Is it Really Better to Give Than to Receive?

Cape May County has a balance of payments problem. It’s large and it’s getting worse. The result is an undue burden on local taxpayers in a county that is already having difficulty holding on to working age families.
Each year the county produces tax revenues disproportionate to our size and sends them north to Trenton. A $6.3 billion a year tourism economy averages $1.5 million dollars a day in sales taxes sent to the state treasury. That’s over half a billion dollars each year in sales and local use taxes alone.
Yet the county often seems to find itself on the bottom of the list when the state allocates money back for local projects or use. Queries often get one version or another of the same reply – we are small and getting smaller. We don’t do well with formula driven allocations based on permanent population counts.
The state aid funds for public education in the county are shrinking. The list of county aid transportation dollars released recently had our county last. We are toward the bottom on the distribution of municipal aid as well. For 2020 only Salem received less in municipal aid grant receipts.
New Jersey Transit monies that should be driven by the higher level of poverty in rural South Jersey never materialize at the levels they should. Mobility for the neediest of our residents is a greater struggle than it should be.
The county’s need for greater capacity to evacuate in the face of an oncoming disaster is ignored year after year. We are told that cost and the opposition of environmental groups means a half a million people on a summer weekend would have to compete to evacuate along roads woefully inadequate to the task.
What does all of this mean for the county taxpayers? Local taxes have to carry burdens that compensate for missing state support. When mobility is hampered by underfunding NJ Transit in our area, more local money has to go into fare free transportation and other ways of getting people where they need to be.
The two largest sources of state revenue are the personal income tax and the sales tax, together over 75% of state revenue. The two largest items of state spending are State Aid and Grants-in-Aid.
State Aid is almost entirely made up of funding for public education. Our share of that is decreasing. It is projected to continue to shrink for the next 7 years.
Grants-in-Aid cover a variety of areas. Check most of them and the county is again at the bottom looking up. The draft of the next Regional Transportation Plan states openly that funding to jurisdictions in South Jersey “is not in proportion to its population, its seasonally adjusted population, vehicle miles travelled, roadway mileage or persons in poverty.” One is left wondering what it is in proportion to.
The point is that we send more north than travels back south. The problem is the discrepancy is large and getting larger. We are left with aging infrastructure that must provide access for hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. It is a burden that should not be left disproportionately to local taxpayers.
Adding complexity to the problem is the fact that county infrastructure projects are often more costly because of the proximity to water and wetlands. The very existence of our environmental wonderland is often used as the reason why projects cannot be funded. They are deemed too expensive. Yet the water and the wetlands are not impediments to the activities that generate dollars for Trenton.
We hear about the need for a fairer New Jersey. It is time to expand that definition of fairness.
This undisputed imbalance must be corrected for Cape May County to thrive. For far too long,  our elected officials have failed to correct this inequity. It is up to our leaders to bring this issue out in the open for the public to see, share the numbers, make the case and lead a fight.