Most of us are familiar with the parable of the boiled frog: the notion that a frog when thrown into a boiling pot of water will leap out to safety, but if placed in a warm pot and slowly brought to a boil, will allow itself to be cooked.  This is very analogous to how we deliver, and more importantly pay for local government services in New Jersey.  Certainly, no one 10 years ago would wake up one morning and find themselves paying what we now pay for schools, towns and county services and not demand an immediate fix.  Yet, slowly but surely, like a pot boiling, property taxes in Hunterdon has risen 64% from an average of $4,930 in 2000 to $8,091 in 2010 (APP).

Of the many solutions, tax type reform, shared services, regionalization, reallocation from municipalities to the county, the most extreme solution may be consolidation.  That is the topic of our next Sharing Services Seminar on Thursday, April 7, 2011 at the Hunterdon County Complex, Building One on Route 12 in Raritan Township at 7:30PM.  Our two program speakers will address what they believe is the source of our problem, Multiple Municipal Madness, to quote the book’s title and that we in New Jersey need the Courage to Connect and consolidate our municipalities.  This session is for taxpayers all; elected officials, concerned citizens, public employees, volunteer first responders, etc.

We will also introduce a new tool we hope will help in the analysis of the cost savings from sharing, regionalization, reallocation, or consolidation, the Hunterdon Municipal Database.  This database is a compilation of taxing and spending by all 26 municipalities in Hunterdon County.  It allows all of us to make some rough estimates about the savings potential from the various possible solutions to reduce property taxes in our county.  For more information on sharing in Hunterdon County, please go to our website http://www.co.hunterdon.nj.us/sharedservices.htm.

On Behalf of the Hunterdon Shared Services Working Group,

Freeholder Rob Walton

http://facebook.com/FreeholderRobWalton

http://freeholderwalton.blogspot.com

http://twitter.com/FreeholdrWalton

Hunterdon County Mis-Communications

Hunterdon County was a leader in the area of both Shared Services and 911 Communications Dispatch when it was the first county in New Jersey to open a county wide shared dispatch service.  The county provided the latest in communications equipment, hired the necessary staff including managers, supervisors and administrators to ensure that our citizens had the protection of a competent communications and dispatch system.

Over the course of the last several years, our Communications operation has taken a turn for the worse.  Benign neglect has resulted in undertrained staff, insufficient supervision and a precarious situation for the taxpaying public. 

Currently, we have only one Supervisor in Communications.  His duties include Open Public Record Act requests, maintain and upgrade all radio equipment, computer equipment, computer aided dispatching software (CAD), maintain and update fire box alarms, implement new box alarms for EMS, the complete sweep of issues that arises from a modern Public Safety  Answering Point/Public Safety Dispatch Point AND supervise some 30 dispatchers.  This has proven to be too much scope for any one Supervisor.

There are four important factors that need to be fixed and fixed fast.

1. Supervision:  As stated above, the dispatchers answer to a Technical Supervisor who is responsible for the technical/infrastructure side of dispatch and now with an unfilled vacancy in the position of Supervisor of Communications, the operations side too.  This scope has proven to be too broad and the vacancy of Supervisor of Communications (or the formal civil service title of Chief Public Safety Telecommunicator) must be filled.
2. Training:  The training of new dispatchers is a near constant process as we have a revolving door of dispatchers who leave for better pay, out of frustration from not being adequately prepared or being asked to leave for incompetence.  Better training would weed out those who lack the particular talents for the job, prepare those who have the talents to do the job right and deliver a better product.
3. More Staff:  Not every problem can be solved with more manpower (or woman power) but here the need is justified.  Just a short 10 years ago, an accident would garner a handful of phone calls.  Now, with everyone having cell phones, even the smallest incident can bring in a storm of 911 calls.  Each call must be answered, screened for important new information, and then the appropriate dispatch and update must be made.  We do not have the staff to do this properly.
4. Better pay:  Hunterdon County will never be, nor should we be, the highest paying county.  We do not waste taxpayer dollars with lavish pay to public employees.  But we must pay a salary that keeps our skilled workers here especially in our essential areas like 911 dispatch.  This would require union negations to allow us to raise these salaries while keeping other employees in line with private sector pay raises (which these days is 0 zero or even cuts).  Our contract with the union to which our dispatchers belong is up at the end of this year.

