Governor Christie Congratulates a Consolidated Princeton

Photo by Lauren Zumbach

In a town hall meeting with Princeton Township Mayor Chad Goerner and Princeton Borough Council member Kevin Wilkes, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie congratulated the two Princetons on the recent vote in favor of consolidation.

“We have to start not just talking about challenging the status quo, but actually challenging it,” Christie said, calling the Princetons an example for the rest of the state.

The consolidation referendum passed with a landslide 85% in the Township and 60% in the Borough earlier this month, settling the decades-long debate after three unsuccessful attempts to form a single Princeton.

Christie has promoted municipal mergers as a way to cut costs and reduce New Jersey’s property taxes, which are among the nation’s highest. A study estimated that the Princeton consolidation could eventually save about $3.2 million, without factoring in legislation Christie proposed in September under which the state Department of Community Affairs would cover 20% of the cost of merging.

But though Christie praised the Princetons’ ability to put “practicality ahead of parochialism,” he argued that there is much more to be done to solve the state’s economic woes.

“We’re not going to spend our way out of the problem, we can only save our way out,” Christie said.

In addition to the already-enacted interest rate arbitration and pension reforms, he called for more money-saving measures in civil service, sick pay and shared services reform.

Though he recognized that some of those cuts would be unpopular, Christie argued that the property taxes used to finance those programs made New Jersey less competitive, costing the state jobs and revenue from income taxes.

“We can no longer think that we can have everything we want and that everyone will be able to pay for that,” he said. “We were treating property tax payers like a money tree.”

Goerner and Wilkes said the measures Christie outlined would help them cut costs and run the towns as efficiently as possible.

Wilkes praised the “creativity” behind the decision to help municipalities finance mergers by subsidizing the upfront cost and letting towns spread it over a period of five years, although he acknowledged that “we don’t want to go down the road of capitalizing too many things.”

“The easier the state makes it to consolidate or share services, the more we’ll see it happening,” agreed Goerner. But he also called for even more flexibility at the local level, giving towns the freedom to make decisions that will let them govern as effectively as possible.

Having been through the process necessary to bring consolidation to a vote, Goerner said Princeton Township members had changes they would recommend to make the process easier. Wilkes noted that the fact that the Princetons were already closely linked through 17 shared services, from fire and first aid to a shared school district, made it possible to take the final step and consolidate.

Christie said that the flexibility they described is what he hopes to achieve with the reforms he’s pushing in the legislature, which he described as “additional tools we can give them to control property taxes.”

“On the local level, if they don’t have the flexibility to do what they want to do, and we’re then holding them accountable when they have one hand tied behind their back, that doesn’t make much sense,” Christie said. “We need to trust local officials and allow them to govern.”

About the Author

Lauren Zumbach

Lauren Zumbach is a student at Princeton University majoring in economics. She is from Chicago and her work has appeared in the Trenton Times, Huffington Post, and the Jakarta Globe.