If it's broke, why not fix it?
In the original legislation, proposed by State Senator Joseph Kyrillos, LUARCC would have produced a list of municipalities to consolidate, and then the legislature would vote up or down on its recommendations, exactly like the BRAC Commission. Before the bill was brought to a vote, however, rival legislators modified it by adding a provision that required voter approval of any consolidation plans. The revised bill passed by a large majority. Even if LUARCC’s funding were restored, the added provision, some say, might prove to be a serious impediment to LUARCC’s effectiveness.
Nevertheless, according to State Assemblywoman Pamela Lampitt, LUARCC could play a valuable role in encouraging municipalities to consolidate, effectively changing the dynamic between the state and local governments by singling out municipalities that should consolidate, and then performing the so-called “feasibility studies” for them.
“The problem is that somebody’s got to be the bad guy here,” she said. “Everybody loves their local mayor. So, here’s the bad guy. The challenge will be to make residents understand that [consolidation] can be a seamless process for them.”
That would require giving LUARCC the funding and the staffing to do feasibility studies so that residents and local officials would see concretely the cost-savings that would result from consolidation, Bruck said. By performing the studies itself, LUARCC would also save the localities the expense normally associated with consolidation studies.
Additionally, Bruck said, LUARCC would make consolidation a more visible alternative for towns now focused on whether to raise property taxes or cut services (and eliminate an excuse for not exploring consolidation as an option).
During its first two years of operation, the Commission produced several reports and literature reviews on municipal size, efficiency, and tax rates, discharging the first stage of its responsibilities under its charter. The next step, according to Commission Chair John Fisher, was to perform feasibility studies with respect to specific municipalities that appear to be good candidates for consolidation, studies which would then lead to the submission of formal consolidation proposals to the state for approval.
“That was the threshold we got to when funding got cut,” Fisher said.
The commission has still been meeting at least once a month, Fisher added, but it no longer has the means to perform or contract for feasibility studies in order to test its preliminary hypotheses with data and analysis.
Defunding LUARCC
According to Kevin Roberts, a spokesperson for Gov. Christie, “[t]he decision to defund LUARCC was due to the unprecedented fiscal crisis faced by the state in the last fiscal year, a policy we’ve continued in the proposed [fiscal year 2012] budget.”
LUARCC’s precise budget in 2009 was not immediately available from the Department of Community Affairs. Fisher said, however, that LUARCC had received only $500,000 in 2009 for “consultancy costs”; additional costs included the salary of an Executive Director and some materials and office supplies, but Fisher said that total was not more than $1 million. In relation to Gov. Christie’s proposed budget for 2011-2012, which included $29.4 billion in total expenditures, $1 million would be equivalent to 0.0034% of the total. Even if LUARCC were significantly expanded (Fisher declined to provide cost estimates for an expansion that would include additional duties), the savings that could result from the consolidation of even a small number of towns could easily offset the cost of the commission, said Bruck. Roberts did not respond to a follow-up question about the range of cost efficiencies the Governor believes could result from consolidation on a large scale.
A backdoor way to erode worker protections?
Local officials have repeatedly pointed to New Jersey’s Civil Service system as an impediment to consolidation, calling it antiquated and, sometimes, unnecessary.
Civil service was started in New Jersey in order to protect against patronage in the public sector, said Jeffrey Keefe, a professor at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations. “Once upon a time, if you got elected, you got to appoint everybody that worked the municipality,” he said.
Civil Service regulations protect against that kind of patronage by required all employment to be “merit based.” Thus, potential employees are given a test before they are considered for a job, and state law provides particular mechanisms that local officials have to go through in order to hire, fire, transfer, promote or demote an employee.
The regulations also protect the individual workers by providing a specific range of compensation that must be paid to an employee, depending on his or her job title.
While only about a third of New Jersey’s municipalities are in the civil service system, local officials have complained that the rules make it difficult for them to consolidate or share services. For example, some officials have complained that the strict job titles in the civil service system prevent them from creating the new positions that might result from a shared-service agreement if it required a range of tasks that could be done by a single employee but that did not fit into a specific civil service title.
These complaints, among others, have caused officials at all levels of New Jersey government to link civil service reform with the encouragement of consolidation and shared services.
Rex Reid, the Political Legislative Representative for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in New Jersey, said that he saw some of the encouragement of consolidation as “a backdoor way to get rid of contracts…and part of the state’s race to the bottom.”
In fact, many of the complaints that have arisen come from municipal leaders in towns that are not in the civil service system, because they pay their employees significantly less and thus see no economic gain to consolidating with a town that is civil service.
While Governor Christie has advocated to allow towns to “opt-out” of the system altogether, and Senate President Stephen Sweeney has proposed legislation that would effectively nullify civil service rules for employees affected by a shared services agreement, LUARCC has actually presented a list of specific changes to civil services law that it believes would remove the obstacles to sharing services.
Jon Shure, of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said that he thinks that it is better to evaluate specific civil service proposals on their merits than to try to link civil service changes to consolidation.
“There are certainly some reforms that can be made without sacrificing worker protections,” he said, “but tying progress on shared services and consolidation to the erosion of that protection raises red flags.”
Shure also said that, in many cases, the savings from consolidation could be used to increase worker protections and compensation, as well as improve service delivery.
“As much as consolidation is needed,” Shure continued, “if it’s being supported only for short-term financial reasons, to make it easier to lay people off, then it’s off the mark. It calls into question whether people see the real value of it in the first place.”