Don’t Make Our Small Towns the Bad Guys

By Mayor Mike Halfacre

It seems that for as long as New Jersey’s small towns have existed, New Jersey lawmakers have been blaming them for the State’s woes. Ironically, many of those same lawmakers started off as home rule politicians, only to smugly point a finger at home rule as the reason our property taxes and cost of living is the highest in the nation, once they made it to Trenton.

I write not as a defender of home rule, but as a defender of small towns. Unlike the Governor, I will avoid painting broad generalizations, but in small towns, there is usually no room for waste, as our margins are too thin. For most small towns, administrative costs are a fraction per resident of what they are in large towns and cities. Perhaps, instead aggregating small towns to form “collectivist” communities, as Corzine wants us to pursue, we may want to look at breaking up the large cities, and taking away the massive bureaucratic money pits that so wildly abuse the taxpayers.

As Mayor of the kind of small municipality that gets blamed for the budget mess in Trenton, I must constantly point out that the mess in Trenton is entirely of Trenton’s making. Over the past eight years Fair Haven’s municipal aid and school aid have not increased one cent, while the State budget has almost doubled. Our town, and others like it, have not received an additional penny of that exponentially increasing state budget.

And yet, when it comes time to tighten the State’s belt, Fair Haven and towns like it get squeezed.

Governor Corzine, hearing the cries of the oppressed at his Town Hall meetings, has “found religion” and introduced a budget that he says is of historical proportions. Frankly, the only thing historical about it is that history repeats itself, and Corzine once again lays the State’s problems at the feet of the small towns.

The FY 2009 budget that attempts to wipe small municipalities from the face of New Jersey calls for a decrease in Municipal aid to towns with less than 10,000 in population in the amount of 190 million dollars. The same budget contains an increase in spending on school aid of 555 million dollars. Yet, in many of those same small towns, not a penny of that increased school aid will be received. The vast majority of school and municipal aid continues to flow to large cities, with machine politics that must be fed suburban taxpayers in order to survive.

Governor Corzine highlights in his budget speeches how state aid and grants for education and municipalities account for almost 75% of the State Budget. While this figure is accurate, it is not reflective of the reality of the State budget. The vast majority of that 75% does not come to the small towns. It is spent in the cities and Abbot Districts.

Nothing in this Budget stops the flow of suburban money to those money pits. Until someone in Trenton can say “NO” to the big city machine, small towns will continue to be the scapegoat of the big spenders in Trenton.

Mike Halfacre is the Mayor of Fair Haven. His website is www.mikehalfacre.com