Roberts at it again! Suburbs beware!!!!!

I just read one of the best descriptions of the property tax mess summarized in one article. In the article "A Property Tax Disaster", Michael Patrick Carroll (on Politicker.com)discussed the looming danger non-city taxpayers face:

Every legislator claims to favor property tax relief, but by their actions shall you know them. The present majority gave us the fraudulent "millionaires’ tax", rebates with borrowed money, etc. But none of these rookie efforts compares with the threat posed by A-500.

Therein, Speaker Roberts and a cadre of urban legislators draw a bead on suburban taxpayers. Should this proposal pass – and be coupled with even more coercive COAH regulations – it could mean property tax increases in the hundreds of millions, of billions, of dollars.

Lest we feel that this article is overstating the case, it clearly lays out the rationale for believing that we may be close to an acceleration of the disaster already propagated upon taxpayers in the past 6 years. The setup is COAH dictating to a local district that they need more low income housing to the tune of 1,000 units (which would be paired with 4,000 market rate units).

5,000 units; let’s assume 1 kid per unit = 5,000 new students. That’s, what, 10 new schools? Not being an Abbott district, the entire cost of that construction would fall on the shoulders of the existing taxpayers. Let’s be generous and assume that each unit pays $7,000 in annual property taxes. Bridgewater presently spends (roughly) $12,200 per kid, which means that present taxpayers will see their taxes increase by $26 million (5000 new kids at $5,200 deficit each), not including the costs of school construction.

But wait, there’s more. If the Abbott folks are correct – students from poor families need spending of roughly $25,000 per year to compensate for their poverty – that makes the deficit for 1000 of those kids roughly $18000 per annum. Oh, and the state contributes a princely 8% of the costs of educating a child in Bridgewater.

This development, then, would be an unmitigated property tax disaster for the local residents.

This entire situation as some level starts to make you sad. As the gas situation gets worse, my commuting cost continue to skyrocket and even food costs are going out of site, the luxury of living in the State of New Jersey is becoming less and less affordable. And the fact that the urban districts in this state will continue to look at people like me and those that read this blog as a pack of rubes ripe for the fleecing. Speaker Roberts is frankly just chief grafter in this pack. Carroll has some ideas in this regard:

Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. We can address the housing problem by addressing the school funding problem: give each child an equal, state funded voucher.

If each kid came with a voucher, municipal opposition to housing construction would abate, because they’d be assets, not liabilities. A fair number of them would attend private schools, making their parents’ property tax payments pure municipal profit. And those who attend public schools would, now, pay their own way. The need for tens of billions of new construction spending on Abbott district schools would vanish. The incentive – and the ability – for Newark or Keansburg to lavish excessive salaries or reward employees with sweetheart deals would evaporate.

In short, kids, their parents, and the property taxpayers would benefit massively. Only those with a financial stake in the present, hugely expensive and horribly unfair system would suffer.

The funny thing here is that once the regular citizens of this state realize what is going on, it will be far too late. "Leaders" like Lautenberg, Menendez, Roberts and Kean Jr are all vested in a system that doesn't serve the state . And only after New Jersey starts to resemble Michigan will they get it. The productive people in this state are leaving in the 10's of thousands every year. One day, the teachers union may wake up and realize that not only isn't there a golden egg, the goose left long ago.

Read this excellent article here.

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