Submitted by rollotomasi07071 t3_11e8wdl in newjersey
How do we create a group to start actually organizing and gaining support for municipal merging in order to cut redundant administrative costs? I'm down to take the initiative to make a discord to get things started before we discover our objectives and goal and vote for actual leadership.
I made a discord server - https://discord.gg/zAyzutc5 Pop in if you're interested in advocating for this. Gonna need people for creating graphics and informational postings, and also people to do the research on the benefits of merging municipalities. We don't need towns that are barely a square mile paying out millions of dollars into the salaries of administrators, police chiefs, and school supervisors when an entire grade is 12 students.
I believe this could be a bipartisan issue that we can all get behind to help make our municipalities more efficient and less wasteful in tax spending. I only ask those that join be polite and respectful towards all people and stay focused on the topic. First steps would be to start raising awareness and trying to get more people on board to lighten the workload of volunteers.
Yes! We need to merge some of these municipalities
The hardest thing to do in Jersey is to get neighboring municipalities to commit to shared services. It's not the governments. Most of the smart towns have been doing this where they can for years. It's the residents and their sense of identity/loyalty/hate.
You need to prove that this would actually help. What are the costs associated with the merging (studies, signs, permits, etc.)? What & how many job(s) would be eliminated? How much will be “saved” when the process is complete? Would levels of service be maintained/improved/decreased?
if we save $10M on administrative costs per year (a number I completely made up, equivalent to eliminating 50 superintendent type positions) & evenly distribute that to the (slightly less than) 4M houses in NJ each household would save about $3/year. So, to offset this current increase of $200 per household we would need to save over $500M/year. Is there that much municipality bloat? I don’t know. If you have hard numbers that show we can save $1B a year that might help you gain support.
(Maybe this data already exists, I didn’t google. Would love to see a real analysis of this)
Yeah, this is what I'd like to see happen with this first brainstorming group. Figuring out the numbers to get some hard data on that so we can help present such things in a much more clear and concise manner complete with attached research. That's a lot of work for a single individual which is why I'm trying to solicit together a group for assisting with research efforts and getting out to present this information. There's over 550+ municipalities in NJ, each with their own police department, and a full boat of town staffing positions.
Schools. Schools are by far the largest expense that hits local taxes, often 50+%.
Merging or having shared service agreements for police and fire is nice but unless and until people are willing to have large shared school district with 4 or more municipalities taxes will never go down.
I am sure not all people will not want their schools merged with their neighboring towns. People paid a premium to buy homes with good schools and probably don’t mind paying extra in property taxes to continue that benefit.
it depends. i live in bedminster. the school here is great, but we could just as easily be part of somerset hills regional and still have our actual school and have our kids go to bernards hs in the normal way and not on a send-receive which costs more money.
Good for you, but half the state would not get that deal, they might merge with the crap district
property taxes are the cover charge for what gets in and what stays out
sorry, not sorry
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