Squeezing Jersey

~ Laura

Last week, I was in the front yard waiting for Ian's school bus and absent-mindedly plucking the weeds out of the flower bed, when one neighbor went storming out of his house, bypassed me (a well known liberal freak), and started ranting at another neighbor about an article in the local newspaper about the proposed 8% local tax hike. I heard him yell, "Next November, I'm voting Republican down the line!"

Well, the reason that our local taxes are going up is because of our new Republican Governor, Chris Christie, so I'm not sure why voting Republican is going to help him out.

New Jersey's economy is in the dumps. Now, it's not California-level crappy, but it's pretty damn close. New Jersey's problem is that there are too many really tiny towns that each have their own police department, schools, libraries. There is enormous redundancy of services. We have a huge police force in a town with barely any crime. We pay these guys $70,000 to wave traffic by construction work. The unions have been very good to their workers, and they receive benefits that most Americans don't receive. It's also a state with high levels of corruption. 

To deal with the budget problems, Christie has taken aim at the schools and the unions. The state has slashed funding to local schools. Our town lost $1 million dollars.There's not a whole lot of fat to cut in our town. The kids are going to lose foreign language instruction. Class size is going to increase to 27 to 29 students. They're cutting back on aides to special needs kids. They're also talking about cutting out busing to the schools. These are severe cuts.

These aren't the only cuts he's made. He's talking about renegotiating the union contracts to reduce the salary of college professors. Funding to libraries has been cut — no more inter-library loans. Funding to state parks has been cut. All the stuff I need and use.

Even with those severe cuts, the school isn't going to be able to function without help from the town. The town has to raise taxes. I just don't see how they are going to pass a local tax increase, when it goes up for a vote in two weeks. We have more old people than families in our town. Also, people are really stretched to their limits. We had a lot of foreclosures on homes this spring.

I'm continually surprised by people who don't understand that taxes buy things — things that they like. Everyone likes their small towns in New Jersey, even if they are expensive to operate. They like their good schools. They like that their kids can get jobs as cops with full pensions and benefits. They like that the seniors have community centers and local ambulances when they get sick. They just don't want to pay for it.

Published by Laura

15 thoughts on “Squeezing Jersey”

  1. New Jersey’s problem is that there are too many really tiny towns that each have their own police department, schools, libraries.
    We have a related, but slightly different, problem. Allegheny County as 1.2 million people and 130 municipal governments. Fortunately, we have far fewer school districts and police forces.
    To deal with the budget problems, Christie has taken aim at the schools and the unions.
    We’re selling assets instead. Anybody want to buy our parking revenue for the next 99 years? The public-sector pensions are going to flatten us and most of the problem isn’t like California where some people are retiring at 60 with $120,000 a year. We’re just broke. You get used to it.
    We have had increasing taxes and decreasing services since I got here. I still don’t see why I should have the taxes I pay increasing faster than my income and give a rat’s ass about the teachers who are still getting raises, have not seen their health care costs rise my more than $50/month in the past decade, and whose pension fund losses I’m covering while watching my own 401k slowly rise to what it was in 2004.

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  2. MH, I remember the day I realized that taxes (combined property and wage tax) in Mt. Lebanon and Fox Chapel were actually far less than in Pgh. When we were first considering moving I ran the numbers to see just how monstrously expensive it would be to move to either place, and lo and behold…

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  3. “We have a huge police force in a town with barely any crime. We pay these guys $70,000 to wave traffic by construction work.
    ….
    There’s not a whole lot of fat to cut in our town.”
    This seems like a contradiction to me. But then, I’m a closet Republican.

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  4. They’ll get you with a commuter tax sooner or later. There aren’t enough people with money who live in the city, so they will eventually find a way to get it from people who work there.

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  5. Massachusetts has been dealing with this for years, although the past few years have been the toughest. We have a 2.5% cap on all property tax increases. If we have a budget shortfall and need to raise the taxes more than 2.5%, we have to hold a special town meeting to get a tax override on the ballot, THEN vote on whether we want a higher tax increase. In most towns residents now pay for their own trash removal (private pick-up or haul your trash to the dump and pay per bag) and pay for school bus service ($325/year per kid in my town). In the town we used to live in they cut down gym, music, art and library in elementary school to 10 times per year per class — basically an average of once per month per subject. The teachers would spend 10 weeks at each of 4 elementary schools.

