Consolidate Savings

Nearly everyone in the state agrees on one thing: We cannot continue on the fiscal path we have been traveling. It is, as Gov. Chris Christie told a packed crowd in Hillsborough on Wednesday, “unsustainable.”

The problem is that there is no agreement on how to construct a new path.

New Jerseyans pay more in taxes – all taxes – per capita than any other state and our average property tax bill is the highest in the nation as well.

But we also have to admit that we get a lot for what we are paying, more than they get in most of the low-tax states. Our schools – while wildly unequal – are among the best in the nation. We have top-notch hospitals, one of the best state universities in the country and outstanding state and county college systems.

Given the state’s high-income levels and extreme property wealth, one would think we could pay our bills, but we have failed miserably.

Our state debt is sky high. We neglected the public employee pension system, allowed our once-great cities to decay into enclaves of crime and despair, assumed we could have everything we wanted without having to pay.

And now that the weight of this debt has become impossible to ignore, we refuse to be honest about the pain and sacrifice we must endure to get the state’s finances onto a more sustainable path.

Gov. Christie, of whom I’ve been critical, is not wrong when he demands that we must put the public sector on a diet. We have to find ways to provide important and necessary services more efficiently. But his solutions – privatizating services, busting unions, dismantling public education and gutting the social safety net – are not likely to put us on a more sustainable path or address the brutal geographical segregation that now exists.

Senate President Stephen Sweeney, a Gloucester County Democrat, is pushing shared services as the answer. He told a crowd in Westfield last night that, for towns, “there is nothing you can’t share.” Except that most towns are not interested in sharing – at least not sharing the big-ticket items like police departments.

Hightstown and East Windsor, Jamesburg and Monroe, the Princetons – all of the other doughnut-and-hole towns out there – should be putting their police departments on the table, seeing if there are ways they can be regionalized. New Jersey has more police officers than any other state per capita, due in no small part to the proliferation of departments.

The unwillingness to combine police resources in most places around the state – and the unwillingness of some rural small towns to chip in for state police coverage – is unfortunate, because it makes it unlikely that the big cost-savers will make it onto the table. Without police and the other big ticket items – road crews, libraries in some towns – the promise of shared services will prove elusive.

And it means that the real reforms – large-scale municipal consolidation, elimination of fire districts, county restructuring and a rethinking of the entire tax system – cannot get the serious hearing they deserve.

Everything else – pension changes, a tax cap, etc. – is just nibbling around the edges.