In a couple of days, the citizens of New Jersey are going to go elect some poor sap governor. Most casual political observers (and I put law student’s into this category), have been looking at this race with a great deal of fascination. Despite its Northern clime, New Jersey is purplish state, with current governor John Corzine’s four predecessors split right down the middle, party affiliation-wise. Speculation has been that this race – which is the only one where a sitting governor is running for reelection – will serve as a bellwether for Congressional elections next year.
What is a far more interesting to look at is how New Jersey got into the pickle they are in. Because that mess, like the millstone that is currently pulling California into the Pacific, can be laid squarely at the feet of the voters. The provocative question that both cases engender is this: can you have too much Democracy?
If you’re ever met anyone from New Jersey, you know the following to be true: wherever the conversation starts, it will eventually end with them complaining about their property taxes. As Matt Bai put in a recent article about the gubernatorial election
“New Jersey could raise up its own army and invade Pennsylvania, and all the state’s voters would want to talk about, still, would be their property taxes. No other issue so dominates the political landscape of a state. In a recent Quinnipiac poll, 41 percent of voters said taxes were the main issue in this year’s gubernatorial contest, compared with 17 percent who cited economic factors and just 4 percent who registered concern about the state’s rampant corruption.”
Given that the FBI just netted 44 defendants, including the Mayor of Hoboken and 15 Rabbi’s in a massive corruption and bribery scandal, that’s saying something.
The property taxes are high, no doubt. They state has an elaborate patchwork that make New Jersey’s rate the highest in the nation, 6.75% as a percentage of income [via MSN Money]. This begs the question, what do you get for all that dough? As Bai’s article points out, you get more government than you could ever possible want. To wit:
“Basically, New Jersey is sliced into so many local fiefs — 21 counties, 566 municipalities, more than 600 school districts — that it’s just about falling apart. Some municipalities are merely dots on the map, maybe a mile wide, surrounded on all sides by a larger township. Some school districts are so small that they actually have no schools. (They pay larger townships to teach their kids.) And yet most little hamlets retain their own officeholders and paramedic squads, just as each tiny school district has its own administrator and school board.”
Not supprisingly, this massive system of overlapping bureaucracy costs oodles of property taxes. The logical conclusion then is that these municipalities need to consolidate, cut out the redundancy, and reduce cost (Bai makes the same point in the article). A quick Google search on “New Jersey Municipal Consolidation” brings up over a million results, suggesting that this is a hot topic, to the extent that anything involving the words “municipal consolidation” can be described as a hot topic. It even has its own (albiet lightly used) Facebook page.
To expedite this process, the State of New Jersey has streamlined the rules for municipal consolidation, and has made state funds available to study the feasibility of consolidation, and to pay “transitional costs” associated with consolidation, which I’m assuming are costs related to the municipal employees made redundant by such changes.
As far as I can tell, this has a led to a grand total of one consolidation being on the ballot this November, between Wantage Township and Sussex Borough. Even after a consolidation study costing $46,000 (paid for by the State with revenue gathered, one imagines, from property taxes), and a State guarantee of $750,000 to cover a variety of costs associated with the transition, the outcome is still in doubt. A vocal part of Wantage Township is concerned with the cost of upgrading the smaller Sussex Borough’s aging sewer infrastructure. Talk about a pissing contest (Thank you! I’ll be here all week!)
Did I mention what the total population of the potentially consolidated Wantage/Sussex Metropolitan area is? 12,532 according the last census. As if that doesn’t make you feel like you’ve gone through the looking glass, check out this quote from Consolidation Comission Vice Chairman Sal Lagattuta
“Our towns have no police force. We have no paid fire department. We already share a court system and a tax assessor and other services. Our school system is regionalized. So there are a lot of things that would make consolidation here easier than in most places.”
Yes, like any actual impediment to consolidation.
But given the angst that you see in some of the letters and editorials posted on the subject, you would think we were talking about the re-unification of Germany, and not 13,000 souls in the northeast corner of New Jersey. In the same article, Lagattuta stated his belief that the entire election will hinge on
“whether the people in Sussex Borough feel that they would be giving up their small-town identity and be swallowed up by the larger town surrounding them.”
Not being from New Jersey, I lack any personal attachment to being from one borough versus another. So I can look at this and see how absurd it is that people are paying through the nose for the privilege of maintaining this individual identity, which doesn’t seem to amount to anything. I can also only imagine how much it makes people who are from these places pucker to think of surrendering what they perceive as “their” identity.
One lesson you can take from New Jersey is this: everyone believes that all government is wasteful, unless it is government that directly affects them, and then it’s vital, sacrosanct, and can never, ever be changed. Even if it means that they are paying property taxes out the wazoo. Another lesson you is that when residents of the Garden State blame “government,” that’s really code for being angry with themselves for being unwilling or unable to make the hard choices required to ameliorate their situation.
So has a surfeit of democracy in New Jersey cut the place into so many pieces it barley hangs together as a state? Would less democracy be better for the citizenry as a whole?
Next up: Money for Nothing and Schools for Free: Lessons from the Golden State
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