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No one wants to give up home rule so we have massive amount of redundancies. Example I lived in Washington in Warren county. Actually in Warren County we have Washington Borough and Washington Township, the Borough is the hole in the donut surrounded by the Township.
Things may have changed since I moved in 2015 but we had separate Police, Fire, DPW and grammar schools with superintendent of schools for the Borough and the Township. Township Fire Department and Police passes through Washington Borough to answer calls. Both agencies back each other up. But both organizations had separate management ie separate police chief, captains, etc. etc. .....WHY?
I moved to Pa police, fire, schools are done on a regional bases with the cost spread out over a larger area and no redundancy with Police, Fire, etc paying multiple people to do the same job, as a result taxes are much less!!
Dont even get me started on the Police here. Many Police were hired at 18 (laws changed to 21 now) and are able to retire at age 38 with 100k+ pensions. This state is ridiculous and crooked.
Nobody likes overpaying taxes. There are some clear ideas for consolidating police and education, but they are not going to happen in my lifetime. My wife and I have good jobs, our kids are getting a great education from excellent, well paid teachers, and our lovely town is safe and well tended. At least we benefit and see the results of our property taxes.
If you have paid off your mortgage, and your property taxes are $15k or $1250/month, it is still a cheap 'rent' for living in the NYC metro area and all the benefits of the area. As we all know, there are many cheaper places to move to when you retire, but it is possible to stay in the NYC metro area in retirement.
And look at what happens when someone tries to do something about it. The South Orange Village President has been pretty vocal about wanting to merge services with Maplewood as much as possible and that turned into a huge thing in our most recent local election where tons of out of town money (largely aligned with the fire fighter's unions and most likely developers) went to promoting a rival candidate. It was 100% insane and the people supporting the rival candidate put a level of spin on all of their information that put a lot of it out anything you'd normally expect. From what I could gather by sorting through the fire fighter's misinformation is that that could lead to an eventual reduction of overtime pay for them.
And this was all to make a single fire department for a pair of towns that have always shared a school district and were the same town just a little over 100 years ago and function as a single community. If two closely-knit towns with similar demographics like South Orange and Maplewood can't easily join services then imagine trying to reunite the other Oranges. Or merging all of what used to be Newark in to a Greater Newark (which is what an outside party would probably say would make sense).
i think a lot of it is the fact that we dont know better. id be curious to see how many people are moving into this area vs moving out. i think there are a lot of other places in the country that are as good or better for quality of life.
the biggest draw is likely the job market, not so much the other stuff like beach and even schools. there are lots of great places to live in nj and the quality of life is high as long as you have a good income. if you dont have a good income; maybe you still have better job prospects here. i dont know im just thinking out loud.
It all depends on what quality of life means to someone. I have friends who moved out west years ago and are happy there. Another friend moved just four years ago to the suburbs of Nashville after living her life in Bergen County (her husband's job was relocated). She has the big-ass brick colonial with a large yard she always wanted for far less than it would cost in NJ. To me it's weird, because like me she is 61 and her only kid is grown, so what's the need for the big-ass brick colonial and now you're sweating in the humidity of the South and the claim to fame of your "city" is country music. But that is HER idea of quality of life.
My quality of life is very different from either here or there, but for now, I'm tied to family obligations in NJ.
But you are right about job prospects. I was relatively successful in my career for someone without a college education, and I am not sure that could have occurred elsewhere.
I live in Maryland near DC. I noticed that the sizable houses in many parts of New Jersey (NYC metro area) have a similar price tag as those where I live. But the property tax in Jersey is like $15,000 a year more.
I’m just wondering - Does it bother you that you will have to pay such a high property tax even after your house is paid off? Or is this something that people just accept and that’s it?
high tax in NJ is indicative of legal and illegal corruption, fraud and incompetence by elected legislators and entrenched bureaucrats that continues as a legacy of poor voter choice and lack of voting participation.... on a municipal, county and state level.
High property tax is bad policy and shows an outdated government infrastructure. A modern government system would not have so many different municipalities and having so much redundant services.
NJ should be divided up to 3 cities only and all the townships should all be organized that way. There should only be 3 separate police forces and not 100+ each with their own commissioner that gets a $200k salary.
That's why the accountability is bad and the budgets are terrible in poor towns requiring Trenton to rob taxes from the rich towns and divert them to the poor ones and yet they still have to pay for their own services.
colonial style governments cost a lot to operate. How much do you want to pay for small government? that's the question.
It's basically a tradeoff for the opportunities of having access to the city as well as the ocean and the country, all within reasonable drives. Since I've got a small condo, my taxes are not as horrific as some others, but what I pay is more than some people in other states pay on a big house.
I'm already retired but won't leave the state as long as my elderly mother is here. I work part-time in the city and make a ridiculously good hourly rate for not working very hard to supplement my pension. I've got the ocean 15 minutes away. I've got every food choice I could possibly want within a hop, skip, and jump.
It's not a perfect life, but there is a reason we are the most densely populated state in the country and have such high taxes. People want to live here for the advantages of good schools, entertainment, access to jobs and pretty much everything else you could want except for reasonable traffic. Then again, I have a friend who lived in Silver Spring and now lives in Arlington, and when I visit her, I always marvel that there's a place where the traffic is worse than in New Jersey!
^this
I'd be fine with high taxes as long as it went to education, science and medicine R&D, and functional passenger rail and mass transit
high tax in NJ is indicative of legal and illegal corruption, fraud and incompetence by elected legislators and entrenched bureaucrats that continues as a legacy of poor voter choice and lack of voting participation.... on a municipal, county and state level.
I'm sure there is some of this happening, but I think the larger point to why the tax burden is what it is goes back to what some others are saying on town services. Basically every 3-square mile parcel of land has their own school system, police force, fire department, library, etc. etc. In other areas of thew country this is not the case.
When I was living in TX, the tows were literally huge (200K+ population) so were much more efficient on town services. I'm not advocating for that - in truth, we DO get more services here. But, I think there's a healthy middle ground somewhere between there and here.
I would look toward a state like Massachusetts that has a similarly high cost of living, demographics and age of infrastructure as a starting point. Their tax burden is actually much lower than ours (and their economy has been growing at a pretty healthy rate.) They basically abolished the county government structure a while back, so the counties are essentially name markers only at this point.
Major structural reforms seem politically out of reach (imagine the previously quoted Maplewood/SO scenario on steroids), but I do think we could do smaller things to chip away at inefficiency.
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