Health & Fitness
Everyone is Responsible For Our High Taxes? Not so.
Municipal tax increases of 177% in Chester Township! Perhaps we need a fresh line of thinking from elected officials actually protecting a rare municipal asset: citizens' money.
I have heard for years from Chester Township leadership a quick retort whenever asked about the high taxes in town: “GO ASK THE SCHOOLS! GO ASK THE SCHOOLS!”
Well the jury is back on the tax increases and it is not the schools who have failed some semblance of sanity for tax increases. According to the Sunday Star Ledger of January 8, 2012 which ran an analysis of property taxes for Morris County municipalities, it is our municipal governance that gets the failing grade.
Chester Township has the worst record in all of Morris County, and not by a nose, unless the liar Pinocchio is the yardstick. The county average over the 10 year period is a ripping 58% when compared to the cost of living at 32% for the same period. This is horrible management of our resources (a.k.a. – private funds).
But the story gets worse for Chester residents. Their municipal tax increases have gone up by 177% in the same time period! This is three times worse than the county average, and six times more than inflation. During this 10-year time frame school taxes increased 50%.
Where is the responsibility? The accountability has to be at the ballot box. Those responsible are largely the same by name and surely of the same mindset for the last decade, even if the faces and placards at the dais change every few years. There is clearly an absence of vision in planning and a gaping void in responsible execution.
Regrettably, stewardship of all resources is an uncommon practice. While our elected officials buy more open space with money we don’t have, while we short circuit private enterprise in the name of stopping everything, while we partner with many a non-profit to the detriment of the residents’ pocketbooks, the spiral has become a vortex draining our community. Senator Mike Doherty makes the point well in his discussions of the destruction of our suburbs as wealth is squandered in funding transfers to wallowing inner cities.
Our residents are voting with their feet and leaving the burdens of the last decades of baseless financial management. Taxes are too high in every regard and the metrics are not in place to measure the extractions in other than our total debt. The unmeasured burdens are also found in financial stress, opportunity costs, lost initiatives and the like.
The next time someone asks a municipal official why taxes are so high the answer ought to be “I did it” as evidenced by their 10-year record of a 177% increase in municipal taxes.