Hunterdon County, to much fanfare, opened our new dispatch room last year and we are updating the software used to dispatch firefighters, EMT’s and police.  Unfortunately a shiny new hammer doesn’t make the carpenter a better craftsman.  We need to improve our dispatchers now.  A good first start would be the hiring of the right individual for the role of Supervisor of Communications.  It is a vacancy left open too long.

My Statement as Deputy Director Prior to Freeholder Action on the County Layoffs

The following was read aloud at our January 18, 2011 Freeholder Meeting.

On November 18, 2010, the Hunterdon County Board of Chosen Freeholders after great deliberation submitted a layoff plan to the New Jersey Civil Service Commission that would reduce the County workforce by 30 positions.  This was due in large part to a Public Employment Relations Commission, (PERC) decision that required furloughs to be negotiated as part of reopening a union contract with appropriate bargaining units rather than the choice of the employer.  The choice to furlough or lay off employees was largely the result of our continued economic downturn which has depleted the ratable base of this county, our main source of revenue via the property tax.  That coupled with increases in group insurance costs totaling 9.9 million and pensions costs totaling 3.65 million has resulted in a projected $4 million budget shortfall on our $94.1 million budget.  After 3 consecutive years of drawing down our surplus, a full hiring freeze and across the board cuts to operating and capital budgets each year, we were left but little else than to reduce the county workforce.  A reduction in force is dictated by state civil service rules.

We have worked very hard to avoid these layoffs and the following resolution will result in saving 10 jobs.  Our administrator, the department heads and all of the staff have found further savings to obtain this result.  We have met repeatedly with the CWA to find more cost savings and we did offer at their suggestion an expansion of our retirement incentive plan.  I thank them for their cooperation.

Unfortunately, for our janitorial staff, who have done a commendable job in keeping our County facilities clean and neat, the price savings to privative this service will result in saving in 2011 $530,000 and in 2012 $$640,847.  This savings is too large to ignore and we have a fiduciary responsibility to make this choice.  We understand that the employees of this new service will need to be screened and supervised closely to develop the same trust we have in our current employees.  We will be doing background screening ourselves though the department of Public Safety and quality control inspections with our Building and Maintenance department.  On top of our past efforts, including securing for these employees jobs here in Hunterdon in the same pension system with the same public employment service time, we will be bringing in the department of labor’s rapid response team to facilitate their transition from county employment.

I am sure my colleagues share my sentiment that we do not take lightly these actions.  We recognize that difficult economic conditions require difficult and painful choices.  This choice which we will now vote on is likely the most difficult one we have to date.

HC News

Dear Readers,

Many of you may have read an earlier story on the HC News about the County’s looking into shared services, consolidation of services and/or reassignment of local government from municipalities to the county.  The goal is not to pick on or highlight Clinton Township or any one municipality’s spending, but to exam how we can together deliver local government services in the most economic way.  I apologize for characterizing the spending of any municipality as wasteful. Without full context, those judgments cannot be fairly made.

I have gathered a small group of elected officials, one small town Councilperson, one large town Committeeperson, and a small school Board of Education member (we are looking for a large school Board of Education member) to look at the spending and budgeting of us all and make recommendations on which areas to tackle and in what order to tackle them.

We will be putting on our website a comparative spending guide for all 26 municipalities, showing what each municipality budgets for personnel for several major categories and job titles.  It will include the real dollar amount as well as the cost per person, household and land area.  This will be an invaluable tool to exam what the real savings may be for example if the county was to have a county wide police force as some have suggested, a county wide construction code enforcement division, or what the real savings would be for two municipalities to share a service or even consolidate.  It is not all inclusive but it is a good first step.

The next step would be to more thoroughly examine an area that looks promising and to include all associated costs and revenues.  All this we hope will lead to real action within the year.

Once costs are known and quantified, voters and the people who represent them can make better decisions about whether the cost is worth the potential loss in service.  Are having taxes collected locally instead of by the county worth the extra cost to taxpayers (assuming there is a savings)?  Is keeping the local identity and control of living in a small municipality worth the extra cost (again assuming there is an extra cost)?

Please feel free to contact me with any questions.  We will be following up in the near future with the site name and information on how we, including all local elected officials and most importantly the taxpayers who pay for all of it and the voters who assign us to make these decisions, can work together to tame property taxes.

