Is this the key to reducing New Jersey’s record high property taxes?

💲 Could consolidation of schools lead to tax savings?
💲 New Jersey has more school districts than municipalities
💲 NJ Senator wants to reduce the number of districts by half

New Jersey has consistently had the highest property taxes in the nation. One of the main reasons for that is the connection to school funding.

The majority of the money you pay in property taxes is diverted to the more than 600 school districts operating in New Jersey.

As costs rise and enrollment declines, many school districts have struggled to balance their budgets.

Since enrollment is directly tied to the amount of state aid a school district receives, many districts have seen massive losses in funding from Trenton.

A solution: merge districts to reduce costs and potentially reduce property taxes.

State Sen. Vin Gopal, D-Monmouth, was a guest on the recent New Jersey 101.5 Town Hall broadcast that examined some of the biggest challenges facing the education of our children.

An antiquated school funding formula was among the topics we discussed.

Gopal says the face of education is changing in multiple ways in New Jersey.

"People are having fewer kids, more people are home-schooling or sending kids to private school and the school funding formula adopted in 2008 has not been changed," he said.

He is committed to a bi-partisan reworking of that formula, but says there are simply too many school districts.

"If you have a district that 1,000 kids 10-years ago, and now they have only 400, it's impossible to maintain the same level of expenses," Gopal argues.

Reduce the number of school districts

Talk of merging school districts goes back decades and across multiple gubernatorial administrations. Incentives for combining schools have largely failed with just a handful of districts even considering it.

Gopal says that's a problem, and suggests Trenton get tough on the issue.

"We need to mandate consolidation," he says.

Ideally, Gopal says, New Jersey needs to go from over 600 districts to 320 or even 300.

By forcing districts to merge, Gopal says the savings on everything from waste management to IT, snow removal, utilities and other overhead costs will be significant.

Gopal told New Jersey 101.5 that he intends to come in "heavy-handed" when he introduces his bill in October.

His goal is to establish a full review of all districts, and identify ones where it makes sense to combine them.

Districts that refuse to consolidate could be penalized, including a further loss of state aid equal to the amount of savings they could have realized by merging.

Gov. Phil Murphy has already come out in opposition to a mandated approach of merging districts, and that disappoints Gopal.

"Incentives have not worked," he says.

Convincing the public

Gopal is convinced that if he can show taxpayers how much money can be saved, and how much that could impact their property taxes, they will line up to demand the state take this action.

"We will build public support and show how we can not only keep up our high standards of education but at the end of the day save money for taxpayers."

Gopal could not say how much money would be saved, but did say in districts where this makes sense, property tax bills will go down.

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