County Executive McNerney still pushing shared government services for small NJ towns!
In the Opinion section of The Record today( Sunday, 2/17/2008) there were two articles as a follow-up to an earlier article which ran this week commenting on County Executive Dennis McNerney's call for consolidation of services of towns which have less than 10,000 residents.
The first article was an open letter by McNerney. He states that the solution to his constituents complaints about high taxes is for small towns to consolidate administrative services. He proposes a plan for a pilot program in which two smaller towns would merge all government services. The carrot on the end of the stick is for a five year timeframe of transition, taxes will be frozen, the state will supplement the towns for any justifiable financial increases and homeowners would be entitled to a 100 percent increase in property tax rebates.
The second article was an evaluation of McNerney's plan by Ernest C. Reock Jr., who was director of the Rutgers University Center for Government Services, until 1992. In his opinion article Come Together , Reock states "When we rank the state's municipalities by size and examine their budgets, we find that there is little difference in the average budget per capita for large and small communities". He goes on to say this is so because the smaller towns do not offer the services of the larger towns.
I said in my last blog on the subject (Allendale - Past to Present - And into the Future?) I don't think town mergers will ever happen in New Jersey and especially in Bergen County. I do think Reock said it best in his article when he wrote:
"Obviously, these New Jersey residents or their ancestors did not choose urban living - they chose small-town living. And this is what they are getting in New Jersey. This is a small-town state by choice, and a large majority of its residents apparently prefers to keep it so."
I would love to hear other views about this proposal. Can it work? Will it work? Does it have even the slightest chance of becoming law? Let me know.
Interested to know more about Allendale and the Allendale real estate market? Contact me for a free consultation!
James Lockard
RE/MAX Properties
Office: 201-825-6600
Cell: 201-674-3114
Email:jlockard@remax.net
Website: http://www.bergencounty-homes.com/