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  7. As you might guess from my sarcasm on the selling the parking revenue, I’m more opposed to many of the non-tax revenue sources. The parking garage thing is bad because to get the highest value for the parking garages, they basically have to promise to not allow anybody to build more garages.
    The water works sells “insurance” on water line repairs. With no bidding or public notice, they let one insurance company add $5/month to everybody’s water bill (you have to opt out and there is no alternative provider). In exchange, they got a few million to fix the old sewer lines. According to the paper, such insurance can be good, but the policy they use is hugely over-priced even after you count the money to fix the old sewers.

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  8. re: cutting fat. I was referring to the schools in that sentence, but that’s okay. What’s on the table to be cut isn’t fat, but the meat of the schools. Losing foreign languages for middle school kids and raising class size to 29 are pretty drastic changes. Our schools don’t give elementary school kids the option of learning Spanish or German or Chinese, like the fancy town next to us. Our kids don’t have any after school clubs or even school plays. It’s a bare bones type of school.
    However, I do think that there could be cost saving changes in services in this state. The problem is that no one wants to do those things. Not Republicans. Not Democrats. Nobody.
    1) Christie talked about cutting police salaries for one day. And that was it, before he had to shut up. Both Republicans and Democrats have family in the police force and there’s going to be no changes in that area at all.
    2) The only way to really lower costs in the schools is by changing the entire structure of education. School districts have to be consolidated. Our local superintendent is in charge of 2 elementary schools and 1 middle school. He gets paid $200,000 per year. I think for that salary, he could be supervising more schools.
    But nobody wants to consolidate school districts. Again not Republicans, not Democrats. In fact, consolidated schools are constantly being challenged in courts, because fancy towns feel like they are subsidizing poorer towns.

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  9. He gets paid $200,000 per year.
    That is way to high. Our guy gets $225,000 (and probably better fringe benefits), but he runs a district with 65 schools, 30 thousand students, five thousand employees, and a budget of over half a billion. And his father overthrew Mosaddeq.
    (If anybody wonders about fat in our district, divide 30,000 students by 5,000 employees.)

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  10. Wow, I just checked our budget, and our super makes $135K. We have 2 elem, 1 MS, and 1 HS.
    Heh, I never looked at the budget before. Our principal makes $95K. The special ed director makes $101K. Her clerical staff make an average of $33K each.
    Must stop now.

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  11. There is always a place to cut fat. Last year our high school cut an entire “house”. That meant cutting one headmaster, two guidance counselors, and several support staff members, not millions in savings but a couple hundred thousand.
    Laura, let’s hope cutting foreign language is a scare tactic. There was a rumor during our local school committee elections about cutting Latin (yes I know we are very lucky to even have that option) at our high school and it was not at all true.

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  12. I grew up in Berkeley, so I get to tell California stories. Jesse Unruh, the long-time leader in the Calif. legislature, useta tell newbies, ‘Son, if you can’t eat their steaks, and drink their whiskey, and fuck their women, AND VOTE AGAINST THEM IN THE MORNING, you don’t belong here.’ A problem in Calif (and in Jersey – let’s think Jon Corzine and the union woman, for a truly Technicolor example) is that the government people haven’t been able to vote against them in the morning. There’s been a lot of people who should have been acting in the interest of the state accepting deals which avoided short-term problems and are back to haunt the state now.
    There are a lot of deals – inappropriately generous pensions, upward-ratcheting wages, union-preference agreements – which are going to have to be unwound. The process is going to be unpleasant and messy. I don’t know how it’s going to work. For a long time, we’re going to have attempts to keep things essentially the same – jettison a planetarium here, a couple more kids per class there, etc. etc. The future is going to be contentious and unpleasant. I don’t know how it is going to work.

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  13. I live in NC where the big Wake County school debate is going on. To bus or not to bus for economic diversity grounds is heavy duty. We are short 20+ million dollars in our budget. The new board wants to go backwards and start “zoning” school districts even though we are in a county wide run system. Neither work well. All are corrupt. But our teachers get paid nada, so I can’t blame them.
    Thing is, we were a model system and because of a budget shortfall, the old board cramming year round schools down parents throats, school redistricting constantly and siblings not going to the same highschool/middle school and being on different tracks, we now have a board that is, funnily, run by some business dude from NJ who knows f-all about education. I dread sending my kids the 2 blocks to school and we will be switching to private if any issues arise. Its all politics.

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  14. Laura, that salary is crazy– our superintendent has a base salary of $230K and he is responsible for the city of Baltimore, with 180 schools in it, many of them low-income and/or troubled by violence.

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