Sincerely,

Rob Walton, Hunterdon County Freeholder

Rwalton@co.hunterdon.nj.us

Speech upon being Sworn in as Deputy Director

Of the many functions of county government, there is one that is more important than all the others.  While we value all of our employees equally, whether they carry a broom or a gun, those County employees who dispatch our fire, police and EMS service in this county carry a greater burden and have a higher responsibility than nearly any other. To that end, they must be held to a higher standard of service and accountability.  Confusing Junction Road in Hampton with Junction Road in Flemington on a planning document or when paving does no irreparable harm, but when alerting emergency services to a crime, fire or accident, it can be the difference between life and death.  To ensure the well being of our residents, we have established new expectations and new measures of accountability on our dispatchers and our entire Public Safety operation.  Reliability, accountability, uniformity will be, must be the hallmarks of Hunterdon County Emergency Services going forward.

As we enter the 2^nd decade of this still young century, and I enter my last year in my thirties, my thoughts often turn to what my generation will leave to my children and what we have inherited from the prior generation.  We find ourselves here in New Jersey and in these United States with serious long term problems.  Every man, woman and child, Alex, Samantha, Michael, and Lauren, Hardy, Paige in Hunterdon County owes to some level of government nearly $53,000 due to our collective debt.  $6,000 of that is our state government and $45,000 of that is to the federal government.  Contrast those numbers to what we owe on average per person to our home towns, a mere $1,800 and to the County government, only $185 and one might think local government is doing well.

But to appreciate the true scope of our straights here in Hunterdon, these numbers are much more important.  The federal government, a paragon of inefficiency and bureaucracy, has 8 employees for every 1000 people.  The local governments of Hunterdon, County and Municipal, have 12 employees for every 1000 people.   Over 1,000 jobs in our 26 municipalities held by 760 different people and another 600 county jobs almost each one earning a pension and medical benefits.  Couple that with a 2% cap on the growth of local spending, and you can see where we are heading.  In the next year we must make substantive progress on sharing services, consolidation of municipal functions and reallocation of local governance or as the New Jersey State Senate President, now former Freeholder Steve Sweeney promises, Trenton will do it for us or better put, TO us.

We in County government sometimes view shared services like a man asking for a joint checking account at a bank.  When the teller asks with whom are you sharing your account, the man replies “Whoever has more money than me.”  In this analogy, municipalities are coming to the County to share our checking account.  But this is backward.  The county has no money, municipalities have no money.  Taxpayers have the money, government takes it and then spends it.  So the question we need to ask is not who benefits, the County or the towns, but how can we take less money from the taxpayers, regardless of who does the taking.

To the end, I have constituted a Shared Services Working Group, elected officials who understand that the shortest answer is doing.  As there is no money for studies and consultants, we will do the work to analyze what areas in Hunterdon should be consolidated and recommend a course toward smaller more efficient local government.  Then we will lead by example and work to bring about these changes.

We have seen the start of this with our Sharing Services Seminars which will continue throughout the year.  We have seen progress already from our first meeting in November.  Annandale Hose Company and Clinton Fire Company have a regional day time response and are working toward shared duty nights.  The EMS companies in the north part of our county are working on a new mutual aid model.  We will next tackle education and reveal on January 31 the results of our comparative analysis of all 26 municipalities.

The County government can and must be partners and leaders in this effort.  This is not something we can leave to the next generation to solve, the job rests with us.  It is on the makeup of local government that we will be judged by posterity.

The offices of Freeholders and Mayors, Council and Committeepersons lack the prominence to bend history itself, but each of us can work together and change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts we can write the history of this County and our generation.

Let the Sunshine In

Anyone got $10 million they can send me?  Sheriff Deborah Trout, Under Sheriff Michael Russo, Former Sheriff’s investigator John Falat Jr., former Democrat Councilman in Lebanon Borough, former Flemington police officer and former candidate for freeholder Christopher Foley, New York City dentist Douglas King, and a New York City resident Serena Dean, a stem cell research scientist, are all suing me Freeholders Holt, Melick, Mennen and Sworen, Assemblyman Erik Peterson, former Prosecutor J. Patrick Barnes, Administrator Cindy Yard, County Counsel Gaetano De Sapio, and other yet to be named John and Jane Does for $10,000,000.

