Diamond Beach won. Andover won. Will Hillsborough make it three?

Back in May, I wrote about two New Jersey towns that pushed back against their own governments and actually won. Diamond Beach got its paid parking ordinance repealed after residents showed up week after week. Andover Township got its data center zoning reversed after a community that had been tearing itself apart found its footing and pushed back together. I ended that piece wondering if the era of apathy might finally be receding.

Hillsborough might be the answer.

I wrote earlier this week about the more than 500 residents who organized in a single week ahead of a Township Committee meeting on property taxes, led by neighbors asking pointed, specific questions instead of just venting. That story is still generating reaction, and the comments underneath it read like a town that's done waiting to be asked.

SEE ALSO: Two NJ towns fought back against local government — both won 

"After everything's been signed on the dotted line"

One comment on our Facebook page cut right to the throughline connecting all three of these towns: people show up to meetings after everything's already been decided, not before. That's exactly what happened in Diamond Beach, where a parking ordinance passed with zero advance notice to the property owners it affected. It's the mistake Hillsborough residents are trying to get ahead of this time, by showing up during the budget conversation instead of after the bill arrives.

The rest of the thread split in some predictable directions, and a few genuinely interesting ones. Several commenters pushed hard for reworking how school taxes get calculated, floating the idea of tying the cost more directly to how many children a household actually sends to the local district, arguing the current system asks households with no kids in the schools to shoulder the same load as everyone else. Others pointed to affordable senior housing as an underused tool, since it adds tax base without adding students. One commenter offered a pointed counterpoint worth including for balance: a relative who built a $300,000 house in Hillsborough decades ago is now sitting on a home worth over a million dollars, and if the property's worth that much, maybe the tax bill is doing exactly what it's supposed to. And more than a few just wanted structural reform outright, one simply wrote: get rid of home rule.

What struck me most, though, wasn't the disagreement. It was the encouragement. "Good for Hillsborough, taxes are too high and it's ridiculous and outrageous, taxpayers need to rally and fight back," one person wrote. Another, simply: "Every town should be doing this!!!!" A third replied with two words that might be the whole thesis of this entire summer: "Strength in numbers."

My actual proposal, again

I've said this before and I'll keep saying it until someone in Trenton listens: stop handing out rebates with cute names and just lower the base rate. Stay NJ, ANCHOR, Senior Freeze, all well-intentioned, all still asking residents to pay the highest property taxes in the country first and then apply for permission to get some of it back. Cut the actual number instead. Let people anchor their futures near their friends and family in this state without needing a rebate program to make it survivable.

We had a real tax revolt in this state once, and I wrote about what it built earlier this week. Whether Hillsborough becomes the spark for something that size again, I don't know. But Diamond Beach and Andover Township already proved the model works at the local level. There are 563 municipalities in New Jersey. If even a fraction of them show up the way Hillsborough did, the "cute name rebate" era might finally have a reason to end.