Up-front costs causing towns to hit brakes on consolidation

A lack of third-party consultants and a scarcity of state funding could put the brakes on municipal consolidation efforts, a panel of experts from the Princetons, Merchantville and Cherry Hill said today at an event sponsored by Courage to Connect New Jersey, a nonprofit that educates residents about consolidation.

A lack of third-party consultants and a scarcity of state funding could put the brakes on municipal consolidation efforts, a panel of experts from the Princetons, Merchantville and Cherry Hill said today at an event sponsored by Courage to Connect New Jersey, a nonprofit that educates residents about consolidation.

“In the three previous efforts to consolidate the Princetons, the citizen commissions didn’t bring on an independent consultant, which we’ve found has taken the public fear factor out of the process and contributed to a large part of our success this time around,” Princeton Township Mayor Chad Goerner said. “But our consultant cost about $76,000, and the state only paid $37,500.”

Courage to Connect research director Andrew Bruck said the state should be providing funding to offset the costs of consolidation studies, independent consultants and transition efforts, which for the Princetons is estimated at $2 million. But since the state no longer has the funding to support a transition to shared services, and since there were cases in the past where the state fronted money, but the consolidation efforts fell through, the Division of Local Government Services within the Department of Community Affairs can only offer state liaisons for municipal consolidation study commissions, said Tom Neff, director of Local Government Services.

Courage to Connect’s executive director, Gina Genovese, thinks that the state government will handle the consolidation law like its state’s anti-bullying bill — pass it first, and later provide funding to implement.

“I don’t know how the state of New Jersey cannot support consolidation, when it can end up saving the state money in the long term,” Genovese said. “We have Florida, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts saying they want to replicate New Jersey’s consolidation model, so I can’t imagine why the state won’t fund a citizen movement that we know is going to sweep across the country.”

Lacking a budget and support from local government officials, Scotch Plains resident Fred Lange, who is spearheading a resident-driven plan to consolidate Scotch Plains and Fanwood, said he believes he’s found an alternate way to fund a study commission, once the municipalities’ submitted application to form one is approved by Community Affairs.

“When I was in grad school, I took a marketing class where part of it involved solving an actual vending machine company’s marketing issues, which probably saved that company a lot of money,” Lange said. “If we can go to a Rutgers graduate finance class and get 30 people working on the commission project with us, we would probably only pay $3,000 on a third-party resource, versus what these other towns have paid for experts.”

Correction: A previous version of this story contained incorrect information about transition costs.