If it's broke, why not fix it?

William Dressel, executive director of the League, confirmed that he had opposed the provision, and added that he would oppose any bill that “penalized municipalities for voting against consolidation.” Several local officials echoed that sentiment. 

Dressel explained his opposition in terms of the state’s alleged failure to offer “carrots,” but, like Shure, some state lawmakers, say the approach of just offering carrots has been tried and found wanting: incentives that were offered in the past were not used by many municipalities, and failed to achieve significant results.

Latest proposal

New Jersey State Senate President Stephen Sweeney does think that sticks need to go with carrots.  He has recently proposed a bill that, in addition to refunding LUARCC, would deny the amount of state aid that LUARCC determined might have been saved through a shared-service agreement to a town that subsequently voted it down.

Bruck said that this principle could also be applied to consolidation recommendations.

But Bruck said that even that stick might not be big enough. The proposal that he advocates would put all the state aid to municipalities with populations under 10,000 in escrow. “If they agreed to do a consolidation study, they would get half of it back,” he said. “If they actually consolidated, they would get two or three times the amount of aid back.”

That would have the effect of motivating towns to consolidate quickly to compete for the aid in the fund. “Right now there’s no momentum,” Bruck said. “We have to incentivize towns to go first.”

Bruck acknowledged that that proposal is unlikely to gain the support of the state legislature, not to mention the towns themselves, at least in the immediate future.

In the near-term, however, many agree that it does not make sense to have LUARCC sidelined when potential benefits of consolidation are so much larger than the costs of running the Commission.

“The first step,” Bruck said, “is to reinvigorate it.”