The Radical's Blog: Death by a Thousand Cuts

As I write more of these blogs, I am learning something about myself and my personal style (I have written a lot more than I have had published yet thanks to some very long flights while traveling for work recently). Other than flipping between very serious posts and more comical ones I frequently use old sayings or Shakespeare quotes for the entry title. This blog is no different. "Death by a thousand cuts" is something we used to use to describe our property tax problem back in 2004-2006 when I was tilting at tax windmills. It meant there was no single fix to the problem. The root causes of the high taxes were vast and many. And explains why our state Legislature has been unable to fix it: They can’t compress a complex fix into a 15-second sound bite. If you have been reading what I write you should know my opinion of our Legislature's ability to fix any serious problem.

So as I look to Gloucester Township and how we can ultimately lower our taxes, there is a cold realization that it is going to take a lot of work with a large number of initiatives that need to work together. Getting one or two reforms on the agenda and passed—while a significant achievement—will not be reason to stop and claim success. There will be many more items to work on in our town. Even if former Gov. Jon Corzine himself came out of exile and paid the entire municipal budget for a year, that would only be 20 percent of the tax bill. A savings yes but still not the dramatic kind of cuts the people of this state need.  We will need to bring those reforms to the schools, county and fire districts. 

Pay to Play is one of those tricky reforms. Certainly we can quantify the savings, just subtract the amounts given to local campaigns and amounts funneled through other campaigns and PACs to local races. But then there is the “hidden tax,” the amount we are overpaying for services because of the lack of competition for contracts and services because the vendor was pre-chosen. Can we quantify that?  Yes, but we would need the rate sheets and quotes from other vendors? How can you quantify the savings from good government? Or quantify the lost opportunity of a business that did not open because they could not afford to donate; or the bid not submitted because the service provider knew the “fix” was in?

The reason I engaged in this effort and clearly published a set of reform items is because the net effect of these should be a reduction in the cost of doing the same services we already provide. Even in this economy, finding savings in the budget that can reduce taxes without downsizing a single employee. Though to be true to my “Radical” label, this is assuming a personnel audit determines we actually need every employee we have. I may be a Republican but I still have a heart. We can’t just knee-jerk react to budget shortfalls and insist we lay people off. That is the argument of cowards—the same ones who put cutting school activities as the first cuts to make. We need to do a thorough review of our processes and what we spend for services. What do we spend in comparison as another town for the same service?  Are we overpaying? Because we chose a party boss' company to provide insurance and benefit brokering, are we overpaying? Have we optimized each and every contract to make sure we are getting the maximum return for every tax dollar spent?

I wish I could wave a magic wand and with a single ordinance fix the tax problem. I can’t. But what I can do is work with members of both parties to get reforms in place that can at least try. If we see successes in one area we know to continue to keep looking. For the sake of our children and our way of life, continuously improving our government has to be an ongoing effort to control costs so another grandmother does not have to explain to her crying grandchildren why she is moving so far away to Delaware or North Carolina. We owe it to our children.