- To learn more about Carl go to www.carlhausman.com
Carl Hausman is a journalist, commentator and educator who is the author of 24 books and is currently professor and chair of the Department of Journalism at Rowan University.
He holds a B.S. in Political Science from the University of the state of New York, an M.A. in Communication from Antioch University, a Ph.D. in Journalism and Media from the Union Institute and Unversity and a post doctoral fellowship in ETHICS from New York University, where he was awarded the Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities.
Carl has appeared as a guest on /The O'Reilly Factor/, Anderson Cooper's /World News Now/, CBS News/Capitol Voices/, CNN's/Outlook/, and a variety of local broadcast programs.
He has testified before Congress on press-freedom issues.
His latest book, Lies We Live By, was an investigative work decoding double talk and deception in politics, media and advertising.
Coping with the State Budget Crisis
By Carl Hausman
In case you missed it, the wheels have come off the state’s finances, with
Early in March, Gov. Corzine announced he will attempt to balance the budget, in part, by slashing more than $168 million in municipal aid to the state’s smallest 323 smallest towns.
Wenonah, which received $260,091 in state aid last year, is now slated to receive $137, 048 in the proposed state budget, which will probably be passed in June.
I recognize there’s no painless way to cut spending; everyone whose individual ox is gored will protest and demand a new ox, generally at taxpayer expense.
But I believe that wholesale reduction of small-town funding is a fundamentally flawed strategy, and an unfair one.
The New York Times did the math and discovered that the state aid reduction to small towns averages 22.7 percent.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/07/nyregion/07cuts.html?_r=1&em&ex=1205038800&en=9d46eb1b6333aba8&ei=5087%0A&oref=slogin).
That’s roughly three times the percent of reduction proposed for larger cities.
One of the ostensible reasons for penalizing small towns in this manner is to encourage consolidation of services. In theory, as the saying goes, that’s a good theory. Wenonah does consolidate many services, but in practice there are limits. A few years ago the Borough did study the possibility of merging police departments with another town, but the reality of prevailing pay structures meant that consolidation would cost us more.
Nor does everyone accept consolidation as a panacea. Mark Hozler, Professor of Public Administration at
The bottom line on consolidation, Holzer told South Jersey Magazine
(http://ml-rosenberg.com/articles/scapegoats.pdf)
last year: “What they found out in the last six months in
No matter how hard I try, I can’t envision how centralized, distant bureaucracies can evolve into a unilateral cost-saving strategy. (Look, for example, at the level of thrift and efficiency in our federal government.)
Moreover, I can’t endorse slashing state aid in this manner because it penalizes people because of where they live. Wenonah is not a confected golf-course community: it’s a cohesive town with natural borders, shared concerns, and an extraordinarily lean government.
(Example: We’re buying an engine out of wrecked police car from upstate and dropping it in one of our cruisers n order to squeeze a few more years out of an existing patrol vehicle.)
In sum, let’s encourage our state representatives to look for other solutions to an admittedly bewildering budget puzzle.
Small-town residents can’t arbitrarily reduce the state’s financial woes by across-the-board consolidation any more than we can save on gas bills by riding the subway.
