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.