Time is nigh for legislators’ tax reform ideas

PACKET EDITORIAL, Nov. 10

   The moment of truth is about to arrive for the New Jersey Legislature.
   The 2006 election is over. All those congressional and borough council and township committee and county clerk and board of freeholders races are history. The vote to fill all 40 seats in the state Senate and all 80 in the Assembly is still a full year away.
   Next week, the Legislature is poised to climb through this rare window of opportunity and present the findings of four joint committees that have spent the past five months looking at ways to ease New Jersey’s crushing property-tax burden. The committees have focused on public school funding, government consolidation and shared services, public employee benefits and constitutional reform — and while we don’t yet know all the details of what they’ll propose, we pretty much know where they’re headed. More important, we know (and they do, too) what kinds of obstacles await them along the way.
   Take the public school funding committee. Everybody knows, as has long complained, that the largest slice of the ever-expanding property-tax pie goes to pay for local schools — but there has never been consensus about how to resolve this problem. Cutting property taxes without finding another source to finance public education is no solution — except, perhaps, to starve-the-beast disciples who believe immediate economic gratification is more important that long-term educational investment. Nobody, least of all the powerful New Jersey Education Association, is going to let that happen.
   On the other hand, the reform most often discussed — and even adopted, briefly, before a taxpayer revolt reduced it to rubble — is having the state pick up a larger share of the public school bill. But this means shifting a good chunk of the tax burden from property owners to consumers (sales tax) or wage earners (income tax) — and that upsets everyone from retail merchants to business owners to organized labor.
   So the choice boils down to which interest groups’ oxen our lawmakers are willing to gore — and the answer, for a very long time now, has been nobody’s. It has been the Legislature’s unwillingness to antagonize any of the state’s powerful political forces that has created the present tax structure. And even though nobody likes it (except, perhaps, the very wealthy, who pay a much lower percentage of what they’re worth in taxes than the beleaguered middle class), there’s more comfort in the status quo than in the unknown.
   The committees on government consolidation/shared services and public employee benefits face the same set of issues. Everybody knows, and has long complained, that we have too many units of government in New Jersey, that they are wasteful and duplicative, and that consolidating municipalities (as well as school districts) and sharing services could lead to significant cost savings.
   But Princeton is the poster child for this state’s almost obsessive devotion to home rule, having turned down every voluntary consolidation plan put forward since the 1950s. And if the state even hints at mandating municipal or school district consolidation, every organized group from the State League of Municipalities to the Police Chiefs Association to School Boards Association will line up in opposition.
   Likewise, any effort to tinker with public employee benefits — even those that allow officeholders to double- and triple-dip — will bring cries of outrage from the powerful unions that represent those employees, not to mention all the double- and triple-dippers in the Legislature itself.
   It’s been clear from the very start of this process that the fourth committee — focused on constitutional reform, and looking in particular at whether this might best be achieved through a citizens’ constitutional convention — offers the best, and perhaps the only, hope for meaningful reform. Of course, it’s also possible the other three committees will surprise us.
   But we doubt it.