons. Pardon everyone convicted of a nonviolent drug crime and refuse to prosecute any more drug “crimes”, excepting sales to minors.
End all other state government, excepting the minimum needed to collect taxes efficiently.
Pay off the state debt, and lower taxes to the level that barely covers everything listed above.
Let the cities and towns self-finance whatever else government they want. Let the citizens self select which communities they want to live in, be they high tax and spend, or low tax and spend.
Also, read the following:
http://www.techcentralstation.com/article.aspx?id=081505A
First as to VA. Incorporated CITIES are not part of their surrounding counties, and have their own jurisdictions, towns do not.
Next: Over the years studies have been made showing the various effects of consolidations, such as a major city with its surrounding county. It has been found (this may be at American Heritage)that the efficiencies,which may be had initially, but dwindle, are had at the cost of reduction of direct citizen influence.
As always, there are unintended but often forseeable, consequences.
Efficiency and inefficiency in government are not about keeping spending down, they are about delivering value for money for the taxes we choose to pay. The only way to judge whether value for money is being delivered is to find out how happy the citizens are about paying for what they get. When you ask them, citizens everywhere tend, rather strongly, to be happiest (or least unhappy) with the services provided most locally. So Gov. Corzine should be asking what services he can move out of Trenton to the townships. In doing so he should bear in mind that each township does no tneed to do everything itself. A great many services can be bought in from neighboring towns or from private corporations. Very small townships can be very efficient, and can provide a very wide range of services.
And Gov Cozine should be getting together with his fellow governors to extract services and the setting of taxes to pay for them out of Washington.
I don’t know the details, but is this a matter of him wanting the rich white enclaves to pay for the government services in other areas in ways that they aren’t right now?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Corzine
“Corzine won the three most populous counties (Bergen, Essex, and Middlesex), five of the top six, and seven of the top nine.”
This probably has nothing to do with anything.
This is a terrible idea. If there’s one thing that actually WORKS in NJ government, this is it. Corzine is attacking a target of opportunity. If he wants to fight waste, let him take on the taxing and appropriations process at the COUNTY level. There are huge redundancies and inefficiencies there that are administered as patronage by the boards of chosen freeholders which are controlled, in each an every case, by unelected party bosses. Corzine is intimately familiar with this–these are the people he had to buy off to be nominee for both US Senate and Governor.
Andrew– a lot of the tiny towns ARE in those very populous counties.
I’m from Sewaren, NJ – pop. 2,700. Our government is the Township of Woodbridge. There is definitely nothing wrong with getting rid of the small town governments and creating townships with centralized public services.
Everybody who thinks the small towns are going away needs to relax. Either way, they’re not going to get any money – either it’s cut off, or they merge and the money goes to their larger “township”. Not a big deal locally – except for the small-town mayors who’ll have to do something else with their time.
And Gov Cozine should be getting together with his fellow governors to extract services and the setting of taxes to pay for them out of Washington.
So make me (a resident of another state) pay for everyone and their brother working for the small town government in New Jersey? No thanks.
If the small towns could self-finance their local governments then this wouldn’t be a problem. But they can’t, and of course the first thing to go is police and fire so the small towns can scream that someone’s gonna die because they don’t get the money. Never mind that the mayor’s secretary / relative is getting a $100k a year job to do nothing.
They already tried privatization in New Jersey when the state’s Division of Motor Vehicles were made for-profit under Christie Whitman. The result? Fraud, waste, poor service of every kind.
http://law.onecle.com/new-jersey/39-motor-vehicles-and-traffic-regulation/39-2A-2.html
The only good thing McGreevey accomplished was sanely reverting the NJDMV back to state control.
If you’re looking for a fancy word to use in place of the word “scam”, you couldn’t do any better than “privatization”.
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