Joint Commission recommends consolidation to municipalities

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The Joint Consolidation/Shared Services Study Commission voted on Wednesday night to recommend that a referendum on consolidation be placed on the November ballot.

If the Borough Council and Township Committee approve the recommendation, the referendum will be placed on the ballot. If the referendum passes with a majority in both municipalities, the Borough and Township will consolidate into one municipality, effective 2013.

The only member of the commission to vote against recommending consolidation was finance subcommitte member and Borough Councilman David Goldfarb. Goldfarb said he would support the recommendation only if the referendum advised that consolidation be put to a popular vote. Currently, the commission recommends consolidation as a result of the vote.

“There’s no reason for us to sit here tonight, even if we’re concerned about some of the conclusions, to say that this process should stop here, that we shouldn’t make any recommendation to the governing bodies because we believe that consolidation shouldn’t happen,” Goldfarb explained. “There’s a reasonable argument to be made for consolidation. Therefore, I would vote in favor of a motion to recommend to the governing bodies that the issue of consolidation be presented with our report."

“If we’re willing to tone it down just a little bit and say that we're recommending that a referendum appears on the ballot in November considering consolidation ... based on our report, I would vote for that motion,” he said.

At the meeting, the finance subcommittee released the figures for the tax impact of consolidation. As a matter of direct property tax impact, consolidation would reduce taxes by $201 for the average household in the Borough and by $240 for the average household in the Township.

The report states the secondary tax impacts as $591 for the Borough and $416 for the Township. These figures, which the commission has stated are less certain than the direct tax impact figures, reflect the predicted results when county equalization measures — adjustments Mercer County makes to each municipality’s property taxes to compensate for year-to-year variance in property values — are taken into account.

The commission also discussed how it will prepare its report to the state Department of Community Affairs requesting assistance in covering the transition costs. Mark Pfeiffer, deputy director of the DCA’s Division of Local Government Services, explained that the state budget allows for appropriations made by request to aid in municipal transition costs, but that he could not state at the present time how much the state would provide.

Local resident Kathryn Warren asked whether the municipalities could trust that money the state may promise now would be available in the state’s budget through the entire consolidation process.

“If there's not money in the state budget in 2013 and the promise has been made, assuming that the government stays the same, will the state guarantee that the money will be there for the Princetons to consolidate its municipalities?” she asked.

“Given that we have continuity of administration,” Pfeiffer answered, “it will have been something that will have been approved through our chain of command, so the reliance that can be placed on that will be very high.”

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Borough resident Anne Neumann asked the commission to consider recommending that a referendum for a shared services arrangement be placed on the ballot due to a differences of walkability between the Borough and Township.

“This difference between a walking culture and car culture, it seems to me, has given rise to some different political views and decisions in recent months,” Neumann said, citing the placement of the public library and the debate over the University’s proposed relocation of the Dinky station. “I would guess, without any proof, that most of the people who walk to the Dinky live in the Borough, and that we in the Borough have more incentive to negotiate harder with the University to keep it from moving.”

Township mayor Chad Goerner said that the population is distributed in such a way that the majority of voters are inclined to preserve the walkability of the downtown Borough neighborhood. Goerner said that, if the student population of the Princetons is excluded, the population occupying the Borough and the ring of Township neighborhoods in close proximity to the Borough would represent a majority of the residents of the Borough and Township combined. More than half of the population of what would be the combined municipality, he said, lives in close proximity to the downtown Borough, and would desire to protect the walkability of the neighborhood.

“When it comes to those values [of walkability], those values would have a majority, and I think we’d be able to unite neighborhoods that are currently divided between the two municipalities,” Goerner said. “As far as walkability and bikability is concerned, that’s one of the things that we recognize that we have shared values on.”

“I want to bring to your attention the fact that, on the Dinky issue and on the library issue, there is an actual history of political divisions,” Neumann said in reply. “People are arguing about the Dinky moving 460 feet and that cutting down on ridership. Think of how much more people in the Borough are looking at that sort of distance than people in the Township because they’re so far away that they’re going to drive anyway.”