From the Publisher Our Cape Has Issues. What Else Is New? Let’s Just Get Busy

Anybody who walks the beaches knows that we live about as close to Paradise as possible this side of the grave. Why else would our permanent population swell from 100,000 to 600,000 in the summer? But since Cape May County is the permanent home to many of us, we still have to deal with life’s nitty-gritty issues.
One such is the consequences of our shrinking population: Healthy things grow, whereas unhealthy things wither. Our economy has suffered badly, and continues to do so, based upon circulating scuttle-butt. While the rest of the nation is gradually digging its way out at an unacceptable rate, South Jersey’s recovery rate is even slower.
Is our answer to just keep doing what we have always done, give it time, and to assume that things will rectify themselves? Or should our prudence dictate that we take a closer look? If things are always tending to be getting better, we can overlook a temporary blip. But when the trend lines aren’t positive, we are forced to look at fundamentals.
One fundamental is, we can’t wait for others. If all 3,043 counties waited for each other, nobody would go anywhere. Each one has to do what it can figure out to do. For Cape May County, there are a fair number of do-able things we need to get busy on.
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Four-lane highways are the norm in the nation — Route 55 must
be finished. People only accept second class so long, and then go elsewhere.
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With tourism our primary lifeblood, we need to be sure that we are easy to love. I look out of my office window and I see jet airplanes coming and going out of the Cape May County airport. How many of our tourists are on those planes? Darn few. So we need to accommodate the other 99+ percent who come here by car; unfortunately, we aren’t doing so.
We read weekly about frustrated travelers cutting through residential streets in numbers enough to infuriate homeowners, in order to escape the bumper-to-bumper traffic coming to and going from Cape May County. Should this frustration surprise us? Our latest road system was built over a sixty years ago.
Four-lane highways are the norm in the nation but we force thousands of our visitors to use two-lane roads curving through the woods to connect to the unfinished Route 55. It must be finished. Why is our economy suffering? – People only accept second class so long, and then go elsewhere.
While Route 55 and other economic development issues are very important to our county, there are many other elements of a vital community which require ongoing attention. One of these is the appropriate structural and funding mechanisms of our schools. Cape May, West Cape May and Lower Township are currently contending with this issue.
A South Hunterdon initiative to dissolve the existing regional high school and in its place create a pre-K-12 regional school district may shed light not only on the Cape May – Lower issue, but on a broader question of whether ultimately the entire county property tax base should fund all county public schools.
At the Aug. 6 Cape Issues group meeting, this was somewhat pointedly discussed, with some feeling it totally inappropriate for all Cape May County communities to take on the burden all students. Others pointed out that that is exactly what is done with most of the libraries in our county. (More on this later.)
Another school topic the community needs to decide upon is the appropriateness of maintaining the overhead and potential inefficiencies of two independent districts for the Cape May County Vocational Technical School and the Special Services School.
We can no longer continue to do things the way we have done them just because we have always done it that way. While speaking of Cape Issues, some other questions the group is grappling with are:
• Should we consolidate tax assessment and collection at the county level? Private industry long ago eliminated such inefficiency.
• Is the recent rate increase granted to Atlantic Electric sufficient to address the degradation of our electrical service?
• Will the attainment of “Coast Guard Community Designation” benefit our relationship?
• What can be done to receive back from the state commensurate service in exchange for the large tourist tax burden we bear, and the revenue sent by tourism-related businesses?
• What could/should our county do to support our budding wine industry?
Nobody said that life would be a rose garden, but our problems are about as close to a rose garden as anyone could find on this beautiful planet.
Art Hall
P.S.: Fred Coldren just informed the Cape Issues group that the budgets for all 16 municipalities are now posted to the Herald website (http://www.capemaycountyherald.com/GovernmentBudgets).