Officials leery over merger proposal

Local officials say new legislation could create a commission in charge of identifying pairs or groups of muncipalities for consolidation.

By: Leon Tovey
   Local officials say proposed legislation that would create a commission charged with identifying pairs or groups of municipalities ripe for consolidation is something they’ve seen before.
   And that they still don’t think it will work.
   "The easiest thing in the world is to say ‘merger,’" Monroe Township Mayor Richard Pucci said last week. "When you’ve got to produce on the thing, nobody wants to take responsibility for it and it doesn’t go anywhere."
   Sen. Joseph Kyrillos, a Republican who represents parts of Middlesex and Monmouth counties, on March 21 proposed a resolution that would create a Municipal Alignment Reorganization and Consolidation Commission charged with creating a list of municipalities for consolidation. The entire list then would be voted up or down by both houses of the Legislature.
   The proposed resolution has not been officially introduced, but a spokesperson for the state Office of Legislative Services said Monday that it would be among the first measures introduced after the Legislature wraps up budget hearings in early May.
   Sen. Kyrillos said last week that consolidation was both a way of saving money at a time when many municipalities are being forced to raise taxes to stay in the black and of eliminating bureaucracies that are prey to corruption. (In Sen. Kyrillos’s home county of Monmouth, 14 people — including 11 public officials — were arrested for alleged corruption earlier this year, the senator noted.)
   "We’ve got a major tax problem in New Jersey," Sen. Kyrillos said. "We spend too much, we have too many layers of administration and too much corruption that results from too many pots of money laying around.
   "This sense of home-rule pride that so many people seem to have may have been quaint years ago, but it’s just not anymore," he added.
   Under the criteria for consolidation established by the resolution — including shared boundaries and potential tax savings — Monroe and Jamesburg likely would make the commission’s list.
   Monroe Township Councilman John Riggs said the question of consolidating Monroe and Jamesburg had come up before, most recently during in the mid-1990s, when a study conducted by the administration of former Gov. Christie Whitman concluded that consolidation would benefit both communities.
   It was a poor study, Mr. Riggs recalled.
   "This study was so inaccurate and so uninformed — it was like it had been written by a guy sitting with a bottle of wine in a restaurant in Trenton somewhere who had never been to either community," Mr. Riggs said. "It actually said that consolidation would be good because Jamesburg has schools and Monroe needs schools."
   Mr. Riggs said he would prefer to see the Legislature use more carrot and less stick in regard to consolidation.
   "We love Jamesburg," Mr. Riggs said. "But (consolidation) has to work for both communities."
   And according to Jamesburg Mayor Tony LaMantia, that’s the sticking point. Mayor LaMantia said earlier this month that while consolidation would work well for the borough, which is facing a 15.8 percent municipal tax increase, as far as he can see it would not benefit Monroe.
   "Our taxes are going up, theirs are going down; we’re 99 percent built out, they’ve got room to grow," Mayor LaMantia said. "It would help us, sure, but there’s no reason for them to do it, so the whole idea is just really far-fetched."
   Jamesburg Councilman Otto Kostbar agreed.
   "I’m not knee-jerk opposed to the idea," Mr. Kostbar said. "But the devil is in the details. In five, 10 years, (consolidation) would work out well in a Monroe and a Jamesburg, but initially, it would cause some disruption.
   "I think it’s something that municipalities in New Jersey beyond Jamesburg and Monroe should look into, but there has to be some attempt made to minimize that initial disruption," he said.
   Mayor Pucci, who also said he is not opposed to the idea of mergers per se, said that the concerns of municipal leaders were not driven by "home-rule pride," but by a desire to maintain services already available.
   "One of the big issues we had the last time was that Monroe is a newer community and Jamesburg is an older community," he said. "Just considering matters of infrastructure — the needs of the two communities over the next 10, 20, 30 years are going to be very different."
   In order to reconcile the different needs of consolidated towns, the state would have to take a very active role, Mayor Pucci said.
   "The state would really have to do a lot of front end work on this — a good pilot program, get the Bloustein School (of Planning and Policy, at Rutgers) involved, really do it right," he said. "And I’m just not overly optimistic that people (at the state level) are ready to take that step."