They claim an “ongoing pattern and practice of violation of State and Federal laws.”  They allege that there was if not a conspiracy a concurrent effort to besmirch them and their associates.  Trout, Russo and Fallat were indicted by Barnes’ office in April.  Those indictments were later tossed unceremoniously and Trout claimed that action vindicated her and her friends.

Not so fast says William McGovern.  Reported in the Hunterdon County Democrat, “McGovern claims that representatives of the Attorney General’s Office and the criminal justice division, “formulated a plan to dismiss the indictments, and force the removal… of certain individuals associated with the investigation and/or prosecution,” of the case.  He basically claims this is part of a grand cover up foreshadowed by Undersheriff Russo’s claim that this would all go away.

In short all of these individuals filing tort claims want the same thing.  They want to know as Ray Donavan stated "Which office do I go to get my reputation back?"  Ray Donovan, secretary of labor under President Reagan, was indicted but subsequently acquitted of charges that he defrauded the New York City Transit Authority of millions.  Mr. Donovan is part owner of Fiddler’s Elbow so I am sure he is doing fine now and given the fame of his quote, I hope his reputation has been restored. 

My answer is to all of this is to make all of the documents related to this open to anyone who wants to see them.  Allow the Hunterdon County Democrat, Lambertville Beacon, the Express-Times, Courier News, Trenton Times, Hunterdon Review, Star Ledger, or better still the New York Times, Wall Street Journal,  for that matter any paper to come and review the documents, emails, anything from the County’s emails, the Sheriff’s emails, the Prosecutors emails, all evidence, court filings, personnel documents, campaign ledgers, anything.

We can put it all in the Historic Courthouse for the public to read them.  Post all of it online for people to access.  We need to close this chapter in Hunterdon history so we can move forward on the larger issues facing us, recession, property taxes, school administration costs, sharing services.

Allow the cleansing light of sunshine to straighten this whole thing out.

Sharing Services

There have been two recent letters to the editor in the Hunterdon County Democrat regarding sharing services.  One from Committeeman Spencer Peck (R-Clinton Township) and the other from Councilman Gerry St. Onge (D-Frenchtown) encouraging more sharing, but in particular sharing police, fire and EMS.  Mr. Peck has called for the County of Hunterdon to take over Police for all 26 municipalities.  This has been seized on by others calling for the Sheriff to be the County Police Chief.

First, the County should not be coming down on municipalities with an edict any more than the State.  Mandates are just as bad when they come from Flemington as when they come from Trenton.  Second, studies are often performed but rarely implemented.  Especially in this economy, government cannot engage in fruitless endeavors.    And that is exactly what any study of County wide police in Hunterdon would amount to without buy in from two very different groups of municipalities: those that get State Police protection at no impact on municipal budgets and those that pay for local Police from municipal tax revenue.  The former are getting something for "free" and the latter enjoy a relatively high level of service.

We have seen Police Departments closed in Califon and Lebanon in recent years opting for sharing with a neighboring community and State Police respectively but Flemington experienced a citizens revolt when it was revealed consolidating Police services was being discussed.  So far, we have one township and one Councilman calling for abolishing local police in favor of a county model.

At this point it is my opinion that the County can serve as a facilitator in ascertaining the level of desire for such an arraignment. A Police Summit for elected officials could be a good first step.

Some threshold questions that such a summit should reveal:

• How many towns believe their residents are ready to have a lower level of service in exchange for lower municipal budgets?
• Would municipalities with police departments cut there budgets by a commensurate amount if the County created a Hunterdon Police department?  In other words if a town's budget is 25% police, would it cut spending 25% or just spend that money elsewhere.
• Are there any towns whose residents are willing to see taxes rise in exchange for a County Police force and perhaps a better level of service?

What I believe is the best strategy, from both a likelihood of success, a likelihood of support and an operational efficacy is a regional approach where neighboring towns of similar character create a multi-municipal force or share an existing force (see Califon & Washington Twp, Morris County and Washington Borough & Township, Warren County).  There is still no guarantee of success (i.e. the Amwells and Lambertville) but it seems to be a much better approach.

Whatever we do, continuing what we are now doing is not working and we in County elected office need to be willing to help our municipal partners better how we deliver services.

RGW

More later on Fire Companies, EMS and Schools sharing.