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Drive almost anywhere in this state and you encounter a lot of traffic. Much of it is because of sprawling development. That development isn't there because towns in New Jersey have so much power; it's because each of those towns has power and there are so doggone many of them. With little inclination to get together and develop a rational plan for what should go where, it's dog eat dog in New Jersey.
The late Alan Karcher put it beautifully in his book, New Jersey's Multiple Municipal Madness. "The present configuration of municipal boundary lines," he wrote, "has assumed a political status approaching the sacrosanct." He added, "Given the opportunity to redraw the political boundaries of the region, no one would ever break the state into the same irrational, wasteful and counterproductive patterns that presently exist."
But here we are: 566 municipalities in geographically one of the smallest states. Indeed, New Jersey has more municipalities per square mile than any other state. And of course the sustenance for this system is property taxes at twice the national average. We fool ourselves into believing that all these municipalities are capable of delivering services to residents, each able to exist on its own. That's the "home rule" myth, and a powerful one at that.
Property taxes are so high not because people are willing and able to pay them but precisely because many of New Jersey's municipalities simply cannot support themselves. In a report for New Jersey Policy Perspective, Henry A. Coleman of the Center for Government Services at Rutgers made it clear this is not just a problem for stereotypically poor cities. In the year 2000, 129 New Jersey municipalities had property tax rates at a level indicating fiscal stress. And many more were on the verge.
Suburbs strain under a burden that worsens by the year. Towns compete against each other for development they don't really want but think they need-in the vain hope that more sources of tax dollars will keep property taxes down for homeowners. Increasingly, the "right" sort of development includes no families. Families have children and children go to school and schools are expensive. Think about that: we have laws that quite properly prevent towns from keeping people out because of their color, and now towns keep people out because of their family composition. This is progress?
In the midst of this cutthroat competition, towns wind up cutting their own throats. Development comes in, taxes still go up and the quality of lifer goes down. The cost and resulting "dumb growth" are obvious manifestations of why New Jersey needs to move away from fragmentation. But they aren't the only ones.
When we tell people they need only worry about how to educate children in the few square miles they call home, we dangerously shrink our horizons. We promote isolation that makes it harder to see this as one New Jersey, where all children need to be educated. We contribute to a system of educational disparity where a five-mile drive can take you from the best to the worst. It's no secret that New Jersey's public schools are among the most segregated, more so even than in the deep South, because New Jersey breaks itself into so many tiny pieces that it's easy to find one where everyone is pretty much like you. But it's also segregation by income: a poor child is more likely to go to a school full of other poor kids in New Jersey than in any other state.
So if you told me that regionalization in New Jersey wouldn't save a penny I would still say it's worth doing because of how fragmentation narrows our thinking and limits opportunity. But it will save money. Take a look at Bergen County, the state's most populous: it has more pieces of firefighting equipment than New York City, with a tenth the population. There are 68 police chiefs in Bergen County alone. This situation exists elsewhere in New Jersey.
And there's even more to it than that. Fragmentation of local government contributes to New Jersey's corruption problem. Each municipality has an attorney, an engineer, an auditor-not to mention a complete set of often low-paid, part-time elected officials. Leaving aside the possibility for illegal activity, just the system of "pay-to-play" by which all of these people get and keep their jobs-legally-is scary enough.
Once I heard the mayor of Rochester, N.Y. speak at a conference on the need for regional solutions to economic development and service delivery. He said that when he made his pitch to some small-town mayors one of them replied, "You opened my eyes. You made me see that I am the mayor of nothing."
With all due respect to their hard work and good intentions, New Jersey is full of places led by mayors of nothing. There are towns that, frankly, have neither a reason nor a right to exist. They can't support themselves and the things they do hurt us all.
In many states people have no problem being served by regional school systems, county police departments and zoning that is in the hands of authorities whose territory crosses municipal lines. It's time for our state to take a closer look and what's happening in other places. The fragmented way that New Jersey provides for local government is more than a quaint anachronism. It holds us back and keeps us apart. It must be changed.
It's time to see property taxes, sprawl and education not as 566 separate, little problems but as one big one: a state problem that requires a state solution.
New Jersey will regionalize. The question is when, and the longer it takes the harder it gets. So we need to get started.
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