Dear Mayor:

On Wednesday, I was again joined by Greg Fehrenbach, the League’s Shared Services consultant in testifying before the Joint Committee on Government Consolidation and Shared Services.   In particular, we offered the League’s perspective on Assembly Speaker Joseph Robert’s CORE reform package and the League’s conceptual support of A-51.  

As this Committee portion of the Special Legislative Session for Property Tax Reform process is scheduled to end on or before November 15, we urge you to pay close attention to developments in Trenton. Newspapers are helpful. The Legislature’s web casts and website are extremely beneficial. And we will continue to do our best to keep you informed of the process, the part we are playing and the part you can play in this vital endeavor. Toward that end, we report on the following.

We expect the special property tax reform session’s Joint Committee on Consolidation and Shared Services to devote itself to considering three basic approaches to service sharing and consolidation.

Our position on consolidation, as clearly articulated to the Committee in our letter on S-2244, has never changed. We have never opposed the consolidation of services, so long as several highly valued generally accepted principals are fully respected.

Two approaches to forced municipal consolidation have been put on the table.  The more radical proposal is embodied in AJR-69/SJR-47, which would establishes a “Municipal Alignment, Reorganization and Consolidation Commission” to develop a plan to consolidate pairs and groups of municipalities.  This resolution seeks to alleviate the property tax without addressing the issue of school costs, which represent the clear majority of the property tax. Further, it provides no mechanism by which to secure the consent of the governed to the mandated new form of government. Nor does it provide a role in the process for local elected officials, who would be, in many cases, most knowledgeable of the impacts of various potential alternative actions.

The second proposal is S-2244. This bill, which has not been introduced yet and is not available online yet, would, as drafted,  put a referendum question on next November's ballot, which would ask the people to approve a mandatory transfer of the tax assessment, tax collection, animal control and public health functions from municipal government to the counties. If approved by the voters, statewide, DCA would develop a "master plan" to phase out local administration of these functions and to phase in county control. The sponsor, and co-chair of the Committee, has indicated that the bill would probably be amended to eliminate the DCA study, provided for in the bill. The consolidation question would, then, be put directly to the voters (in November 2007) and if approved, would be phased-in, according to some plan – presumably to be specified in another amendment.

We commend the sponsor for advancing a concrete proposal that allows the people of New Jersey some say in the process. However, as we read the bill, in its current form, we fear it may fail to respect our aforementioned principles in our letter on S-2244.  Accordingly, we raised several concerns for the Committee’s consideration. The bill seems to ignore any other possible outcome of the study and moves directly to placing the question on the ballot of every county. The bill seems to assume that there is only one possible process, through which to phase-in a pre-ordained outcome. If the purpose of the bill is to allow those affected to determine the appropriate level of government for the delivery of certain services, then why does the bill seem to bind all 21 counties to a single end and process? While the end and process may benefit most voters in most counties, a significant majority of voters in one or more counties may prefer current practice or an alternative means of achieving the same end.