New legislation takes away control, not taxes
Leave it to the state to streamline government by creating a new level of bureaucracy.
At least that’s what the Joint Committee on Consolidation and Shared Services is proposing.
The committee is one of four empowered by state Senate President Richard Codey and Assembly Speaker Joseph Roberts after Gov. Jon Corzine called a special session of the state Legislature to address the public’s ire over rising property tax bills.
The legislation, sponsored by Mr. Roberts, would create a new "executive county superintendent" that would review and hire local superintendents, have line-item veto power over school budgets, propose ways for districts to share services or recommend they consolidate completely and recommend elimination of state-mandated programs.
The goal of the legislation is to reduce education spending and, therefore, reduce the average property tax bill paid by New Jersey residents.
While this is a worthy goal, we think the legislation will do little more than create a new, unnecessary level of centralized bureaucracy and strip local districts of control over their schools.
We believe that local school boards and the publics they serve are better suited to choose their top administrative personnel than someone appointed by the state education commissioner and that locally created budgets are likely to do a better job meeting both state and local educational goals.
We also are concerned that the bill would place too much authority at the county level. First, not all counties are the same. Hunterdon, for instance, is a relatively rich, sprawling county with a small population of about 120,000, while Hudson County is urban with 600,000 residents squeezed into a little more than 40 square miles. And Middlesex and Mercer counties may share many of the same characteristics, but Middlesex has twice as many towns and more than twice the population. These kinds of disparities raise serious questions about workload, access and accountability.
County government, after all, is the seat of political patronage in New Jersey. As The Record of Bergen County pointed out last month, it would be foolish to increase the power of the state’s counties without first enacting comprehensive campaign-finance reform. Otherwise, there is the danger that large, countywide contracts for the various consolidated services envisioned by the legislation among them transportation, purchasing and food services could become entangled in the web of "patronage hiring and influence-peddling" that have plagued the state for too long.
This is not to imply that change is not needed. It is desperately. Taxpayers are rightly angry over rising property taxes, much of which van be attributed to school costs. We would advocate a school consolidation commission similar to the one being proposed for municipal consolidation, that would review each of the state’s districts and determine which could benefit from consolidation in terms of cost savings and expanded programming. The commission would then make a recommendation to the state Legislature, who would make the mergers happen.
We also want to remind legislators and voters that there is another side to the equation revenue. New Jersey relies too heavily on property taxes to fund its various layers of government schools in particular and needs to move toward a broader use of the income tax to ensure fairness and take the pressure off homeowners.

