New Jersey is No. 1, but not in an area that should please residential property taxpayers.
The state, according to the Tax Foundation, has the highest median property tax bill in the nation at $6,082 — almost $1,700 more than second-ranked New Hampshire. It also ranks fifth in the amount of property taxes paid as a percentage of home value and first in taxes paid as a percentage of income.
The Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan tax research group based in Washington, also found that 13 New Jersey counties are listed among the 20 counties nationwide with the highest median property tax bills — including the Central Jersey counties of Hunterdon, Mercer, Middlesex, Monmouth and Somerset.
None of this comes as a surprise to residents of the Garden State, who consistently rank high property taxes at the top of the list of issues they most want the state’s policy makers to address.
The question is how to tackle the issue.
The policy prescriptions put in place over the last few years — the local tax levy cap and the creation of a new set of budget watchdogs — are little more than Band-Aids, efforts that make for good sound bites but offer little in the way of real reform.
The state’s residents instinctively understand this. They want structural reform that goes beyond the small changes typically proposed in Trenton.
Consider the results of an October poll conducted by the Monmouth University Polling Institute, which found that just one in 10 Garden-Staters “feel that the structure of their government, including both state and local government, works well enough as it is now” and that nearly two-thirds of the state’s residents “say these improvements require a major overhaul.”
Enter Assemblyman Reed Gusciora, D-Mercer. Mr. Gusciora plans to introduce legislation in January that would radically alter the structure of local government by forcing so-called “doughnut towns” to merge and by consolidating the six separate municipalities on Long Beach Island into one.
The “doughnut town” legislation would affect 22 geographic areas — including the two Princetons, the Hopewells and Pennington and Hightstown and East Windsor in Mercer County and Jamesburg and Monroe in Middlesex County — and offers a perfect opportunity for residents of Central Jersey to ask themselves what they should expect from local government and whether maintaining the multitude of municipalities makes sense.
Mr. Gusciora says the forced mergers — which would be phased in over 10 years — would result in better services while also saving money.
“They both have municipal buildings, there are multiple police forces, this would make for less duplication of services and, ultimately, lower property taxes in the long run,” he said last week.
That remains to be seen. But leaving it to the discretion of local officials, as the law currently does, to determine when and if merger talks and shared services will save money no longer makes sense. (We would encourage Mr. Gusciora either to broaden the scope of the legislation to include towns that might best be called “crescent communities” — the Bordentowns and Fieldsboro in Burlington County, Delaware and Stockton and Lambertville and West Amwell in Hunterdon County, Millstone and Hillsborough and Rocky Hill and Montgomery in Somerset County and Millstone and Roosevelt and Allentown and Upper Freehold in Monmouth County — or to include them in a companion bill.)
The “doughnut” bill should force officials in towns like Monroe and Jamesburg, East Windsor and Hightstown, the Princetons and others around the state to justify the status quo or energize residents of their communities to make change.

