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Health & Fitness

Opinion: Think Out of the Box...Point Pleasant Council!

We lived in Fairfax, Virginia for quite some time, almost 18 years. Fairfax is located just outside Washington, DC, and is a very large and highly populated city and county. It is quite a lovely area in which to live and the county school system, although behemoth, is ranked among the best in the nation. The number of children who graduate from high school and go on to college is 96%.

When I was working, we were fortunate enough to own a $600,000+ home. Get ready for this…our property taxes were $2,200 a YEAR! In the shore area the property taxes on a one car garage (no house) on a 50x100 lot are more than $2,200 a year. So, why the great disparity? Well, there are lots of reasons, but I would like to focus on just one for the time being.

Can you name a regressive tax? That’s right, a sales tax. It’s regressive because no matter what you earn the tax on most purchases is the same. For example, a person with a yearly income of $50,000 pays the same sales tax on most purchased items as a person who earns $500,000 a year. Right here in Point Pleasant, NJ we have a very regressive hidden tax that is overlooked by most people, including our Council. That tax is trash and recycling collection. That’s right, trash collection. A significant portion of the municipal budget that is derived from property tax is used for trash/ recycling collection. This tax is very regressive, because  an elderly couple with a median home value that regularly puts out a small can or bag of trash/recycling pays the exact same amount for this service as a family of four with a median home value that regularly puts out 2/3 very large containers of trash/recycling.  

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Now, let’s get back to Fairfax County. The county does not provide trash/recycling pick-up as a municipal service. Each residence must have their trash/recycling picked up by private haulers. Just think, $1.5 lobed off the Borough’s budget, and a significant reduction in property taxes. Sound good? It gets better.

If you could hire your own trash/recycling you would have freedom of choice of the hauler and the service you get. The marketplace would dictate the pricing too.

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In Fairfax County some residents had their trash collected weekly, others once every two weeks or more. In a community like Point Pleasant where some homeowners are not here year around the service could be curtailed altogether for the winter. The private haulers in Fairfax also had a menu of services, like designated site pick-up instead of curb pick-up. This could be very helpful to the elderly and the infirmed. Some haulers offered significant discounts on pick-up using specially designed cans that can be emptied using automated machinery. This approach also means that businesses and apartment complexes would be on their own too. Of one thing you can be certain…if you are personally the paying the tab, there would be no more can lids tossed on plants or left in the street, no more “I can’t take the trash because it is too heavy”, or “you missed the pick up and too bad”. You know why? Simple, YOU are individually the customer!

Now, some may argue that the economy of scale (one company providing the service to the entire Borough) makes the service less expensive. Furthermore, some might say the Borough has offered this service for a long, long time…in other words, it has always been done this way. Finally, some would argue that people might let the trash just pile up on their property, or bury it.

I suggest that all these arguments are specious. First, the principle of economy of scale does no good in a situation of regressive taxation, which is very unfair. Second, Albert Einstein is credited with saying that, “The true meaning of lunacy is doing the very same things over and over and expecting different results”.  If we want to really tackle the property tax problem in NJ, we are going to have to get much more creative. There is good reason for the people with more trash/recycling to pay more and vice versa. Third, simple ordinances prohibiting the hoarding of trash or the burying of trash would suffice…the enforcement would be easy too, because neighbors would police each other. And, hefty fines would be a good prevention tactic.

I suggest that property taxes ought to be limited exclusively to those services that a homeowner can not obtain elsewhere, like professional schooling, police protection, fire protection and road reconstruction and maintenance. Trash/recycling collection should NOT rank among these community services that are unattainable elsewhere.

“Thinking out of the box” is a necessity in these times, and this concept is a much more fair and equitable approach than the regressive nature of the one that now exists.

Fairfax County does not provides trash/recycling service and it works perfectly!

 

What do you think?

   





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