Garden State Patriot

Kudos to State Senator Gerald Cardinale! Cardinale blocked Bergen County Executive Dennis McNerney from being placed on a panel to “study the consolidation of towns and school districts.”

Cardinale cited his opposition to McNerney’s appointment, firstly, because the Democrat is known to favor consolidation. Secondly, Cardinale also rightly points out that recent study commissions have been stacked with people pre-disposed to arrive at conclusions that the Governor and Legislature desire. In fact, this was the case with the recent recommendations from a state panel on gay marriage. From the Bergen Record:

Cardinale, the veteran Republican from Demarest, says he will not support McNerney’s nomination to the Local Unit Alignment, Reorganization and Consolidation Commission.

Cardinale, who can use “senatorial courtesy” powers to blackball a gubernatorial nomination from Bergen County, believes McNerney will simply rubber stamp “preconceived” recommendations to merge smaller towns with larger ones.

McNerney is an unabashed champion of small-town consolidation and authored a report in February calling for the merger of 35 Bergen towns with 10,000 or fewer residents. “I firmly believe that the root of excessive property taxes lies in the overabundance of small local governments in the state,” McNerney wrote in an Op-Ed piece.

 Further…

Cardinale’s objections extend beyond McNerney. He believes the nomination fits a pattern by Corzine and the Democratic-controlled Legislature of stacking study commissions with members predisposed to reach conclusions favorable to Corzine’s controversial legislative aims. “It’s time for it to stop,” he said

Of course, McNerney’s claims regarding property taxes and small local governements are complete and utter hooey. The fact of the matter is local governments are actually far more efficient than governments in places like Jersey City or Newark, which spend far more per capita than the smaller towns and municipalities. If we allow Trenton to start merging New Jersey towns, it will only lead to more government, more bureaucracy and higher taxes. 

In fact, gubernatorial candidate and State Director of Americans for Prosperity in New Jersey, Steve Lonegan, exposes this Trenton scheme in his book Putting Taxpayers First. Here are some excerpts (from Chapter Six: The Myth of Consolidation):

It is disturbing to listen to elected officials willing to throw “home rule” (what built this state) under the proverbial bus. These cries for consolidation are cheap sound bites from elected officials with no knowledge of the importance and the effectiveness of local government. Those who spout this nonsense either have no understanding of this issue or simply are willing to sacrifice self-government for political purposes. I don’t know which is worse.

The term “home rule” has been coined by the liberal media, which advocates consistently for onerous centralized government. The rights of individuals to self-govern are seen as being at odds with the need of the government to rule with central authority. The term “home rule” is most often treated by the media with contempt since they equate the concept of self-government with selfishness.

This interpretation is rather curious, as the right to rule over one’s own home has long been considered sacred. Giving up the right to determine one’s destiny is something any healthy person should fight to avoid, which is why the socialists have such a need to create entrenched constituencies for big-government programs – in other words a dependent populace that relies on hand-outs from Big Brother. 

At first blush such big-government welfare programs might appear to be borne from a populist mindset, but in fact these programs characterize an elitist world view. Such programs are created by ultra liberal collectivists who believe from the depths of their patricial cockles that the proverbial unwashed masses are incompetent to govern themselves. And since home rule stands in the way of imposing elite central authority, steamrolling over it is a key goal of collectivists. Fundamentally eliminating home rule is to indicate that a man’s home is not his castle; it is only through the benevolence of the State that his “home” is made possible.

 Steve goes on…

Governor Corzine and his minions would like to turn New Jersey’s wide array of small towns and municipalities into scapegoats for the problems their policies have created. In a July 28th article published in The Record by Senate Majority Leader Richard Codey, he states “New Jersey currently has 566 municipalities, 616 school districts and 186 fire districts, which along with our 21 counties rely on property taxes to fund their operations.” Codey makes this statement as if the numbers of local governing entities alone are sufficient to explain New Jersey’s sky high taxes. And unfortunately, many ill-informed politicians are coalescing around the false solution of forcing merger of municipalities.

And Steve is 100% correct. This effort to merge our municpalities is essentially a dagger to the heart of the very type of democracy our Founders desired for us. It is an incremental step toward more government control over our lives. One that Steve rightly concludes “must be resisted at every turn.”