Neighborhoods Need Revenue-Sharing Funds
By Bret Schundler
If government in America is going to serve the
people, it must serve them where they live. Americans
care about peace in Kosovo, but they care even more
about peace and quiet in their own neighborhoods.
The governmental services that matter most to most
Americans are local government services such as policing, schooling, park maintenance, and
road repair. To provide high-quality
community services, local governments
require resources and the management
powers necessary to use these resources
efficiently. But in recent years, the state has
been stripping local government of both.
In the years since 1994, New Jersey's
state revenues have increased by $4 billion.
Yet, on an inflation-adjusted basis, the
state has cut its revenue sharing with
municipalities by $323 million. The state is
raking in more sales and income tax revenue
from its municipalities, but sharing less.
The state has been pouring dollars into select school
districts but simultaneously increasing its interference in
school district management. This works at cross-purposes
with the state's goal of increasing school cost-effectiveness.
Earlier this month, to please government school unions, the
New Jersey Legislature passed a law that effectively bars
school districts from sub-contracting for bus transportation,
custodial work, and cafeteria management. School districts
subcontract for these non-educational services to save
money so that they can lower property taxes while
increasing the availability of dollars for classroom learning.
It was wrong for the Legislature to take this management
tool away from school districts, but it was not surprising that
it did so. State usurpations of municipal and school district
powers are becoming common.
As the state reduces our resources and management
powers, I and other mayors across New Jersey are finding it
increasingly difficult to provide high-quality community
services at a reasonable property-tax cost.
But we are not going to just wring our
hands. Instead, we are banding together
across party lines to demand that the
state restore the $323 million in revenue
sharing that it has cut, and that the state
begin to index its revenue sharing to the
rate of inflation, so that it will be
constant in
inflation-adjusted terms.
We are also demanding that the state
end its usurpations of municipal and school district management powers.
State politicians say that rising property taxes are
the fault of spendthrift local governments. But the
truth is that if more governmental resources and
management powers were controlled locally, governmental services would become both more responsive
to the public and more cost-effective.
Originally appeared in The Record
July 21, 1999.
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