Below I recount the movement to get Jersey's many small towns and school districts to share services and cut jobs so that they can better restrain property tax increases in the state with the highest residential real estate taxes in the nation. While unions oppose the movement because they want to preserve government jobs, I would be remiss if I didn't note that there is a more legitimate beef from some local officials, who point out that the real driver of property tax increases in the Garden State comes from Trenton in the form of the state's activist supreme court and its education spending mandates.
As I explained here, the court has forced the state to fund urban school districts at the same level as the richest school districts in Jersey, and the result has been that in many small towns taxpayers are supporting two school districts at once: their own with property taxes and big urban school districts with income taxes. In 166 Jersey towns, for every dollar residents send to Trenton in income taxes, they get back less than 10 cents in school aid. Meanwhile, as the chart above shows, state aid to local urban schools funds most of their operations. At last count, Jersey was spending $29,797 per student in Asbury Park, $23,356 per pupil in Camden and $21,895 in Newark thanks to supreme court mandates that have done little to raise student achievement.
Jersey state sen. Mike Doherty has proposed to amend the state's constitution to provide equal state aid to districts based upon their student enrollment. Such a formula would still redistribute some income tax money to urban school districts but at a lower rate than the current supreme court formulation, and it would relieve some of the property tax burden in smaller towns. Naturally, the state's teachers union has opposed such legislation in the past and supports the supreme court decisions channeling big chunks of aid to urban districts.
None of this is to deny that some Jersey towns couldn't use a dose of efficiency and consolidation to cut costs. Jersey's dense and multi-layered local government structure is often used a vehicle for patronage jobs. Sweeney's legislation, which is described in my previous post, aims to push towns to get more efficient. But perhaps the best thing that Trenton's leadership, including Sweeney's Democratic caucus in the senate, could do to restrain property taxes in NJ would be to pass a Doherty-like bill or appoint judges to the state's supreme court that vow to follow state law, not make it.
Jersey state sen. Mike Doherty has proposed to amend the state's constitution to provide equal state aid to districts based upon their student enrollment. Such a formula would still redistribute some income tax money to urban school districts but at a lower rate than the current supreme court formulation, and it would relieve some of the property tax burden in smaller towns. Naturally, the state's teachers union has opposed such legislation in the past and supports the supreme court decisions channeling big chunks of aid to urban districts.
None of this is to deny that some Jersey towns couldn't use a dose of efficiency and consolidation to cut costs. Jersey's dense and multi-layered local government structure is often used a vehicle for patronage jobs. Sweeney's legislation, which is described in my previous post, aims to push towns to get more efficient. But perhaps the best thing that Trenton's leadership, including Sweeney's Democratic caucus in the senate, could do to restrain property taxes in NJ would be to pass a Doherty-like bill or appoint judges to the state's supreme court that vow to follow state law, not make it.
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