Home Rule: Political Legacy or Luxury?

As if you didn't know, New Jersey residents pay the highest per capita property taxes in the nation, funding 616 school districts, 566 municipalities and 21 counties. With 70 municipalities occupying 234 square miles and a density of 3,868 persons per square mile, Bergen County is one of the most suburbanized counties in the United States.

Bergen County boasts more municipalities per square mile than any other county in America because of the onset of middle-class urban flight during the late nineteenth century. Escaping increasingly congested and industrialized cities, railroad commuters regarded a good education as the gateway to prosperity for their children. In contrast, the “Old Settlers,” or “Punkin dusters”—as farmers were derisively known from their supposed habit of dusting the frost from their pumpkin crop—required only the most rudimentary education for their offspring. Class sessions were held in winter and summer, when the cycle of agricultural production made children available to learn the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic.

I have seen history repeat itself. Sussex County, where I grew up, still boasted “More Cows Than People” when I was born. The last one-room schoolhouse in Vernon Township survived until 1958. There were only four high schools in Sussex County when I first attended Newton High School—the others being in Franklin, Sussex and Sparta. High Point Regional High School opened when I was a sophomore. Dualization of Route 15 and completion of Interstate Route 80 across Allamuchy Mountain by 1970 steadily turned Sussex County into a “bedroom community” and the number of schools multiplied. Thus, I witnessed the renewal of a process that swept away the old agrarian regime in the very same way Bergen County was similarly transformed half a century earlier.

The roots of Home Rule can be found in New Jersey’s largely independent and neighborly system of public education, dating to colonial times, when school districts did not correspond with municipal boundaries, but often encompassed portions of two or more townships. As early as 1693, the General Assembly of East Jersey allowed inhabitants to form a three-member school committee to set the salary of a schoolmaster. Once a majority of inhabitants agreed, the remaining townsfolk were obligated to contribute their share. Loose coalitions of interested parents thus formed informal boards of education to negotiate all arrangements for the operation of a neighborhood school.

The New Jersey Legislature only established a free public school system in 1871, forbidding state aid to any private school. It also compelled all townships to have a nine-month school term. The state school tax of 1871 was two mills on the dollar for assessed property. State constitutional amendments in 1878 required the state to provide “a thorough and efficient system of free public schools for the instruction of all children between the ages of five and eighteen years.”

In an agrarian age, the cost of schooling and other governmental services was relatively slight. The burden of taxation grew after 1894, when a new School Act consolidated large rural districts, allowing each municipality to fund its own separate school. Residents were compelled to pay off the debts of the old school districts on a pro rata basis, but, for some reason, “boroughs, towns, villages and cities were exempted from the law.” Consequently, the number of municipalities, each forming its own school district, rapidly multiplied. Writing on “Public Education” in 1923, County Superintendent Benjamin Wooster addressed the consequences of the 1894 Township School Law, claiming, “Its main purpose was to equalize educational opportunity so that children in a poor section might get some of the advantages given to children in richer districts of a township, but in Bergen County the attempt was a failure. The richer districts were unwilling to share their funds with their neighbors and advantage was taken of the ‘Borough act’ which permitted portions of a township to become separate municipalities with municipal and school governments of their own. In the same year (1894) that the township act was passed, twenty-six boroughs were formed in Bergen County alone, and scarcely a year has failed to add to the number.”

In 1903, the school tax increased to 2.75 mills on each dollar of property value to fund more and better schools. The Commission for the Survey of Municipal Financing reported in 1916, “The funded debt of New Jersey municipalities has doubled in a decade. The costs of administration have increased two and a half times in the same period. The ever increasing demands for service will bring constantly increased tax burdens.”

And you can follow the trail of complaints down to our own time. Professor Edwin Seligman wrote in the Trenton Times in 1930 that New Jersey communities placed too great a reliance on property taxes. He concluded, “the revenues are inadequate, the methods are slip-shod, the system is outworn.” By 1935, New Jersey was second among the states in combined state and local debt per capita. Skipping decades ahead, we learn that over 100 school budgets were defeated in 1963 based in part upon high real estate taxes to support education. To this day, school districts are independently chartered governmental entities, distinct from municipal government. Consequently, school taxes usually far exceed municipal and county taxes, making up 55% on average of a New Jersey resident's tax bill. As the Associated Press reported on April 18, 2007, “New Jersey's reliance on property taxes to pay for schools is unusually high compared to other states. The control the state gives voters over local tax bills is also unusual, compared with other states.”