This is the second in a series that will analyze and compare how much county municipalities spend on local police departments.
ERMA – Providing 24/7 police service is an expensive proposition. With a 2020 census population of over 22,000 spread over 31 square miles, Lower Township is no exception.
Budget documents suggest that the municipality uses more than a quarter of its general fund budget to cover the expense of its municipal police department.
Public municipal budget documents are useful sources for getting a sense of the overall distribution of appropriations and the sources of revenue. They are not easy documents for pulling together the specific costs of a department or aggregating the true expense of an activity like policing. What is available misses expenses that may be aggregated elsewhere. This is especially true about items like health insurance and other benefits.
Using both the public budget document and the user-friendly version of the budget, which some, but not all, municipalities make available, one can get at a relatively granular look at the cost of policing in Lower Township.
There is no reference to a police department in the municipal budget, which prefers to use the designation of a public safety department.
Police Expense
The formal budget document lists the 2021 salaries and wages of the public safety department at $4.9 million. A check of the user-friendly budget, which singles out police officers specifically, shows total salaries and wages for 50 full-time and 10 part-time officers at $4.8 million. The user-friendly document breaks this down into base pay of $4.55 million and $232,000 in overtime and other compensation.
That same user-friendly document that focuses specifically on the 50 full and part-time officers lists an expected 2021 pension payment of $1.9 million, health benefits payments net of employee share at $500,525, and employment and other taxes at $365,777.
Acknowledging a certain level of imprecision given the differences in what the budget documents relate, there is a total budgeted expense of approximately $7.9 million for the police department, which includes $4.9 million in total salary and wages, $278,000 in operating expense, $1.9 million in estimated pension payments, $500,000 in net health benefits costs and $366,000 in other taxes.
Lower Township’s 2021 Budget
The general fund budget for the municipality in 2021 is $30.9 million, putting the expense of policing at 25.7% of the budget, or just over $1 out of every $4.
Not all the county’s 16 municipalities maintain police departments. Three of them, Dennis and Upper townships and Woodbine, elect to use the State Police for police services, mainly patrol. Two others, Cape May Point and West Cape May, pay the City of Cape May for police coverage through a shared services agreement.
The $30.9 million general fund budget of Lower Township draws $21.8 million, or 68% of its revenue from local taxes. The other major sources of funds are a budget surplus of $3.5 million, local revenue of $3.4 million, and state aid of $1.6 million. The municipality entered 2021 with a healthy surplus balance of over $7 million.
The Big Picture
Policing has been expensive since the first public police force was established in nineteenth-century Boston. Some studies, however, suggest that municipal police departments in New Jersey absorb a greater share of public funding than neighboring Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Delaware, and New York, which was the conclusion of a 2011 study from Ball State University.
More recent data shows that the Garden State has more police officers per capita than any other of the 50 states, except for New York.
Statistics like these tie back to New Jersey’s home rule tradition with 565 independent municipalities. In Cape May County, a municipality as small as West Wildwood with only .36 square miles of land and less than 600 permanent residents maintains a municipal police department.
Another factor that complicates the comparison between Cape May County policing and locations in neighboring states is the need here to deal with the summer influx of visitors. On any given day in the summer, the population is a multiple of six to eight times the size of the permanent population. Only so much of that influx can be dealt with using special class officers.
This analysis of Lower Township policing expense misses things. It is also an analysis of budgeted expenses and not actual expenditure. However, it uses publicly available budget figures to show that over 25% of the municipality’s operating funds in 2021 are allotted to policing.
To contact Vince Conti, email vconti@cmcherald.com.
