Princeton officials are facing the challenge of managing public expectations about the benefits of consolidation, Mayor Liz Lempert said Wednesday at a seminar at Princeton University.
By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Princeton officials are facing the challenge of managing public expectations about the benefits of consolidation, Mayor Liz Lempert said Wednesday at a seminar at Princeton University.
”We’re trying to get the message out that consolidation has been a really great thing for Princeton and being able to bring down our costs and increase our services. But in the context of the larger tax bill, people are still going to see an increase — not due to consolidation,” she said at a gathering organized by Courage to Connect New Jersey, a pro-consolidation nonprofit.
In her remarks, she said the town would lower the municipal tax rate, as the $61 million budget in the first year of the merger is due to be adopted Monday. Still, county and school taxes are going up, she said.
”There’s been a lot of news that we’re reducing the tax rate, but that’s only the municipal piece of the tax rate,” Mayor Lempert said.
In the morning, she sat on a panel with Councilwoman Heather H. Howard, town administrator Robert W. Bruschi and Joe Stefko, the president and CEO of the Center for Governmental Research, who worked as the consultant on the merger. The panel moderator was former Township Mayor Chad Goerner, who earlier talked about what goes into a merger.
”And it’s important that when we look at consolidation, it’s truly a merger of equals. It’s not one community taking over another,” said Mr. Goerner, a member of Courage to Connect’s board and the principal of GovWorks Consulting. “And it’s really building a new community that has a shared history perhaps but truly a new identity.”
This was the third consolidation conference Courage to Connect New Jersey has had, this year held at the Robertson Hall, home of the university’s Woodrow Wilson School. About 60 public officials and others from around the state attended.
Princeton has held itself up as a model that others can follow, although the new town is only entering its sixth month as a single community. Other towns are looking into the idea of doing likewise.
Residents of Scotch Plains and Fanwood, two Union County towns that have a unified school system, are in the midst of creating a consolidation study commission, said Don Parisi, a former school board member there who attended Wednesday’s conference.
On Wednesday, Princeton officials talked about the benefits of the merger, how it helped police working as one during Hurricane Sandy last year even before the consolidation had taken effect.
”I can honestly sit before you and tell you that consolidation has had a tremendous positive impact on our ability to provide the emergency management function,” said Police Capt. Nicholas K. Sutter, who participated in a panel later in the day.
Mayor Lempert said in terms of increased government services, the police department has been cut from about 60 officers to 54.
”Even though we have a smaller department, because it’s now a single department, we can deploy our officers in a more effective and efficient way,” she said.
Before the merger, the borough and the township shared 13 government services, not to mention a school system. Yet there were concerns that pro-merger forces had to address when making the case for the consolidation.
Ms. Howard, a former borough councilwoman now serving in the consolidated government, said there had been a perception of a cultural difference between the borough and the township, where the former was more densely populated and walkable than the latter.
”There was the sense that there would be a takeover by the township imposing the values of the township, which is less dense, less walkable,” she said. Mayor Lempert, who played a direct part in the grass roots effort to pass the merger, said a key decision was in choosing the name the pro-consolidation campaign would call itself as an organization. The leading name originally was going to be “One Princeton,” the same one used in a consolidation attempt in 1996. “But, really, when you think about it, that feeds directly into the fears of the former borough about losing identity,” she said. “And deciding to be Unite Princeton I think was one of the most important decisions, because it’s not that you’re losing who you are, it’s not that you’re necessarily becoming one and erasing your past. But you’re just uniting, you’re coming together and bringing together the best of both.”