Should the Garden State Abolish Its County Governments?
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A state assemblyman from North Jersey wants to do away them. But he might want to take a South Jersey field trip first.
Government officials in New Jersey at the state and local level have plenty of fiscal issues to grapple with. But would getting rid of the state’s 21 county governments be a simple way to streamline government services and save money?
State Assemblyman Robert Auth thinks so and has proposed a first step to do just that. He’s introduced a measure that would direct a state commission to recommend ways to the legislature on how best to eliminate New Jersey’s counties.
"It's just duplicative services,” Auth told The Star-Ledger. “The budget and the state's economy are in such a bad way at this point that one of these local forms of government has to go. And in our state it would be county government."
Auth thinks that the state government and municipal governments can provide the services that New Jersey’s 21 county governments provide.
Usually with the topic of local government consolidation, discussions revolve around municipalities dissolving or consolidating services with a county government—not the other way around.
John Donnadio, executive director of the New Jersey Association of Counties, told The Star-Ledger that “we should be looking at consolidating and dissolving municipalities as opposed to county government.”
New Jersey is a complicated place to say the least. It has 565 municipal governments, many of them concentrated in the northern part of the state, adjacent to New York City.
While Auth, who lives in Bergen County, might be frustrated with county government in North Jersey he may want to take a field trip to South Jersey.
“From a practical viewpoint, we’ve been able to successfully work with our municipalities to find ways to lower the cost of government services to the residents of Burlington County in a really, really successful way,” Burlington County Administrator Paul Drayton Jr. said in an interview Friday.
GovExec State & Local previously profiled Burlington County’s efforts to deal with the economic realities of the Great Recession by using what Drayton has called “third way” budgeting to improve county services, upgrade its 911 and IT infrastructure, avoid drastic employee layoffs and reduce costs at the same time.
“I would certainly encourage [Assemblyman Auth] to take a very close look at what we’ve been able to do successfully and if that can help contribute to the debates that are taking place in Trenton, I think that’s a really good thing,” the county administrator said.
Drayton said that five South Jersey counties, Atlantic, Burlington, Camden, Cumberland and Gloucester, are in the beginning discussions to join forces to build a regional jail, which would be the first in New Jersey.
A kick-off meeting for the counties is scheduled for this week.
“The fact you have five major counties in South Jersey saying—‘Hey, you know what? We’re wiling to work together, to plan and look at the feasibility of this’—is absolutely a great step in the right direction.”